AOC’s foreign policy adviser gains ground after bumbling display in Munich
Ian Sams may finally have some competition for the title of worst Democratic aide of the 21st century. The notoriously incompetent communications adviser has fallen off the radar after guiding Kamala Harris to a tremendous defeat in 2024. Sams has been “self-employed” ever since.
Enter Matt Duss, the left-wing foreign policy “expert” who advised Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.) ahead of her disastrous performance at the Munich Security Conference. Duss serves as executive vice president at the Center for International Policy, which bills itself as a “woman-led, progressive, independent nonprofit center for research, education, and advocacy working to advance a more peaceful, just, and sustainable U.S. approach to foreign policy.” Translation: It is a typical D.C. institution whose sole purpose is to provide affirmative-action sinecures to overeducated liberal dorks who lack the skills necessary to succeed in the real world.
Only a politician of AOC’s caliber would be impressed by Duss’s resume. He holds a master’s degree from the University of Washington, and got his professional start as an analyst for the left-wing Center for American Progress. Duss served as president of the Foundation for Middle East Peace, a terrorist-adjacent activist group, before Sen. Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.) hired him as a foreign policy adviser. He left Sanders’s office in 2022 to join an “anti-war” think tank funded by the Koch brothers.
Duss started briefing Ocasio-Cortez on foreign policy late last year after the congresswoman accepted the invitation to speak at the conference in Germany, according to MS NOW. They had several months to prepare, but it wasn’t enough to stop AOC from embarrassing herself on the world stage. The 36-year-old firebrand, who is clearly thinking about running for president in 2028, gave a series of rambling, incoherent answers that some have described as “Kamala-esque,” and seemed ill-equipped to respond to basic questions about U.S. foreign policy.
Asked how the United States should respond to a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, AOC delivered an uncanny impression of the former vice president. “Um, you know, I think that, uh, this is such a, you know, I think that this is a, um, this is of course a very long-standing, um, policy of the United States,” she said. “Uh, and I think what we are hoping for is that we want to make sure that we never get to that point, and we want to make sure that we are moving in all of our economic research and our global positions to avoid any such confrontation and for that question to even arise.”
The word salad was “especially impressive,” wrote the Wall Street Journal editorial board, because Ocasio-Cortez could have easily “taken cover under the fact that U.S. policy is to decline to answer the question.” It wasn’t the only head-scratching moment from AOC’s time in Munich. She also slammed President Trump for the successful operation to kidnap Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro, saying the United States should not “engage in acts of war just because the nation is below the Equator.” The line came off as well-rehearsed, but failed to account for the fact that Venezuela is actually above the Equator. She also mixed up the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a defunct trade agreement negotiated by the Obama administration, and the “transatlantic partnership,” a generic term for the U.S.-European alliance.
The Munich performance raised some alarming questions about the quality of Duss’s foreign policy advice, but it certainly bolstered his case to surpass Sams as the most incompetent Democratic adviser of his generation. It won’t be easy, given Sams’s prolific track record of political failure.
Sams has been a figure of national intrigue since 2016, when he served as regional press secretary on Hillary Clinton’s failed campaign and debased himself by modeling the now-infamous “Grillary Clinton” apron. He then worked as communications director for Tom Perriello, the Virginia gubernatorial candidate who lost to Ralph “Coonman” Northam in the Democratic primary. As communications director for Kamala Harris’s disastrous presidential campaign in 2019, Sams was widely ridiculed for posting nonsensical photoshops on social media and for frantically accusing journalists of racism.
The résumé doesn’t get any less impressive after that. Sams led the Biden administration’s communications response to COVID-19, which is generally regarded as a catastrophic failure. He joined the White House in 2022 to oversee the response to special counsel Robert Hur’s investigation into Joe Biden’s mishandling of classified documents. He repeatedly vouched for Biden’s cognitive fitness and lashed out at Hur for accurately describing the president as an “elderly man with a poor memory.” Sams would later testify that he had just two interactions with Biden. Harris was so impressed, she made Sams a senior adviser on her (second) failed campaign in 2024—a clear indication that she was ill-equipped to be president.
Ian Sams will always be the “Forrest Gump of Political Failure” in our hearts, but he hasn’t shown us the goods in 2026. We hate to say it, but Sams is definitely at risk of being overtaken by an ambitious rival of profound incompetence. Matt Duss is arguably the biggest threat, and we can’t wait to see what happens next.
Good luck to all!
Read the full article here
