As we crossed the Bronx-Whitestone Bridge from Queens to meet Ocasio-Cortez at her apartment in the Bronx, we passed Trump Golf Links on the right. It’s a view Ocasio-Cortez knows well, and it inspired the line of questioning she directed at Michael Cohen, Donald Trump’s former lawyer and longtime fixer, the previous Wednesday. Since the Democrats reclaimed the majority in the House of Representatives last fall, their approach to oversight has been measured and deliberate. Under Pelosi’s leadership, it isn’t enough just to request Trump’s tax returns. Democrats first needed to make a public case as to why it was necessary—not partisan. During Cohen’s testimony before the House Oversight Committee, A.O.C., prepped with careful staff work, did exactly that.

Back at her Parkchester apartment, Ocasio-Cortez tells me about that day. “I know that people underestimated me. My whole life I’ve been underestimated,” she said. That night, Ocasio-Cortez received a notification on her Apple Watch that her heart rate was unusually high that day. “It shows you the moment, and it was the moment when I was coming up in the Cohen hearing and my hands were shaking,” she said. “I do feel an intense amount of pressure. Every day for me feels like I’m walking on a high wire. Every single day.”

Ocasio-Cortez pictured at the St. Pat’s for All Parade in Sunnyside, Queens, on Sunday, March 3. Photograph by Cait Oppermann.

Where, exactly, Ocasio-Cortez lives has become something of an obsession on the right. The prospect that her apartment might belie her democratic-socialist bona fides was too juicy for her antagonists to pass up. In fact, the place is thoroughly unassuming, a two bedroom in a standard-issue brick building. The décor is typical for a twentysomething living in New York—geometric-patterned throw pillows on the sectional, a metal-framed round mirror, a snake plant. A.O.C. divides her time between this apartment and a spot in D.C. At one point, her longterm partner Riley Roberts, tall, with red hair and beard, drifted out from a back room. When I said that this experience must have been weird for him, too, he joked that all he had to do was pick up a few things. It was clear he didn’t want a sliver of the spotlight; he just wanted to make sure we didn’t take any photos that revealed the exact location of the apartment.

As with any famous, polarizing person, there are all manner of threats. Outside of Ocasio-Cortez’s office in the Cannon House Office Building in D.C., there is a wall of brightly colored Post-its with notes from her well-wishers. Inside, her communications director, Corbin Trent, said there is a wall of pictures of people who have threatened the freshman congresswoman. But Ocasio-Cortez is under no illusion that the right wing’s obsession will abate. “The whole goal is to dehumanize,” she said.

“If I don’t use my voice, then they will fill the void.”

A dominant theme of the 2019 Conservative Political Action Conference was that Ocasio-Cortez is the ringleader of an insidious Democratic plot, in Senator Ted Cruz’s words, to “kill all the cows.” Former White House adviser Sebastian Gorka likened the freshman congresswoman’s ambitious Green New Deal to a Stalinist watermelon: “green on the outside, deep, deep red communist on the inside.” Donald Trump Jr. suggested that her socialist tendencies would lead to Americans eating dogs. The New York Post noted that she’d failed to compost sweet-potato peels in an Instagram video.