In the future—the future being next week—your news source of choice will contain only stories about Donald Trump and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

Flexing all the verve and moxie of mind-control masters, the duo has annexed the attention of the nation’s editors and producers. If he tweets about the wall or the shutdown or Michael Cohen or Venezuela, the press pounces and amplifies. If she Instagrams the preparation of an Instant Pot ramen in her kitchen while giving an audio essay on policy, or if she uses Twitter to dunk on Joe Lieberman or Aaron Sorkin, news organizations happily fan her democratic socialist breeze into every home and phone in the country.


Their media magic works on their newsroom friends and their foes. Just as CNN can’t leave the villain Trump alone for more than five minutes without chyronizing his latest outrageous tweet and convening all-star panels to dissect his latest White House lawn comments, Fox News and other right-leaning media have fallen prey to what the SiriusXM radio host Dean Obeidallah calls “Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez derangement syndrome,” an assessment supported by data. As the Washington Post’s Philip Bump has reported, Fox News and Fox Business Network talk much more about her than either CNN or MSNBC do.

Ocasio-Cortez’s choice of footwear, her precarious financial state, her last job as a bartender at New York’s Flats Fix restaurant, her Green New Deal proposal, her gaffes, and social media ubiquity make conservative commentators jump double-dutch to the point of exhaustion. She tends to get the better of her critics when unloading on them via Twitter. “@FoxNews, why can’t any of your anchors say my name correctly? It’s been 5 months,” she tweeted in November in one of her many counterstrikes against her critics in the media.

Setting aside for a moment the fact that Trump and Ocasio-Cortez don’t agree on anything, the two New Yorkers with Queens connections have a lot in common. Both made their political marks as outsiders, collapsing traditional power structures from within to become political celebrities. Both ran thrifty campaigns, substituting news coverage for advertising. Trump proved at the ballot box that Republican voters held no real allegiance among to the usual conservative stands on trade, immigration and foreign policy. Ocasio-Cortez likewise toppled a tenured insider, Joe Crowley, in a primary by catching him coasting.

Both command Twitter brigades in the millions—Ocasio-Cortez 2.63 million (up from 379,000 in July) and Trump 57.7 million—and use their audiences to delight their friends and aggravate their enemies. Ensconced in Washington, the pair has sustained their newsworthiness by jousting against their opposition and their putative allies, and this tension adds to their media appeal. On any given day, there are probably as many high-ranking members of their own party gunning for them as high rankers from the other side of the aisle. From mid-December to mid-January, reported Axios, Ocasio-Cortez generated 14 million interactions (retweets plus likes), twice as many as Sen. Kamala Harris, and almost six times as many as Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Sen. Chuck Schumer. To give you a sense of scale, CNN generated only 3 million interactions in the interval.


Both Trump and Ocasio-Cortez possess charisma—that special gift of personality that Catholic theologians said was vouchsafed by God, and which sociologist Max Weber later adapted to describe the political power the few command over the many to lead and inspire. Like other charismatic politicians of the media age—like John Kennedy and Ronald Reagan—Trump and Ocasio-Cortez shine brighter on electronic screens than in real life. Ocasio-Cortez especially brings personal authenticity to the video appearances in which she self-documents, reality-TV style, her opening weeks in Congress. Like Trump, she thrives at life in a fishbowl. She's so good at this she can make watchable content out of a brief Instagram about her search for Mitch or an explanation for one of her “no” votes.

Charisma helps explain why Trump’s endless parades of lies and Ocasio-Cortez’s sloppy policy gaffes do little to diminish their faithful’s adoration, and why neither strives for factual accuracy. One way that the magical power of charisma shields its possessors from harm is that it makes them appear more noble, more sympathetic, more adorable when attacked. By inducing pre-rational rage in Trump supporters, Jim Acosta of CNN has probably done more to maintain Trumpmania in the heartland with his critiques of the presidency than anybody on the White House payroll. Consciously or not, editors and producers surrender to charisma’s pull—and sense vindication when their Trump or Ocasio-Cortez stories drive Web traffic and increase ratings.

The power of charisma leaves nobody immune, especially the charismatic. Trump doesn’t appear to have tweeted about Ocasio-Cortez yet, but she’s been on his radar. Last August, Trump told Bloomberg News of his first encounter with her in his usual rambling style, and it’s unusually flattering:

“So I’m watching television, and I see this young woman on television. I say, ‘Who’s that?’ ‘Oh, she’s campaigning against Joe.’


“You know who Joe is, right? So Queens. Crowley. So I say, ‘Ah, let me just watch her for a second’—wonderful thing, TiVo. So you go back—‘huh, tell him he’s going to lose.’”

The inevitable matter/anti-matter collision of Trump with Ocasio-Cortez can’t be far off, especially if her party doesn’t put a brake on her rise. I can’t predict the outcome, but I’m willing to imagine the setting. The wise-cracking former bartender sizing up the motor-mouth who thinks he owns the joint. May the most charismatic win.

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Send evidence of your charisma to Shafer.Politico@gmail.com. My email alerts watch Fox, my Twitter feed watches CNN, and my RSS feed watches MSNBC just to see Chris Matthews interrupt his guests.