Self-declared socialist Rep. Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., has been speaking to journalist Ryan Grim… and she’s divulged some ugly details about her relationship with Speaker Emerita of the House Nancy Pelosi.
Grim works as a bureau chief for The Intercept, an outlet founded by journalist Glenn Greenwald. He tapped Ocasio-Cortez for his upcoming book The Squad: AOC and the Hope of a Political Revolution. U.K. newspaper The Guardian published a preview.
According to Grim, Ocasio-Cortez and Pelosi hate each other… and AOC has been seething mad all year.
Ocasio-Cortez said that she developed better relationships with party leaders after Pelosi retired the speaker’s gavel in January.
“I thought things would get worse [after Pelosi’s speakership],” Ocasio-Cortez told Grim. “I thought a lot of my misery was due to leadership more broadly having a thing against me. But … my life has completely transformed. It’s crazy. And it’s that that made me realise it was kind of just [Pelosi] the whole time.”
Describing life after Pelosi, Ocasio-Cortez said, “Senior members talk to me, [committee] chairs are nice to me, people want to work together. I’m shocked. I couldn’t even get floor time before.”
Pelosi has feuded with Ocasio-Cortez before, both in public and in private.
“All these people have their public whatever and their Twitter world,” Pelosi told a columnist for The New York Times in 2019. “As I say to these people, come to my basement. I have these signs about single-payer from 30 years ago. I understand what they’re saying. But we have a responsibility to get something done, which is different from advocacy. We have to have a solution, not just a Twitter fight.”
Later that year, Ocasio-Cortez retorted, “I find it strange when members act as though social media isn’t important.”
The socialist superstar repeated this critique when speaking to Grim.
Ocasio-Cortez said in a text message obtained by Grim, “The amount of times she told me that stupid ‘I have protest signs older than you in my basement’ s**t. Like yeah but mine don’t collect dust.”
The New York liberal also asked Pelosi to give her credit for unseating a 20-year incumbent, Democrat Joe Crowley.
“I told her DCCC campaign vendors sucked,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “And that it was strange that after I beat Crowley not a single person bothered to ask how I beat him … and how I think we should pay attention and ask questions when that happens, to spot weaknesses. She got so mad at me.”
Grim used uncomfortable detail to describe the first meeting between Pelosi and Ocasio-Cortez.
He wrote —
[Pelosi] spoke for nearly the entire lunch, dishing out her trademark looping, run-on sentences to her bewildered companions.
“‘She just keeps talking; it’s a fascinating thing,’ Saikat Chakrabarti, then AOC’s chief of staff, recalls. ‘We were eating, and she just talked the entire time without even taking a break. And I wasn’t sure exactly what she was saying, but I was like, ‘Huh, OK.’
“Getting Pelosi’s unfiltered thoughts was both eye-opening and disturbing,” Grim writes. “Ocasio-Cortez, who had made the slogan ‘Abolish Ice’ [US Immigration and Customs Enforcement] central to her challenge to Crowley, was particularly perplexed to hear Pelosi say that the phrase had been injected into American political discourse by the Russians and that Democrats needed to quash it.
“AOC wondered, ‘This is how the leader of the party thinks?’ …
Chakrabarti said Pelosi “wasn’t super hostile” in a meeting that followed.
The Horn editorial team