Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) was accused of "looking not spirited, warm and original as usual but sullen, teenaged and at a loss" by Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan in her observation of President Donald Trump's State of the Union address last night.
Ocasio-Cortez soon responded.
"Tonight was an unsettling night for our country. The president failed to offer any plan, any vision at all, for our future," she wrote. "We’re flying without a pilot. And I‘m not here to comfort anyone about that fact."
It's true that Ocasio-Cortez, one of the president's more prominent critics, did not applaud him during a speech that has been described as both "unrepentant" and "defiant."
Many took Ocasio-Cortez's side over Noonan's.
The self-described democratic socialist Ocasio-Cortez has made regular headlines for her disavowals of the president.
Ahead of the State of the Union address, Ocasio-Cortez tweeted out a CNN story on "what to watch" on the State of the Union address, adding "none of it." (She did not elaborate further.)
"The president was unprepared. I don't think that he did his homework," she told MSNBC afterward.
"We've seen State of the Union address delivered by many presidents, Democrat and Republican," she continued. "They almost always have substantive policies that are offered. I agree with Senator [Amy] Klobuchar that there was no plan. There was no plan to address our opioid crisis. There was no plan to address the cost of health care, there was no plan to increase wages. It was... I had to ask myself: 'Is this a campaign stop or is this the State of the Union?"
Noonan, the winner of the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Commentary, called the president's speech a "deeply adept" one that "cut to the muscle on legal and illegal immigration, on abortion and infanticide, on foreign wars."
Since her days as a primary speechwriter and Special Assistant to President Ronald Reagan, Noonan has established herself as a prominent voice within the center-right. She has, however, criticized Trump on several occasions, particularly recently, when she, in one of her columns, called for an end to the "stupid" recent government shutdown that kicked off after the president declined to sign a stopgap funding bill that would have averted one because he and Congress reached a stalemate over funding for his border wall project.
Noonan's praise for the president's "deeply adept" speech runs counter to some of her past criticisms, particularly that he "talks too much."
Trump "obscures and steps on and makes not-obvious anything good that is happening, he thinks his constant communication is his power," Noonan said last year.
"Instead, I think his constant need to talk and tweet and be in your face is, in fact, his weakness, but he cannot stop. He doesn't have enough self-discipline to hold himself back and let events unfold in an interesting way."
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