AOC vs. Marco Rubio: First throwdown of 2028?

It’s reasonable to suggest that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez should have been better prepared for a question about China and Taiwan. During her appearance last weekend at the Munich Security Conference — which may or may not have been an index of her interest in higher political office — the New York congresswoman who has become an international left-wing celebrity created the kind of headlines no one in politics wants to see.

In a now-infamous viral moment from a Munich panel discussion, Ocasio-Cortez fumbled her way through her initial response to a question that, in all fairness, is one of the most difficult in contemporary international relations: Should the U.S. commit to defending Taiwan with military force in the event of a Chinese invasion? The correct and succinct answer, I would argue, is no. But no one in American politics, left, right or center, can afford to say that straight up. Here is how she responded:

Um, you know, I think that I, uh, this is such a, you know, I think that this is a, this is of course, a very longstanding, um, policy of the United States and I think what we are hoping for is that we want to make sure that we never get to that point, and we want to make sure that we are moving in all of our economic research and our global positions to avoid any such confrontation and for that question to even arise.

There are two important things to say here. One is that reporting Ocasio-Cortez’s comments exactly that way, as nearly everyone in media did, was a political or ideological choice, and one that violated established norms of journalism. In other words, it was a deliberate gotcha. When rendering spoken words in print, it’s standard practice to delete the “uhs” and “ums” and “likes,” remove irrelevant false starts and silently correct the minor errors of grammar and syntax endemic to human speech.

When it comes to public figures, there are clearly good reasons to stick pretty close to a verbatim transcript of what they really said. But that fails to explain this instance, in which Ocasio-Cortez’s remarks could easily have been clarified by inserting an ellipsis, without changing her words or falsifying her casual language: “You know, I think that this is … a very longstanding policy of the United States,” and so on. As numerous commentators on social media have noted, Donald Trump’s indecipherable public utterances are almost never subjected to that kind of forensic reconstruction, in large part because of the resulting howls of protest from the MAGA faithful about “TDS” and the “far-left media” and the president’s imaginative “weave” of anecdote, metaphor and pure fantasy.

The second thing to say is that AOC’s actual response to the question, once she finally got there, was entirely lucid and reasonable. Arguably, she said just about the only thing any American policymaker should say about the nightmarish prospect of war between the U.S. and China: “We want to make sure that we never get to that point.”

Indeed, as Stephen Wertheim of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace told the Times of London, the actual substance of Ocasio-Cortez’s China remarks was preferable to former President Joe Biden’s “repeated statements that the United States would definitely defend Taiwan if attacked, which were destabilizing comments and contradicted the U.S. policy of strategic ambiguity.” I hardly need to remind Salon readers how damaging Biden’s inept or unfocused public utterances turned out to be. That lingering trauma from 2024 almost certainly hovers in the atmosphere above AOC’s Munich melodrama.

Then comes the irresistible and arguably even more important corollary to this episode, which is why one woman’s 20-second struggle with an unanswerable question sparked a week-long media sensation, full of accusations and counter-accusations, anguished discussions on “The View” and premature right-wing or centrist celebrations of AOC’s downfall.

The reasons why that happened are nearly too obvious and too depressing to enumerate. Furthermore, they are the same reasons why so many mainstream media observers halfheartedly signed onto an inverse narrative about Secretary of State Marco Rubio, whose Munich speech was greeted (we are told) with a grateful standing ovation. If you squint at real-world events through MAGA-tinged spectacles while ignoring content and context, and haven’t shed your contact high from the infamous 2024 “vibe shift,” then Ocasio-Cortez is a dangerous impostor who got her comeuppance on the world stage, while Rubio is a statesman who brought America and Europe back together, with just a little fascism as a treat.

I said it was obvious, but I’d better say it more clearly: Ocasio-Cortez is a young woman — an intelligent and charismatic young woman of color — who represents a destabilizing threat to the still-standing ruins of America’s political order, both the pseudo-populist MAGA right and the desperately scrambling, nearly-left-behind Democratic center. She told the New York Times she went to Munich not as a political candidate but to deliver a message to “those folks in nicely-pressed suits in that room [who] will not be there much longer if we do not do something about the runaway inequality that is fueling far-right populist movements.”

That could, of course, turn out to be the mission statement of a 2028 presidential campaign, and Ocasio-Cortez is clearly considering her options. Unlike New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, a faintly rivalrous ally and related political phenomenon, she is constitutionally eligible for the office, as well as old enough. (She’s now 36.) It’s also possible that she may decide to hold her fire this time around and pursue Chuck Schumer’s U.S. Senate seat first. (If she runs, even money says Schumer quits, an outcome that would please Democrats across the board.)

So there’s a nearly infinite litany of reasons why what remains of the American political and media establishment, although largely consumed by self-hatred, self-doubt and bitter internal bickering, is united by its eagerness to destroy Ocasio-Cortez, and gratefully seized on her China freeze-up as a potentially fatal weapon. What’s especially depressing about all this is not just the multiple overlapping forms of bigotry at work — misogyny, racism, class prejudice, generational anxiety and quivering, unreasoning terror of the activist left — but also the shameless mendacity and sheer stupidity.

No one who’s trying to sell AOC’s Munich moment as a damaging scandal actually thinks she was wrong on substance, or even has a worthwhile opinion about that. Similarly, no one who listened to Rubio’s Munich speech actually believes it was a genuine gesture toward MAGA détente with Europe. At best, it was a warmed-over rewrite of JD Vance’s white nationalist insult-comedy routine from last year, but delivered in Rubio’s unctuous, reassuring tones with a faint throwback to Bill Clinton-era empathy and Reagan-era neoconservatism. As is nearly always the case these days, analysis of policy ideas or political substance takes a back seat to second-rate drama criticism, although not, in this instance, with much conviction.

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As Foreign Policy columnist Howard W. French observes, Rubio’s standing ovation wasn’t about anything he said. It was largely a matter of “heartfelt relief that Rubio had not spoken in the threatening style of his boss, President Donald Trump, or with the insulting bluster of Vice President J.D. Vance,” along with “the polite response of a European elite that has shed its illusions about a shared vision of the world and simply wants to keep frictions with Washington to a minimum as the two sides drift apart.”

Rubio is a smooth operator steeped in the old-line Republican tradition of expressing hard-right views in courteous, nonconfrontational language. But as French notes, after his speech the secretary flew straight to Budapest to express the Trump administration’s unconditional support for the autocratic, ethnonationalist regime of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. In any case, the message Rubio delivered in Munich, however carefully packaged and wrapped, was rooted in the same ahistorical or anti-historical delusions as everything else about Trumpian foreign policy, especially “a false notion of Europe as a place of fixed national identities, rooted in whiteness, 19th- and early 20th-century folk stereotypes, and Christianity as a universal standard.”

Meanwhile, Ocasio-Cortez’s visit, viewed from the European perspective, appears to have been a hit. She received far more positive coverage than either Gov. Gavin Newsom of California or Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, two other possible or likely presidential contenders, and hardly anyone across the Atlantic even mentioned the supposed China gaffe. By AOC’s own account, she met privately with a number of left-leaning German ministers and legislators and spoke before a packed house at a Berlin university.

But Ocasio-Cortez’s European fans will not be casting votes for the next president of the United States, and it was more than slightly disingenuous of her to complain about the media narrative that her Munich visit felt like a tentative campaign rollout. She told the New York Times that an unidentified reporter had asked her, “Is Munich the new New Hampshire?” That’s definitely obnoxious, but in an era when there’s barely a one-year separation between the previous presidential campaign and the next one, it’s not exactly surprising.

I had the privilege of observing Marco Rubio’s political implosion up close back in 2016, and I’m not sure the memory of his nearly-empty “Super Bowl party” during the New Hampshire primary campaign will ever leave me. Despite his Trumpian rebirth and subsequent years of groveling, or maybe because of them, Rubio has almost no chance of becoming the post-Trump MAGA standard-bearer. He might serve as Vance’s running mate, I guess, but both in Munich and in general he strikes me more as a chirrupy Robin to JD’s would-be Dark Knight.

So I’m disinclined to believe that we saw the two 2028 nominees unleashed last week in Munich. We might not have seen either of them. But we certainly saw the first outlines of a campaign like no other, one with unimaginably high political and philosophical stakes, to be waged with viral memes and out-of-context clips under a rattletrap fascist regime that has unlimited resources and almost no grasp of reality. Whether Ocasio-Cortez runs for president is up to her; I’m not in the business of giving advice. But maybe she now understands what’s coming at her if she does, and how ugly it’s likely to get.

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