Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is making herself an even bigger headache to her fellow Democrats, giving a wild third response to President Trump's speech, which pretty well eclipses the Democrats' carefully crafted messaging.

This shows just what a mess the Democrats are these days, and how she's happy to be their problem.

The Trump speech started as a duel between Trump, who spoke out about a border wall last night, and not one, but two Democratic responders.  That had a precedent in how a State of the Union address response goes to the other party, but the Democrats couldn't even agree on a single responder.  They had a pair of them, hoping to hog more camera time, perhaps, but it came at a cost of a unified message.  Nancy Pelosi, who leads the House, was a logical response agent, but Democrats went and put New York Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer up there as well.  The result, as they stared out at the TV cameras together, all botoxed and heavily made up, was "American Gothic," except maybe with oily game show hosts instead of farmers.  The image was so strong (and not in a good way) that it was hard to pay attention to whatever their words were.

Trump spoke of national security and crimes against Americans as the result of an open border.  Pelosi and Schumer responded with a twofold split defense of government worker paychecks, which is not a great topic of sympathy for U.S. workers, given the former's bloatedness, along with a "trust us: we'll discuss border security after the shutdown is over; just open the government," which, coming from Schumer, came off as credibility-challenged.  (Where was he in the discussion of this in the first two years of the Trump administration?)  It was odd stuff, seeing him up there.  He's the Senate minority leader, not the power guy, so just his being there making forked-tongue promises looked like an ego trip.

But that was the least of it.  Now we have incoming, buck private-ranked Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez weighing in for a third Democratic response, the voice of the radical left, and her messaging was way out in left field compared to the other two.  Pelosi and Schumer, whatever the weakness of their message, did try to come off as mainstream and compassionate so as to win voters over.  They didn't call Americans rats for not liking illegal alien crime; they didn't promise illegals more goodies or argue much for the lawbreakers' interests over those of American citizens.  They were actually trying to persuade by making Trump look like the unreasonable one.  And don't think their bid to seize the "narrative" wasn't carefully and painstakingly crafted.

Then Ocasio-Cortez barged in.  Here's the video (which doesn't have a "share" function, or I would post it).  Ocasio-Cortez uttered the wild stuff that incenses most voters, the stuff that Pelosi and Schumer were trying to avoid.  She defended illegals, calling the lawbreakers "acting more in an American tradition" than actual law-abiding Americans, and ignored Americans' concerns about illegal alien crime, saying her concern is for illegal migrants' fear of apprehension.  She yelled that Trump is a human right-violator, she blamed Trump for a flu-infected child's death in ICE custody, and she didn't even pay fake tribute to slain-by-illegals Officer Ronil Singh out in central California.  She argued for the interests of lawbreaking foreigners above actual rule of law, making Democrats look not just unreasonable, but un-unified.  Worst of all, she upstaged Pelosi and Schumer, hogging valuable camera time from what they had expected would be talking heads analyzing their own remarks.  As she threw her verbal bomblets into the arena, she made the whole thing about herself.  Shadow speaker, as American Greatness writer Julie Kelly observed earlier?  Sure looks like it.

Maybe there was a good-cop, bad-cop element to the whole thing.  Maybe the Democrats planned it together with Ocasio-Cortez being the tag-team member to rouse the Democrat base and far-left wing as Pelosi and Schumer appealed to middle America.  But given how badly Pelosi and Schumer did in their response, I kind of doubt it.  I especially doubt it given Whoopi Goldberg's recent expression of discontent about Ocasio-Cortez's Sunday 60 Minutes interview as "pooping on people," meaning that Ocasio-Cortez had been insulting her fellow Democrats.  You know that Whoopi is connected to those establishment circles and was expressing the sense of the Senate (and House).  And yes, Ocasio-Cortez's remarks did express contempt for Democrats already in the Congress.

In more ways than one, Ocasio-Cortez is now proving a problem for them.  For those of us who support President Trump, that's good news.