Unsurprisingly, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) wasn’t exactly getting all misty-eyed watching former President Donald Trump’s recent arraignment.
“Maybe George Santos and Marjorie Taylor Greene were” part of the supposed hordes openly weeping as Trump was taken into custody, Ocasio-Cortez told Jordan Klepper in an interview that aired Monday night on The Daily Show. “But not me. Ticket back to LaGuardia [Airport], baby!”
The congresswoman said she thought most New Yorkers were of the same state of mind. “I think they treated him like a Florida man. He don’t belong to us no mo’,” she said, laughing. “He’s not from Queens anymore. He’s a citizen of Mar-a-Lago at this point.”
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Ocasio-Cortez was just as game to weigh in on Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’ “BFF Nazi memorabilia collector,” as Klepper characterized Harlan Crow, the real estate mogul who became a supremely unwilling household name after ProPublica reported earlier this month that he’d quietly lavished some of his billions on Thomas. With Crow suddenly in an uncomfortable national spotlight, it emerged shortly after that he also happens to be an aficionado of all things Third Reich.
“That whole thing is just, I mean, bizarre,” Ocasio-Cortez remarked. “You also don’t keep the [swastika-embossed table] linens around… Who does that?”
“Don’t you think if you had a billion dollars and you bought everything, you’d probably eventually get to Nazi linens?” Klepper asked.
Calling the Nazi memorabilia “a distraction” from the real issue, Ocasio-Cortez turned to Justice Thomas, who failed to report any of Crow’s gifts. “This is why we pay salaries to public servants,” she said, “and if they want to live that kind of lifestyle, then they can resign from the court. They can retire.”
“Clarence is endemic of a larger problem with the now right-leaning Supreme Court and the Republican Party as a whole,” the congresswoman said. “We have to face the reality that the Supreme Court has chosen to give up huge swathes of their own legitimacy,” she added.
Klepper journeyed to meet Ocasio-Cortez at Jacobi Medical Center in the Bronx, where they discussed the hospital’s Stand Up to Violence program, a flagship model that treats gun violence as a public health crisis rather than a pipeline to incarceration.
“A Democrat focused on violence,” the correspondent quipped. “Isn’t that a little off-brand?”
“Well, I’m from the Bronx,” Ocasio-Cortez shot back, smiling. “So it’s on-brand for where I’m from.”
Now in its seventh year of existence, the program has shown a 45 percent reduction in gun violence in the areas it serves between 2014 and 2018 compared to the four years prior, a drop that Klepper called “impressive.”
“I can hear how Fox News would spin this,” he said. “‘AOC tries to defund the police and fund gang members.”
“If I spent my time worried about what Fox News said, I wouldn’t be here,” Ocasio-Cortez responded.
For more, listen to The Daily Show’s Jordan Klepper on The Last Laugh podcast.
