President Donald Trump launched a sustained attack against Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) during a freewheeling speech at a rally in Montana. The president revived his "Pocahontas" nickname for Warren and challenged her to submit to a DNA test to prove her Native American heritage.
"I will give you a million dollars to your favorite charity, paid for by Trump, if you take the test and it shows you're an Indian," he said. "I have a feeling she will say no. She's based her life on being a minority."
The president clarified that he would toss the genetic testing kit to her "gently because we're the #MeToo generation," a comment which mocks the international movement against sexual harassment and assault which, among many other examples, spotlighted his own sordid history of abuse and emphasized comments he made on the now-infamous Access Hollywood tape.
The irony of these comments appeared to be lost on Trump, who further used the social movement to impugn Warren:
I'm gonna get one of those little kits. And in the middle of the debate, when she proclaims that she's from Indian heritage, because her mother says she has high cheekbones. That's her only evidence, that her mother said she had high cheekbones.We will take that little kit and say — but we have to do it gently, because we're in the #MeToo generation, so we have to be very gentle. And 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.
It didn't take long for Warren to punch back, taking his administration to task for the humanitarian crisis they've created––and exacerbated––along the U.S.-Mexico border.
Warren's response was a reference to reports that the U.S. government is performing DNA tests on children and parents in an attempt to reunite migrant families separated at the border as a result of the Trump administration's "zero tolerance" family separations policy.
The Department of Health and Human Services will be conducting DNA tests by taking a cheek swab of every child before matching him or her with a parent. The move comes after a federal judge in the Southern District of California ordered that the government must reunite parents separated from children younger than 5 by July 10 and children ages 5-17 by July 26.
Others also criticized the president––and mocked his request, emphasizing that the American public would rather he finally release his tax returns.
Other comments were considerably more pointed.
The president––and many of Warren's critics––have claimed that Warren used false claims of Native American heritage to gain an edge over other candidates for a faculty position at Harvard University. However, a simple fact check indicates that these claims don't hold under scrutiny.
As Snopes notes, "specific evidence that she gained her position at Harvard (at least in part) through her claims to Native American heritage is lacking." Moreover, several people with whom Warren worked at Harvard, including David Bernstein, who is the former chairman of the American Association of Law Schools, have said that her ancestral background did not factor into the professional opportunities she received while employed at Harvard.
Warren was not the only woman the president verbally attacked. He continued a long-running feud with Representative Maxine Waters (D-CA), claiming she has an I.Q. in the "mid-60s."
"Democrats want anarchy. They really do. And they don't know who they are playing with, folks," Trump said. "I said it the other day, yes, she is a low IQ individual, Maxine Waters. I said it the other day. I mean, honestly she is somewhere in the mid-60s. I believe that."
The president's latest attack comes after more than 200 black female leaders and allies slammed Democratic leaders Nancy Pelosi (CA) and Chuck Schumer (NY) for their “failure” to protect Waters from “unwarranted attacks from the Trump administration and others in the GOP."
Last month, the president accused Waters of advocating “harm” against his supporters.
But Waters did not call for physical harm. In fact, she called for civil disobedience.
“If you think we’re rallying now you ain’t seen nothing yet,” she told supporters at a rally in Los Angeles recently. “If you see anybody from that [Trump] Cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd and you push back on them, and you tell them they’re not welcome anymore, anywhere.”
Waters’ rather pointed remarks were a response to a couple of different news reports of Trump administration officials who had trouble dining out peacefully, and her suggestions appear to have worked. Yesterday, Scott Pruitt resigned from his position as head of the Environmental Protection Agency. Pruitt's tenure at the EPA has been marred by multiple scandals and departure came two days after a woman approached him at a restaurant and urged him to resign.
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