AOC Rejects Trump’s Communism Takeover Warning as ‘Very Stupid,’ Citing $7.25 Minimum Wage Freeze
Anna Moneymaker / Getty Images News via Getty Images
By Jerome London
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez dismissed Trump’s warnings to take on the communist regime as “absolutely foolish,” pointing out that the US can’t even manage to raise its long-frozen minimum wage — and citing fear as a distraction on issues like health care.
The federal minimum wage has been stuck at $7.25 an hour since 2009, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez used that number to push back on President Donald Trump’s warnings about a communist takeover.
The New York congressman dismissed the alarm as “absolutely ridiculous,” arguing that the state “can’t even raise the minimum wage,” according to People. When a reporter asked about the “slippery slope to social welfare” that “inevitably ends up being total communism,” he replied: “I mean, no. I think that’s very stupid.”
The comments come after weeks of Trump sharpening his rhetoric, calling democratic socialists “hardline, godless communists” and telling the Faith & Freedom Coalition that the left will “close your churches” and “kill your people.” He described communism as “the single greatest danger to our country in its history, including World War II,” and wrote that “America the Great will NEVER be a Communist Country!!!” House Speaker Mike Johnson called the bill “common sense versus communism.”
The background is a series of Democratic primary wins in New York by candidates supported by New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and tied to the Democratic Socialists of America, including races that have eliminated candidates. Trump and his allies cast those results as a “cancer” spreading to the Democratic Party ahead of the midterms.
Ocasio-Cortez, also a democratic Socialist, described the speech as a deliberate distraction: “They are trying to scare people because they don’t want us to talk about the fact that we all have the right to health care… everyone else is better than us, and we spend a lot of money on the worst care in developed countries.”
He returned to the wage debate to wrap up his point: “Just think how impossible it would be to raise the minimum wage in America in 10, 15, 20 years. We can’t even raise the minimum wage. Do Republicans really think these things are going to happen? No, they don’t.”
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