The most erratic, inconsistent, and emotionally incontinent political figure in recent memory isn’t tweeting from Mar-a-Lago; she’s live-streaming from the well of the House and the Instagram accounts of half the country’s young progressives.
A recent Daily Beast article presents Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as the calm, concerned adult in the room, solemnly warning the nation that Donald Trump’s Truth Social posts—calling for the death penalty against six Democrats who reminded troops they needn’t obey illegal orders—reveal a “bizarre,” “erratic,” and “volatile” mental state that “we should all be questioning right now.” Yet the moment anyone flips the camera around, the accusation shatters like cheap glass. The most erratic, inconsistent, and emotionally incontinent political figure in recent memory isn’t tweeting from Mar-a-Lago; she’s live-streaming from the well of the House and the Instagram accounts of half the country’s young progressives.
Start with AOC herself. In 2019 she declared that billionaires exhibit “low empathy, narcissism, dishonesty” and implied they are essentially psychopaths, a sweeping psychological diagnosis delivered with the confidence of a bartender who once read half of a Malcolm Gladwell book. The same year she argued that record-low unemployment under Trump was actually terrible because “everybody has two jobs” and “people can barely feed their family,” an economic take so illiterate that even left-leaning economists winced. She has called paparazzi “creepy” and “stalkerish” in one breath while choreographing viral photo-ops in the next, accused critics of misogyny for quoting her verbatim, and built an entire brand on performative outrage that swings wildly between revolutionary socialism and petty personal feuds. Selective fury is her signature: Trump’s rhetoric is evidence of cognitive collapse, but Joe Biden wandering onstage lost for 45 seconds, calling Zelenskyy “President Putin,” and ending sentences in mid-air for four straight years never prompted AOC to question whether the nuclear codes were safe. That isn’t principle; that’s partisan mood disorder.
Zoom out and the pathology metastasizes across the entire Democratic Party in the wake of the 2024 rout. Instead of introspection, Democrats have retreated into a fortress of denial whose walls are built from every excuse except the correct one. Tim Walz insists the problem was that they failed to “win over Trump voters,” as if the party that called half the country fascists simply needed better messaging. Internal post-mortems from the DNC, The New York Times, and NPR read like group therapy sessions: the Biden-Harris swap came too late, the campaign obsessed over abortion and democracy while voters obsessed over $4 eggs, ads never aired early enough, Kamala dodged interviews, and the entire operation fixated on TikTok vibes while the working class walked away. These aren’t tactical footnotes; they’re symptoms of a party that lost touch with reality so thoroughly it couldn’t even see the tsunami coming.
The behavior has been even more unhinged. Democrats have repeatedly threatened government shutdowns, not to stop some outrageous Trump policy, but to protect billions in expiring green-energy subsidies and NGO funding that voters explicitly rejected. They are quite literally willing to torch the economy they claim to defend rather than accept the verdict of an election. Public sentiment is brutal and bipartisan in its exhaustion. People from every political stripe mock the party for “running the 2024 playbook after they already lost,” call their brinkmanship “how a child behaves,” and openly float the idea that half of Congress needs weekly drug testing because the meltdowns no longer look sober. When Rep. Anna Paulina Luna proposed mandatory testing for members, the replies weren’t partisan jokes; they were exhausted pleas that someone, anyone, explain the nonstop hysteria emanating from the Democratic caucus.
Projection has become the party’s primary coping mechanism. They spent years diagnosing Trump supporters with every psychological disorder in the DSM; now they diagnose Trump himself with dementia because he types in all-caps and refuses to speak in the soothing, focus-grouped monotone they mistook for sanity. Meanwhile, their own leaders can’t string together a sentence without blaming “disinformation,” “the algorithm,” “late-breaking economic data,” or the ghost of James Comey. The same media that amplified every anonymous “senior official” whispering about Trump’s mental decline now ignores the very public collapse of a political movement that cannot accept mathematical reality.
Trump’s style is bombastic, hyperbolic, and sometimes reckless—nobody disputes that. But it is also predictable, consistent, and rewarded twice by the American electorate in landslides that grew larger the second time. Erratic is when you promise to codify Roe and then lose 15 seats anyway. Volatile is when you scream “fascist” for eight years and then act shocked when the public stops listening. Bizarre is when you declare victory for democracy by attempting to kneecap the incoming administration before it even begins.
So when AOC stands before the cameras, eyes wide with practiced alarm, begging the country to question Trump’s mental fitness, the irony is almost performance art. The most unstable force in American politics right now isn’t a 78-year-old billionaire shit-posting from Florida. It’s a Democratic Party, and its shrill young star, that has spent an entire year throwing a screaming, kicking, increasingly incoherent tantrum because the voters they spent a decade lecturing finally told them, in the clearest voice possible, to sit down and be quiet.
