Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Just Pointed Out the “Real Conversation” the Country Needs to Have About Trump

“He is a symptom of much deeper problems.”

Kevin Hagen/AP

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On Sunday afternoon, just a few hours before Attorney General William Barr delivered his summary of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report to Congress, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez weighed in on the flurry of attention being paid to Trump and several investigations surrounding him and the Russia scandal. 

There is a bigger picture, she said in a tweet quoting Star Trek actor George Takei, who had asked, “Let’s say Trump goes down in disgrace… We’re left with a big question: How did a guy like that get elected? Why do so many still support him? We can’t just say ‘Fox News’ or ‘Russians.’ We have serious issues to sort out.”

Agreeing with Takei, Ocasio-Cortez said, “As horrific as this president is, he is a symptom of much deeper problems.”

Even the issue of foreign influence, she said, presumably referring to Russian interference in the 2016 election, “plays on nat’l wounds that we refuse to address: income inequality, racism, corruption, a willingness to excuse bigotry.” 

“[Trump] can stay, he can go,” she continued. “He can be impeached, or voted out in 2020. But removing Trump will not remove the infrastructure of an entire party that embraced him; the dark money that funded him; the online radicalization that drummed his army; nor the racism he amplified and reanimated.”

Takei responded: “There’s no deep state, but there are deep problems. Let’s work together to solve them.”

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