‘I am as powerful as a man and it drives them crazy’

In a new interview with David Remnick of The New Yorker, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said her powerful position in Washington is driving her GOP critics crazy.

“The idea that a woman can be as powerful as a man is something that our society can’t deal with. But I am as powerful as a man and it drives them crazy,” she told Remnick.

The freshman congresswoman was responding to a question about Jezebel writer Ashley Reese’s piece claiming that women in politics are characterized as either “hideous harpies like Hillary Clinton” or “pretty idiots whose ‘craziness’ is bound up with their sex appeal.”

“To her critics, Ocasio-Cortez is firmly in the pretty idiot category,” Reese wrote.

Ocasio-Cortez said she agreed with Reese and “predicted it from day one.”

“I can see Trump being enormously upset that a 29-year-old Latina, who is the daughter of a domestic worker, is helping to build the case to get his financial records,” she added. “I think that adds insult to injury to him.”

Ocasio-Cortez also called the president a “small, mediocre person” in the interview, adding that she “grew up with a real romanticism about America. I grew up in a first-generation household where your parents give up everything, and for me, America was the greatest thing ever to exist. To be there on the floor of the House was beyond anything my parents would have ever dreamed of. But the person behind the podium was so unskilled. It was kind of sad.”

Ocasio-Cortez was part of the historical congressional freshman class of 2019. In an exclusive interview with ELLE.com last summer, she admitted suffering from “major imposter’s syndrome” when she first started in politics, but “always [felt] confident that what I was doing was the right thing to do and that what I was standing for was the morally superior position.”

“There are a lot of haters out there, and they’re like, ‘Who are you? You’re just a waitress running for Congress.’ Which was true. Who did I think I was? When so many people are telling you that, it does sink in,” she said. “Our society so aptly boils people down to the amount of money that they make and their professional position that it demoralizes a lot of really great people.

“[But] I knew I was more than that.”