Last Monday night, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez broadcast live to at least 150,000 Instagram followers, telling — in raw, emotional detail — how she hid as rioters stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, and how she feared, not for the first time since her 2018 election, that her life was in peril.
Cynical political opponents are calling it a melodramatic attempt to attract attention; in fact, it was a vivid and vital first-person account of the consequences of President Donald Trump’s incitement from a woman at the center of right-wing fever dreams.
On the day of the insurrection, AOC was trapped in her own office. She made her way to Rep. Katie Porter’s office, ditching her suit and high heels and donning street clothes and sneakers so she could run for her life, if she had to.
Ocasio-Cortez’s point, which ought not be lost on any American — and especially not on the senators set to judge Trump in his trial next week — is that it was not only a system scarred by the former president’s anti-democratic behavior; human beings were hurt too. In this case, Ocasio-Cortez is also a survivor of sexual assault, a fact she briefly but agonizingly recounted to illustrate the point that trauma stays with a person and, in moments like this one, is reawakened.
This editorial first appeared in the New York Daily News on Wednesday. This commentary should be considered another point of view and not necessarily the opinion or editorial policy of The Dominion Post.
