Anna Moneymaker / Getty Images News via Getty Images

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is brushing off Trump’s warnings of a communist takeover as “very silly,” pointing out that the U.S. can’t even manage to raise its long-frozen minimum wage — and casting the fear-mongering as a distraction from issues like health care.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez addresses reporters on the Capitol steps on July 22, 2026, following House votes on the NDAA and a congressional stock-trading ban. Photo by Anna Moneymaker / Getty Images.

The federal minimum wage has been stuck at $7.25 an hour since 2009, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez used that figure to push back on President Donald Trump’s warnings about a communist takeover.

The New York congresswoman dismissed the alarm as “very silly,” arguing the country “can’t even raise the minimum wage,” according to People. When a reporter asked about a “slippery slope to socialism” that “inevitably ends up as full-blown communism,” she replied: “I mean, no. I think that’s very silly. We can’t even raise the minimum wage. Do they really think communism is going to happen? No.”

The remarks come after weeks of Trump sharpening his rhetoric, calling democratic socialists “hard core, godless Communists” and telling the Faith & Freedom Coalition that the left will “close your churches” and “kill your people.” He’s described communism as “the single greatest threat to our country in its history, including even World War II,” and posted that “America the Beautiful will NEVER be a Communist Country!!!” House Speaker Mike Johnson has echoed the framing as “common sense versus communism.”

The backdrop is a string of Democratic primary wins in New York by candidates backed by New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and tied to the Democratic Socialists of America, including races that knocked out incumbents. Trump and his allies have cast those results as a “cancer” spreading through the Democratic Party ahead of the midterms.

Ocasio-Cortez, herself a democratic socialist, framed the rhetoric as a deliberate distraction: “They’re trying to scare people because they don’t want us talking about the fact that we all have a right to health care… They want to call everything they don’t like communist because if people actually wake up to the fact that their elected officials are screwing them over… they’re going to realize they deserve better… Germany, Italy, the UK, Canada, everybody else, has it better than us, and we spend the most money for the worst care in the developed world.”

She came back to the wage argument to wrap up her point: “Just think about how impossible it has been to raise the minimum wage in America in 10, 15, 20 years. We can’t even raise the minimum wage. Do Republicans really think that this stuff is going to happen? No, they don’t.”

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