Longtime Democratic strategist Dan Turrentine laid into Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) on Tuesday, saying that she was undermining her own reputation in her efforts to pivot away from gaffes at the weekend’s Munich Security Conference.
Turrentine explained on “The Huddle” that Ocasio-Cortez had built an image of herself as social-media-savvy and adept at taking her message directly to the people, so it did not look good when she turned to The New York Times for a bailout.
WATCH:
🚨NEW: @danturrentine on AOC whining to NYT over scrutiny of her overseas gaffes🤣
“It’s now getting to the point where the cover-up is worse than the initial crime. It’s PATHETIC & EMBARRASSING! This now has more & more people LAUGHING AT HER within the party.”@DailyCaller pic.twitter.com/TqqRu9IXZr
— Jason Cohen 🇺🇸 (@JasonJournoDC) February 17, 2026
“It was a horrible idea. It’s now getting to the point where the kind of cover-up is worse than the initial crime,” Turrentine said. “Start with who she — she called the New York Times, right? We talked about how her brand is social media savvy. She’s young, she constantly is online, kind of giving and taking, and just in the game.”
“And next to [California Democratic Governor] Gavin Newsom, it’s who people said gets this modern world better than anyone else,” he continued. “To argue that basically it’s unfair that people are taking clips and sending them around in short snippets — duh! It’s pathetic and embarrassing for her to make this kind of whining argument that — when your calling card is that you’re kind of the party queen of social media.”
“I don’t understand what she was doing,” he added.
Ocasio-Cortez delivered a full weekend’s worth of gifts to her conservative critics, from a nearly incoherent response to a question about whether American troops should ever defend Taiwan to her objectively false claim that Venezuela was below the equator. She also raised eyebrows when she attempted to engage Secretary of State Marco Rubio in a battle of historical trivia — a battle in which she was unsuccessful.
AOC mocks Marco Rubio for saying cowboys can be traced back to Spain.
Fun immutable fact: cowboys can be traced back to Spain. pic.twitter.com/WvQXGVI2mr
— Brittany Hughes (@RealBrittHughes) February 16, 2026
But Rubio was, in fact, correct in his assertions. “American” cowboys were modeled after the vaqueros — horse-mounted livestock herders from Spain’s Iberian peninsula — after Christopher Columbus brought Iberian horses to the New World in 1493. Spanish explorers and conquistadors also brought horses with them; some were traded to Native Americans, and others escaped and ran free. By 1525, horses were being bred in Mexico — but they were not, as Ocasio-Cortez suggested, native to the Americas.
When clips of her missteps began making the rounds on social media, she responded by running to The New York Times for help.
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