U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), shown, can’t seem to get separation from her embarrassing past claim to have American Indian heritage. During a raucous campaign event July 5 in Great Falls, Montana, President Trump, who regularly refers to Warren as “Pocahontas” over her dubious claim, once again scored some political points at her expense when he said he’d be willing to pay the leftist senator $1 million if she could prove she has any discernible Native American heritage.
“Let’s say I’m debating Pocahontas, I’ll do this,” Trump told the Montana crowd. “I promise you I’ll do this. You know those little kits they sell on television for $2 to learn your heritage? I’m going to get one of those little kits and in the middle of the debate, when she proclaims she’s of Indian heritage — because her mother said she has high cheekbones, that’s her only evidence…. We will very gently take that kit and we will slowly toss it, hoping it doesn’t hit her and injure her arm, even though it only weighs probably two ounces.”
Trump played to the cheering crowd, noting that “we have to do it gently, because we’re in the ‘Me Too’ generation, we have to be very gentle,” referring to the hyper-politicized atmosphere that exists relative to sexual harassment accusations.
Trump said that he would then tell Warren: “‘I will give you a million dollars, paid for by Trump, to your favorite charity if you take the test and it shows you’re an Indian.’ And we’ll see what she does. I have a feeling she will say no but we will hold it for the debates.”
Trump was no doubt playing to the news that Warren has recently been touted as a viable Democratic opponent to his 2020 reelection bid.
As for her supposed Cherokee heritage, Warren has been publicly claiming it since at least 2012, when she told NPR News that family stories passed down for generations proved her Indian bonafides. “I am very proud of my heritage,” insisted Warren, who grew up in Oklahoma, which is the center of the Cherokee culture. “These are my family stories. This is what my brothers and I were told by my mom and my dad, my mamaw and my papaw. This is our lives. And I’m very proud of it.”
However, Warren has steadily refused challenges to take a DNA test to confirm what many people doubt. The Hill noted recently that Warren “was questioned during an appearance on NBC’s ‘Meet the Press’ about an editorial in a Massachusetts newspaper, ‘Warren must resolve debate on heritage,’ which said a DNA test would ‘permanently resolve the issue.’”
In response to the challenge Warren insisted: “Look, I do know. I know who I am. And never used it for anything. Never got any benefit from it anywhere” — which makes many people wonder, then, why she brought it up in the first place.
In 2016 the Washington Post confirmed that there is “no official documentation,” such as the simple DNA test suggested by President Trump, to prove Warren’s Indian heritage claims. The paper advised that those with sufficient interest in the issue should “look into it on their own and decide whether Trump’s attacks over Warren’s background have merit.”
In the meantime, Warren deflected Trump’s most recent good-natured tweaking by accusing the president via Twitter of obsessing over her “genes” while his administration “is conducting DNA tests on little kids because you ripped them from their mamas & you are too incompetent to reunite them in time to meet a court order. Maybe you should focus on fixing the lives you’re destroying.”
Image: Screenshot from senate.gov
