AOC on 2028 Buzz: ‘My Ambition Is Way Bigger Than That’
“My ambition is to change this country. … Presidents come and go; Senate, House seats, elected officials come and go, but single-payer healthcare is forever.”
During a Friday interview with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) in Chicago, Democratic strategist David Axelrod noted that many Democrats want to see her run for president in 2028. The crowd responded to the prospect of her candidacy with thunderous applause.
He said there are others who would like her to challenge Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) in a 2028 primary. Once again, the audience broke into cheers.
Well, as it turns out, Ocasio-Cortez’s ambitions are “way bigger” than either one of those offices. She wants to “change the country.”
But first, she took aim at a critical op-ed published by The Washington Post editorial board last week in response to a controversial remark she’d made the previous day: “You can’t earn a billion dollars.”
She said, “In this op-ed that [Amazon CEO Jeff] Bezos paid for in The Washington Post, there was a veiled threat — it was the elite saying, ‘If you want this job, you just stepped out of line. And we want you to know where the real power is, and it’s in the modern-day barons who own the Post and own the algorithms, and we’re going to — we’ll make an example out of you.'”
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: You can't earn a billion dollars.
Ilana Glazer: That's right.
AOC: You just can't earn that.
Glazer: That's exactly correct.
AOC: You can get market power. You can break rules. You can do all sorts of things. You can abuse labor laws.
Glazer: Yup.… pic.twitter.com/VJIAm9ptqL
— Breitbart News (@BreitbartNews) May 7, 2026
Having set the record straight — at least in her own mind — the congresswoman continued:
They assume that my ambition is positional; they assume that my ambition is a title or a seat. And my ambition is way bigger than that. My ambition is to change this country.
Presidents come and go; Senate, House seats, elected officials come and go, but single-payer healthcare is forever. A living wage is forever. Workers’ rights are forever. Women’s rights, all of that.
…
When you haven’t been fantasizing about being this or that since you were seven years old, it is tremendously liberating. Because I get to wake up every day and say, how am I going to meet the moment?
…
But I make decisions by waking up in the morning, looking out the window, and observing the conditions of this country. And saying, ‘What move or decision can I make today that’s going to get us closer to that future, stronger, faster, and better than yesterday?’
The implication could hardly be clearer. Ocasio-Cortez does not view herself as merely another ambitious politician climbing the Democratic ladder. In her telling, she is something larger — a transformational figure uniquely positioned to reshape the nation’s political and economic order. Titles and offices, she insists, are secondary to the historic mission she has assigned herself.
Axelrod: There are a lot of people who would like you to run for president in 2028. And there are others who would like you to run for the senate.
AOC: In this op-ed that Bezos paid for in The Washington Post, there was a veiled threat—it was the elite saying if you want this… pic.twitter.com/ZjyuXPVu1G
— Acyn (@Acyn) May 8, 2026
Ocasio-Cortez first won her seat in Congress by defeating 10-term incumbent Joe Crowley, then-chairman of the House Democratic Caucus and a close ally of Nancy Pelosi, in a low-turnout Democratic primary in June 2018. Her upset victory shocked the political world.
Upon her arrival in January 2019, the 29-year-old former bartender took Washington, D.C., by storm. Despite her lack of experience and political knowledge, her charisma and media savvy quickly elevated her to the Democratic Party’s upper ranks. It wasn’t long before talk of higher office — even the presidency — gained traction.
But let’s face it. For all the confidence and rhetorical polish she tries to project, the substance behind it is remarkably thin. We still remember her cringeworthy response when asked if the U.S. “would or should commit troops to defend Taiwan” in the event of a Chinese invasion at the Munich Security Conference in February.
Clearly in over her head, she said:
Um, you know, I think that, uh, this is such a, uh, you know, I — I think that this is a, umm, this is of course a, uh, a very longstanding, um, policy of the United States – uh and I think what we are hoping for is we want to make sure that we never get to that point.
The shocking sound bite was replayed on a near-constant loop by media outlets around the world for days. The conclusion was clear: Ocasio-Cortez was not ready for prime time.
For those who may have missed it, her response can be heard in the clip below.
🚨 NEW: Fox News hosts call out AOC for being unable to answer key policy question on China:@JulieBanderas: “When it came to clearly articulate her stance on a critical foreign policy issue she came across as less presidential than even Kamala Harris.” @TomiLahren: “This is… pic.twitter.com/dotiNcSg46
— TV News Now (@TVNewsNow) February 15, 2026
The Post’s editors observed that Ocasio-Cortez appears to hold a dim view of human potential. Evidently, however, she makes an exception for herself, regarding her own potential as boundless.
Elizabeth writes commentary for The Washington Examiner and Legal Insurrection. She is an academy fellow at The Heritage Foundation. Please follow Elizabeth on LinkedIn.
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Comments
Single payer healthcare is forever? It’s called rationing and then insolvency.
“If you think healthcare is expensive now, wait until it is free.” Former bossman at Hopkins, 1995
She might want to take a look at the implosion of England’s vaunted healthcare system or better yet Canada’s whose response to overwhelming and unsustainable costs is to murder everyone they can
She couldn’t care less about any of that. If anything Canada’s enthusiasm to thin the populace of burdens to the system is an added bonus.
Why doesn’t the stupid bitch move to China or North Korea where her ideal system is already established? Oh yeah, no hypocritical personal gains and media attention with that route.
Followed up by death panels.
Just because that braying donkey is incapable of earning a billion dollars doesn’t mean other can’t do it.
It depends what you mean by “earn”. The way she defines it, based on Marxist economics, it’s literally impossible for anyone to earn that much in a lifetime of work.
If you don’t accept that the phrase “making money” is literal, that in a capitalist economy the people who have wealth literally created it and it wouldn’t have existed without them, you’re a Marxist.
She believes that people who work for wages are exploited, as their employers keep a portion of the earnings from their products. Meaning that employees aren’t paid all they are worth, profit for the business being the evidence this is true. She doesn’t understand that “profit” is the incentive for people to create businesses. Without this incentive, there would be no jobs (except maybe government jobs, but then there’d be little enough revenue from which to pay them).
This is, as I see it, the major problem with Marxism – it works against human nature. Conversely, it’s the major advantage of capitalism that it harnesses human nature. The problem with those supporting Marxism is that they don’t understand the capitalism’s “failures” are not due to the structure of capitalism, they’re due to human nature (which is incapable of perfection). They believe Marxism, done correctly, can be perfected – again ignoring the effects of the imperfections of human nature, which even Marxism “done right” can’t avoid.
Yes, that is the Labor Theory of Value, which is the core of Marxist economics. The entire value of anything comes from the labor put in to making it. What it’s actually worth to anyone is irrelevant. Therefore something found has no value, while a ditch that took 100 people a year to dig by the sweat of their brow must be very valuable indeed. And therefore any part of a thing’s value that is not divided among those who put in the work to make it worth what it is must have been stolen from them.
This is of course absurd.
I don’t believe its absurd. I believe it ignores reality. The reality is that all “exploitation” isn’t bad or evil. Many (if not most) forms of voluntary exploitation are beneficial – to the individual and to society. Not everyone can go into business for themselves. (An economic system based solely on self-employment is probably not viable.) So people strike bargains with employers – I will work for you at a fraction (not necessarily a small fraction) of the value of my work if you will afford me with the employment I need to support myself and my family. This arrangement can be (and usually is in modern societies) mutually beneficial. Both the employee and the employer have incentives to enter into such arrangements, and both have incentives (job security and continued production by experienced employees, respectively) to maintain these situations.
Question: Is the employee exploiting the employer by benefitting from the employer’s expenditure of capital by which his widgets are produced, thus creating the job opportunity for the employee?
Question: When the employee demands so much of a fraction of his actual work that he drives the employer out of business, is this “good” because the “exploitation” of the worker stops?
Dave, it’s absurd to think that the value in something comes from the work put into it. That something no one wants is inherently valuable, just because it took a lot of work to make, while a diamond that was discovered by accident with no effort is worthless.
The genius of capitalism is that value is not inherent in anything, but exists only in the human mind. A thing is valuable only and exactly to the extent that people value it. And therefore if you get people to want something that makes it valuable, and that’s value that you created out of nothing.
@Milhouse at 8:28PM
Well, no, it’s not entirely absurd, Milhouse. But, you’re making it abstract enough it seems that way.
When you say “something found” you’re ignoring that anything found that is raw has very little value – except as an investment to make it valuable. You mention “found” diamonds. But really valuable diamonds are not generally found – they are dug out of the ground through a lot of hard work. And then they are cut and polished. Yes, as diamonds, they have more value than some other things dug out of the ground through hard work. And that’s where you are absolutely right about demand. But some huge portion of their worth in the market is because people either made it possible to enjoy or added value to it.
Most people don’t want to sit on logs in their living rooms. So people cut those logs and fashion them into comfortable furniture that people DO want to sit on. And all of that fashioning – including the cutting down of trees, transporting, warehousing, a showroom, etc. – is what gives the end product MOST of its value. Heck, trees have (for most purposes) almost ZERO value if “found” because someone has to chop them down and haul them just to get them somewhere useful. (Already fallen trees might have a little inherent value, but most are very undesirable. Hey, there’s your demand thing, again.)
And, of course, it’s the abstraction that also makes all of that into the “labor theory of value” that is pretty stupid the way Marx works it. Primarily because Marx reduced it to one kind of labor (manual work) that adds the value, out of a sense of envy of those who didn’t “labor” but had wealth.
@DaveGinOly at 6:59PM
It sort of ignores reality. (All Marxist philosophies do that to some extent.) But part of it is also the envy factor. Which I think makes the ignoring of reality easier. Sort of like the envy is a blinder to keep reality at bay and narrow your sense of the world.
GWB, yes, most diamonds are not simply found. But occasionally one is. Or a gold nugget is found, just lying around at the bottom of a stream. Marx’s Labor Theory of value would have us believe that it is therefore worthless. But that is absurd.
It’s more of an intelligence test. Marxist fail it at a 100% rate
Keep eating and you can be the next Stacey Abrams.
I doubt she can write well enough. And that’s setting a low bar, IMO.
I’m not a democrat but I would like to see her slit her own throat so we can be done with her ignorance and stupidity once and for all.
Hand her a razor. A Norelco Floating Head razor!
She wants the post of her Communist Party Secretary/ Premier.
Oh God — yet another twit; the latest in a long line of obnoxious, empty-suit, lazy, entitled, silver spoon-fed, private sector-avoiding, dumb-as-rocks, self-reverential, arrogant and destructive Dhimmi-crat “saviors,” here to lead the country straight to their “promised land” of hell.
Occasional-Cortex is so profoundly stupid, just like Comrade Sanders, Mamdani, and the rest of the private sector-avoiding “Democratic Socialist” communists. These pukes don’t understand how companies are created, how economic value, jobs and collective wealth are created, so, naturally, she echoes the manifest stupidity of narcissist-incompetent-dunce, Obama’s, “You didn’t build that; someone else made that happen” demagoguery rhetoric.
They are the epitome of the line in Back To School, “Oh, you left out a bunch of stuff.”
AOC looking at a mustard seed: “My brain is, like, way smaller than that.”
“Forever”?! Ask Ozymandias, King of Kings.
Ask Walter White too.
Nah. Ask the GOPe… who campaigned on repealing Obamacare, and then, when they had the power to do exactly that… just could never manage to get around to it.
You can earn a billion dollars but you can’t spend it. That’s why billionaires are a good idea. They invest their extra money instead of spending it.
That investment buys power equipment for ditch diggers, raising their productivity and hence their wages. That’s trickle-down, not dimes falling from the pockets of the right.
“They invest their extra money instead of spending it.”
Exactly. Why is this so difficult for Libs to understand? They seem to believe that billionaires sequester their money in mattresses just to keep it away from the unwashed masses. They may also believe poor people are important creators of new jobs.
If they allowed themselves to understand, well, it would blow their misbegotten ideology out of existence.
They actually believe the rich are Scrooge McDuck, keeping their wealth in vaults for their personal enjoyment.
It’s a stupid and childish belief, as are leftists.
Damn, you beat me to it. Well done.
And even if they aren’t investing it, if they’re spending it, they’re still creating or sustaining jobs for other people to make money and provide for their families, so they spend money which allows other people to have jobs to provide….
All billionaires have giant vaults of gold coins they swim around in. Like Scrooge McDuck.
Although too many of them “invest” it in the Democratic Party, which makes both sides infernal idiots.
Her response to the Taiwan question is not a surprise in the context of her other statements in the article. She wants to change the country. She knows nothing about geopolitics because it doesn’t interest her. I’m not saying she understands economics, I’m just saying it’s not surprising she can’t answer a question concerning a subject with which she is unconcerned. She probably thinks this is OK, as she may really not be interested in becoming president. Not everyone in Congress is a foreign policy wonk (an obvious statement). It’s best for everyone when those without the chops in any field recognize their limits.
If she’d only recognize she’s not a brilliant economist the country would be better off.
“If she’d only recognize she’s not a brilliant economist the country would be better off.”
If leftists recognized that, there wouldn’t be any socialists.
Unlike AOC, GWB is actually a very intelligent person, but until he decided to run for president he knew very little about foreign affairs because he had never bothered learning about it. It didn’t interest him, and he didn’t think he needed to know it, so he never informed himself. Once he decided he wanted to be president he started studying it and turned out to have been quite good at it. But there were lacunae in his knowledge that reflected how recently he’d acquired it. He didn’t _remember_ things happening, even in his lifetime; he had to learn about them as history.
Certainly you’re not suggesting that AOC should run for president, because she could catch up on foreign policy later!
Unlike Bush, she hasn’t got the smarts to catch up. Or to learn it the first time.
GWB is actually a very intelligent person
Why, thank you, Milhouse.
Ohhh, you mean the other guy. NVM.
“I’m not saying she understands economics”
That makes you wiser than Boston University.
“Her response to the Taiwan question”
For extra lulz, her other major was International Relations.
I’m sick of low-IQ Democrat aholes fundamentally transforming America into Babel.
Here are the sons of Shem
for their clans, for their tongues,
in their lands, for their peoples.
Here are the clans of the sons of Noah for their exploits,
in their peoples:
from the latter divide the peoples on earth, after the flood.
And it is all the earth: a single lip, one speech.
And it is at their departure from the Orient: they find a canyon,
in the land of Shine’ar;
They settle there.
They say, each to his like:
“Come, let us brick some bricks.
Let us fire them in the fire.”
The brick becomes for them stone, the tar, mortar.
They say:
“Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower.
Its head: in the heavens.
Let us make ourselves a name,
that we not be scattered over the face of all the earth.
YHWH descends to see the city and the tower
that the sons of man have built.
YHWH says:
“Yes! A single people, a single lip for all:
that is what they begin to do! . . .
Come! Let us descend! Let us confound their lips,
man will no longer understand the lip of his neighbor.”
YHWH disperses them from there over the face of all the earth.
They cease to build the city.
Over which he proclaims his name: Bavel, Confusion,
for there, YHWH confounds the lip of all the earth,
and from there YHWH disperses them over the face of all the earth.
Chouraqui translation, verbum pro verbo, as Cicero says should not be done.
Cicero was right. The only way I understand that attempt is by knowing the original text by heart.
“You can’t earn a billion dollars, but I’m angry at the people who literally did!” Maybe try building something of value like they did. Unfortunately, she’s young so unless she’s been covering up some massive scandals we’re still stuck with her for a while.
This group of know-nothing know-it-alls is amazing. As JK Rowling said, so little experience of real life, ignorant of how ignorant they are. Complaining about the terrible world left to them, yet making the poorest decisions. Thank you AOC.
They know so much that isn’t so.
“My ambition is to change this country…”
Toxic Dunning-Kruger — so sure she can “improve” something she hasn’t even BEGUN to understand.
An odd thing for Rowling to say, since the culture she built in her universe has no roots at all. It goes down six inches and then you hit a plastic baseboard.
If you cannot understand the context, of what she said, that is on you. It has NOTHING to do with the universe she built, but real life experience, as she said directly:
“Like other people who’ve never experienced adult life uncushioned by wealth and fame, Emma has so little experience of real life she’s ignorant of how ignorant she is,”
She wrote books about teenagers attending a wizard school. She never claimed to be JRR Tolkien, nor tried to be.
Her ambition sounds like king. I dont expect that many stupid people outside new Dork support her.
Oh you might be surprised at the things really stupid people will do.
“I think about the Civil Rights and voting rights movement, and how black Americans really created democracy in this country.”
– AOC 2026
She screwed up with her first two words.
They created democracy, but are incapable of getting an I D?
They’re counting on the Gell-Man Amnesia to work in their favor.
The 6:00 AM alarm awakens AOC, and she asks aloud, “how am I going to meet the moment?” Answer- with more verbal inanities and vacant stares.
Between that and a shower, she really should choose the shower.
She’s the worst kind of nightmare imaginable.
She’s a female Ralph Wiggum — “helping.”
Bezos has an annual salary of just north of 80K$/year.
His wealth is stock in a company.
Dems and MSM and other morons conflate meanings, change meanings, or outright lie – we can’t communicate effectively using ‘words mean what I mean them to mean at this moment”.
Profit, salary, ‘made’, and so forth are meaningless words in contemporary use.
You can not fix stupid, nor the party of mental illness.
Another
Obnoxious
C__________ (fill in the blank.)
If she’s been having these ambitious fantasies since she was “seven years old,” she may have been watching Pinky and the Brain cartoons.
“Gee, Brain. What are we going to do tonight?”
“The same thing we do every night, Pinky. Try to take over the world!”
Was ready to post the same thing.. good going! And as with them… AOC will hatch another scheme to rule the world…. only she doesn’t sound as good as the “Orson Wells” voice of The Brain.
Presidents come and go; Senate, House seats, elected officials come and go, but single-payer healthcare is forever.
_____________________________________________________
so is retardation
What’s that old saying? “A legend in her own mind.” She needs a serious ego check.
I don’t consider nails on a chalkboard charismatic.
I think it was motivational speaker Zig Ziglar who introduced me to the concepts of free markets, in his mantra, “You can have and earn everything you could ever want, if you just first find a need and a way to create something that enough other people want and will buy from you.
Like early Microsoft and the personal PC, or Amazon and home delivery of goods.
AOC and her ilk are totally ignorant children in the world. Sad that Dems give them a platform and power.
Her ambition is to be Empress of the Earth.
Allow me to add to my comment above: This is the chick who was afraid of a frickin’ garbage disposal in her kitchen. Yeah, she’s gonna make over the USA. Riiiiiight.
but single-payer healthcare is forever
Did she just prove the adage that you vote your way in to socialism, but you have to shoot your way out?
The problem with AOC, or for that matter Bernie Sanders is, they’re never challenged. We haven’t seen socialism work anywhere, what would she do differently? What advancements in society have come out of socialism?
She’s a product of our education system, unbelievably graduating with a degree in economics. She has no clue what makes an economy work, yet she’s questioned as an expert.
AOC is the only bartender that brings nothing to the table. Read that the other day, had to steal it.
how much is already in the hands of the government ????paying for others healthcare??
its the law
the gop made sure it became law
this would like if washington and jefferson sent the brits ammo to be used against our military
AOC can be elected President – especially if conditions similar to 2008 happen in 2028. I remember 2008. Once Lehman failed, nothing could stop Obama from winning in a landslide. Right now, we seem overdue for another great crash.
AOC has a very high opinion of herself and in love with her progressive media coverage. In reality she is an inexperienced, dumb as a stick kid like her sidekick Mayor Mamdani!
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