“AOC sucks” might be the new “Lock her up,” and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez the Democratic boogeyman conservatives are looking to hold up in place of Hillary Clinton.

Ahead of President Donald Trump’s rally in Grand Rapids, Michigan, on Thursday, Donald Trump Jr. took to the stage to introduce his father and rile up the crowd. While he was at it, he took some swipes at the Congress member from New York and her promotion of the Green New Deal.

“Think about the fact that every mainstream leading Democratic contender is taking the advice of a freshmen congresswoman who three weeks ago didn’t know the three branches of government,” Trump Jr. said of Ocasio-Cortez. “I don’t know about you guys, but that’s pretty scary.”

The crowd began to chant, “AOC sucks!” as Trump Jr. smirked. “You guys, you’re not very nice,” he said. “And neither is what that policy would do this country.”

Donald Trump Jr. blasts Ocasio-Cortez: "Think about the fact that every mainstream, leading Democratic contender is taking the advice of a freshman congresswoman who three weeks ago didn’t know the three branches of government...that’s pretty scary"



Crowd chants: "AOC sucks!" pic.twitter.com/Qh4TmyVSFi — Ryan Saavedra (@RealSaavedra) March 29, 2019

Ocasio-Cortez, 29, has had a meteoric political rise since she defeated the incumbent, Joe Crowley, in her district’s Democratic primary in 2018. She is one of the most recognized names in American politics, even outpacing some 2020 presidential contenders, and she is constantly in the headlines, whether for mentioning raising tax rates, highlighting the influence of money in politics during a congressional hearing, or just having a funny tweet.

Of course, not all of the chatter about Ocasio-Cortez has been so flattering, especially on the right. AOC bashing among some conservative circles and media outlets has become near obsessive. Where she lives, what she wears, how much money she has have all been points of discussion. Republicans were quick to seize on her rocky rollout of the Green New Deal and are constantly looking for angles of attack. Fox News and the New York Post have been eager to pounce.

It’s not all that different from the way Republicans treated Clinton, who for decades they held up as a villain, a woman who is somehow simultaneously unfit for the position she’s attained and a dangerous, malicious threat. The right’s animosity for Clinton isn’t fading — at that same Thursday Trump rally, chants of, “Lock her up,” also broke out. But conservatives are creating a sort of villainous HRC 2.0 out of AOC right now.

The right is very into going after AOC

There doesn’t seem to be much about Ocasio-Cortez conservatives aren’t interested in scrutinizing, whether in her personal or political life.

Conservative pundits have often tried to undercut Ocasio-Cortez’s working-class image by implying that she’s secretly rich or that her background isn’t what she says it is. Soon after she was elected in November 2018, Washington Examiner opinion writer Eddie Scarry tweeted a picture of Ocasio-Cortez from behind and remarked that her “jacket and coat don’t look like a girl who struggles.” The same month, Fox News ran a story about how much money was in her bank account. The New York Post has run stories about her riding in a car and where she lives.

It’s not all that different from some of the coverage Clinton has received throughout her career. In the summer of 2016, for example, the New York Post wrote about Clinton’s wardrobe. “[A]n everywoman she is not,” the Post declared, noting that Clinton had worn a $12,495 Giorgio Armani jacket at a speech.

(To be sure, going after the way women dress in politics is nothing new — as Vox’s Anna North wrote last year, it’s the rule, not the exception.)

But at every turn, Republicans appear hell-bent on going after Ocasio-Cortez, much in the same way they did to Clinton for years.

Philip Bump at the Washington Post found that Fox News mentions Ocasio-Cortez more than any likely or already-declared 2020 presidential candidates besides Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA). From January 1 to February 16 of this year, Fox talked about Ocasio-Cortez more than it did Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT).

The New York Post, which, like Fox News, is under the control of conservative Australian billionaire Rupert Murdoch, has also covered Ocasio-Cortez breathlessly. Joe Pompeo at Vanity Fair noted that the Post has always taken “glee in skewering progressives,” and it’s recognized a huge opportunity in Ocasio-Cortez:

“A.O.C. is the new Trump bump,” a second Post source told me, noting that coverage of her is consistently among the top-performing stories on nypost.com. In the past six days alone, the Web site has published 24 A.O.C. articles about everything from her ties to Bernie Sanders, to a former Greenpeace president calling her a “pompous little twit,” to a joke she made, apparently in reference to the Post, about using paper: “I need to admit something to you all. Frankly, I don’t know how my environmental reputation can recover.”

AOC and HRC are criticized for inauthenticity, but in different ways

It’s hard not to see parallels with Clinton in all of this.

Republicans have for years held Clinton up as a villain, and even after her 2016 defeat, she’s still a huge topic of conversation on the right. Vox’s Alvin Chang in 2018 delved into Fox News’s ongoing obsession with Clinton and found that the outlet was still covering her more than other cable news outlets by a wide margin.

A lot of the criticism of Ocasio-Cortez has a similar tone to the attacks on Clinton: that she is somehow inauthentic. With Ocasio-Cortez, the angle is that she is somehow secretly rich and posing as a working-class Latina from the Bronx. With Clinton, it’s that she’s always out to get ahead and has a contrived political façade covering up whatever the “real Hillary” is.

Ocasio-Cortez, thus far, has largely been able to avoid the contentions of inauthenticity creeping their way into the mainstream. Clinton couldn’t. Purportedly objective journalists and outlets have described her as a “very much camouflaged woman” and openly discussed her “authenticity problem” for years.

It’s demonstrative of the complexities of being a woman in the public eye and, specifically, in politics. Because American culture doesn’t see women as natural politicians in the same way it does men, it’s easier to perceive a wide array of things about them as unnatural.

Attacks took a toll for Clinton. And they might for Ocasio-Cortez, too.

The time in the spotlight took a toll on Clinton’s favorability among Americans. While as secretary of state she had high approval ratings, they fell after her presidential run, and she remains an unpopular figure.

Ocasio-Cortez’s polling numbers are also pretty bad, as Vox’s Zack Beauchamp laid out this week:

A Quinnipiac poll released on Thursday morning found that 23 percent of Americans had a favorable view of the member of Congress, while 36 percent had an unfavorable view — a -13 overall approval rating. Thirty-eight percent hadn’t heard enough about her to have an informed opinion. This new poll isn’t a one-off finding. Three prior surveys — one in January from Morning Consult, one in February from Fox, and a third in mid-March from Gallup — all found that more Americans had negative views of AOC than had positive ones.

Beauchamp, and Ocasio-Cortez herself, chalks some of her unpopularity up to negative coverage on the right. Yes, some of her proposals are pretty drastic and therefore polarizing, but, as Ocasio-Cortez put it, that “Fox News has turned into ‘AOC TMZ’” isn’t helping.

The first-term Congress member has shrugged a lot of the scrutiny off. In an interview with the New Yorker’s David Remnick, she joked, “Apparently, I am a cow dictator,” a nod to the right’s contention that the Green New Deal will involve entirely eradicating cows.

During the same interview, she reflected on the constant criticism of her.

“It feels like an extra job,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “I’ve got a full-time job in Congress and then I moonlight as America’s greatest villain, or as the new hope. And it’s pretty tiring.”

Clinton, in a 2017 interview with Remnick, has also offered up a reflection of the years of attacks on her. She struck a similarly defiant but weary tone.

“I’ve thought a lot about this,” Clinton told Remnick. “And for whatever combination of reasons—some I think I understand, and others I don’t—I am viewed as a threat to powerful forces on both the right and the left. I am still one of the favorite subjects for Fox TV. With the return of [Steve] Bannon to Breitbart, we’ll see him utilizing that publication. It’s because I do speak out, and I do stand up.”

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