After demanding President Obama’s birth certificate and highlighting Ted Cruz’s Canadian origin, it appears Trump has an almost pathological obsession with public figures’ family heritage. This bizarre tendency manifested yet again, when the reality TV star responded to Senator Warren’s continuing criticisms of his character by mocking her partial heritage as a Native American.
Raised in Oklahoma, Warren identifies as having a small amount of Native American ancestry, based on family stories, old photographs, and hereditary traits. Former Senator Scott Brown argued that she had fabricated her heritage while she was running against him for the U.S. Senate.
While, unlike Obama, Warren did not provide documentation proving her ancestry, the people of Massachusetts decided that the racial background of a candidate’s great, great grandmother was not an especially crucial policy point. Warren won the election, and Brown lost his seat.
Trump tried to resurrect the criticism in a recent interview, dismissing Warren’s criticisms of his repeated bankruptcies by calling her, “that Indian,” and claiming, “She’s got about as much Indian blood as I have.”
The claim is typical of Trump, but is also quite comical given that Trump himself once claimed to have Swedish heritage, despite the fact that he is actually German. Senator Warren had no words on Trump’s ancestry, however. She instead fired back against his core message, calling him “a bully,” and vowing to continue her fight to level the playing field of the American economy:
“Donald Trump is a bully and that’s what bullies do. Scott Brown tried the same thing, and if Donald Trump thinks using Scott Brown’s old hate-filled attacks on my family is going to shut me up, then he should think again. It didn’t work before; it’s not going to work this time. I’m doing what I promised the people of Massachusetts I would do. I’m out there in Washington every single day busting my tail to try to level the playing field, to try to loosen the stranglehold that Wall Street has on our government.”
As you’d probably expect from the folksy Massachusetts progressive, Elizabeth Warren is not backing down from this fight.
Featured image via Flikr by AFGE available under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 license.
