Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) on Monday evening told protesters who are defying stay-at-home orders to “march on over to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue” and protest President Donald Trump and his incompetent administration if they want their freedom.
“If you want your freedom, if you want to end the shutdown, then tell your president to make some damn tests, and to support some state governments. This is outrageous,” Ocasio-Cortez said during a live appearance on Instagram. “So if you wanna make sure that we re-open the economy, why don’t you turn around, march on over to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and protest this president [who is] not supporting our governors.”
She also criticized Trump for the lack of medical equipment, hospital funding, and local funding that many municipalities have been forced to deal with.
“If you want this economy to be re-opened, then tell Donald Trump to go make some damn tests. And tell him to stop leaving it to all of the governors to figure everything out and go to other countries to get what they need because they are not getting it from their president,” she said. “So if we want to re-open this economy, then we need to follow the science, to mass produce tests, do contact tracing so that we can all go back to work.”
Ocasio-Cortez also said it will take longer for economies to re-open so long as Trump keeps rambling at press conferences instead of coming up with plans to produce more tests and personal protective equipment (PPE) for frontline workers.
“But as long as Trump sits up here in these press conferences and la-di-das and decides to hold a campaign rally instead of enacting policy and producing tests and PPE and funding hospitals and state and local municipalities so that we can go outside, then we are not going outside,” she said.