Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wants you to know what it’s like being so popular with the media.
The 29-year-old New York Democrat has insisted that all the attention frightens her. (Eye roll.) In a new Vanity Fair piece she tells writer Abigail Tracy that the fame has been “disorienting.”
It’s also sooooooo hard.
“At first, it was really, really, really hard,” she says, employing three consecutive “reallys” for emphasis. “I felt like I was being physically ripped apart in those first two to three months.” (RELATED: Here Are, Like, AOC’s Fave Words)
The story is actually quite hilarious. After the writer pronounces AOC as more popular than House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), she explains that one day in June she was a nobody, the next she was being chauffeured in an Escalade to the set of MSNBC’s Morning Joe! How exciting. (RELATED: Did Joe And Mika Destroy The Constitution With Their Nuptials?)
Soon VF puffs up her recent questioning of Michael Cohen before the House Oversight Committee hearing — which evidentally required “careful staff work.”
Cue up the violins. AOC takes this moment to explain how people have “underestimated” her for her entire life.
The congresswoman knows for a fact that anxiety and stress can affect her phsyically. That’s because AOC’s Apple Watch shot her an email telling her that her heart rate was “unusually high” on the day she questioned Cohen. She says she was “shaking” and that she always feels like she’s walking on a “high wire.”
The writer explains that the right has some sort of “obsession” with AOC. She notes that critiquing her New York apartment as too posh for a socialist pol was too much for her right-wing detractors to “pass up.” But actually, it was Splinter News, a lefty post-Gawkerish outlet, that wrote up a scathing story about how lame it is that AOC moved into such a shitty hood like Washington’s Navy Yard. The rent at her building, where she can swim and take a steam, ranges from the low $2000’s to the low 4000’s per month.
VF sucks up to AOC some more, writing that her two-bedroom apartment is “unassuming” and situated in a “standard-issue brick building.” Did the reporter really conduct a sampling of bricks around town?
AOC was obviously extremely liberal in the press access she gave this Vanity Fair reporter. Her mother, Blanca, also recently gave an extensive at-home interview to the Daily Mail. This was odd because AOC previously ripped the tabloid after a reporter allegedly offered her boyfriend’s family cash for stories.
Maybe fame can go to a person’s head. The congresswoman recently blasted The Hill for writing up a painless item saying her mother hoped she’d soon get married. (RELATED: Ocasio-Cortez To Press: Stop Harassing My Family. Also: Free Lasagna!)
The story lists various ways that the press has tweaked her, including the New York Post mocking her for not composting sweet potato peels.
Unlike the Vanity Fair‘s writeup, in real life, where the press doesn’t always shower her with praise and kisses, she’s not always so open and kind.
“She is just nasty,” a member of the D.C. press who has covered her told The Mirror. “On Twitter she said she’d always been Alex from the Bronx. Now she’s got all these little friends from Hollywood.”
AOC seems to thrive on the actions of her enemies. During the VF interview, she told her naysayers to “draw on her face” and “do what you’re gonna do.”
Still, she insists, she’s just a “normal person” who some days wants to lock herself in a closet.