Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) says she doubts she could ever be elected president of the United States because so many people in the country “hate women” and “would never let that happen.”
In a recent interview with GQ magazine, New York Democrat and self-proclaimed socialist firebrand speculated about the possibility of launching a White House bid in the future.
While Ocasio-Cortez claims to keep a positive attitude, her time in Congress has “given me a front-row seat to how deeply and unconsciously, as well as consciously, so many people in this country hate women.”
“And they hate women of color,” she added. The article described her as the “political voice of a generation” and “bona fide culture celebrity.”
“People ask me questions about the future. And realistically, I can’t even tell you if I’m going to be alive in September. And that weighs very heavily on me. And it’s not just the right wing. Misogyny transcends political ideology: left, right, center,” AOC said.
“I admit to sometimes believing that I live in a country that would never let that happen.”
When young girls tell Ocasio-Cortez they want her to be president one day, she finds it difficult.
“It’s very difficult for me to talk about because it provokes a lot of inner conflict in that I never want to tell a little girl what she can’t do,” she stated. “And I don’t want to tell young people what is not possible. I’ve never been in the business of doing that. But at the same time…”
The legislator, besides being a woman, stated that her opposition to Wall Street might negate any future presidential run.
“Could [former President Barack] Obama have gotten elected without the kind of financial support that he had?” she stated. “I don’t know.”
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) also speculated about how she’d deal with the political establishment, which she says would try to stifle her objectives, should she be elected commander-in-chief.
“There are still plenty of limitations,” she continued. “It’s tough, it’s really tough.”
The congresswoman spoke of how “openly hostile” her own Democratic Party colleagues were when she took office in 2018.
“It was open hostility, open hostility to my presence, my existence,” Ocasio-Cortez said.
“Since I got here, literally day one, even before day one, I’ve experienced a lot of targeting diminishment from my party. And the pervasiveness of that diminishment, it was all-encompassing at times. I feel a little more steady on my own two feet now.”
“But would I say that I have the power to shift the elected federal Democratic Party? No.”
Ocasio-Cortez candidly talked about her personal life with Riley Roberts, as well as why she chose to go public about being raped in her early twenties.
Nearly half a month following the Capitol riots, the congresswoman took to Instagram to detail her past experience with sexual assault and how it relates to the trauma she felt during the insurrection.
“I could not talk about that day without disclosing it, because it was such a central part of my experience,” Ocasio-Cortez stated in the interview that she had to hide in congressional offices when rioters stormed in.
“I felt like I could not really adequately communicate what that experience was without giving people the context of what I had lived through and what was being echoed, because so much of it was about resonance and fear of a thing that was not theoretical but a fear of a thing that I had experienced.”
After the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June, the congresswoman addressed rape once more when she spoke to anti-abortion protestors in Manhattan’s Union Square.
She told GQ that she’d carefully considered whether to share more about being assaulted after seeing how much her political opponents – both on the left and right – had analyzed her words since taking office.
“One major trauma that a lot of survivors of assault deal with is a struggle with being believed,” she continued. “There are aspects of it that I may never share because of the trauma of having that experience litigated in public.”
During an interview with The New York Times, Ocasio-Cortez addressed news reports speculating on her relationship with her fiancé. She posited that people’s perceptions of her as a free agent, a successful woman could affect them.
“The moment you start being yourself, they kind of freak out,” she stated. “I think it causes a conflict within them that they didn’t even anticipate. It’s not even a deception. It’s just, they uncover insecurities that they didn’t know were there.”
Ocasio-Cortez stated that the opposite occurred when she was elected and thrust in the public eye, having first met Riley at Boston University when they were both 19.
“For him to experience us dating when I was still working as a waitress and a bartender through now and seeing how the world responds [to me], I think has been a very eye-opening experience for him as well,” she stated.
