Rahm Emanuel says Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her staff are alienating moderates and playing into President Trump’s hands as the 2020 presidential election season nears.

The former Chicago mayor recently told columnist Maureen Dowd that Ms. Ocasio-Cortez’s chief of staff, Saikat Chakrabarti, is “a snot-nosed punk” for his role in publicly challenging House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

“What votes did you get?” Mr. Emanuel, who also served as chairman of the House Democratic Caucus, said for a New York Times piece published over the weekend. “You should only be so lucky to learn from somebody like Nancy who has shown incredible courage and who has twice returned the Democratic Party to power.”

Ms. Dowd concurred and called Mr. Chakrabarti a “real instigator” who “assumed he could apply Facebook’s mantra, ‘Move fast and break things,’ to one of the oldest institutions in the country.”

Mr. Chakrabarti is the co-founder of the liberal Justice Democrats and Brand New Congress groups.

A now-deleted tweet of his compared moderate Democrats to Southern segregationists in the ‘40s.

“We fought for years to create the majorities to get a Democratic president elected and re-elected, and they’re going to dither it away,” Mr. Emanuel added Saturday. “They have not decided what’s more important: Do they want to beat Trump or do they want to clear the moderate and centrists out of the party? You really think weakening the speaker is the right strategy to try to get rid of Donald Trump and everything he stands for?”

Ms. Dowd concluded her piece by warning readers that “AOC and her Pygmalions” risked “burning down” the Democratic Party for the sake of the “emotional satisfaction of their own purity.”

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