http://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/elizabeth-warren-goes-to-war-against-donald-trump?mbid=social_twitterElizabeth Warren Goes to War Against Donald Trump
By Margaret Talbot , May 17, 2016
When Senator Elizabeth Warren, of Massachusetts, took up the fight against Donald Trump in the last few weeks, it felt a little like that moment in an action movie when the disaffected friend who’d walked out turns up late in the third act, mid-fray, with fresh ammunition and a wink and a grin for her old gang. With Hillary still pinned down in the primaries, unable to shake off the dogged Bernie Sanders campaign, Warren started a Twitter war with Donald Trump.
On May 3rd, when Trump won the Indiana primary and became the presumptive Republican Presidential nominee, Warren tweeted, “There’s more enthusiasm for @realDonaldTrump among leaders of the KKK than leaders of the political party he now controls.” When Trump responded a few days later, calling her “Goofy Elizabeth Warren,” the senator shot back, “For a guy with ‘the best words,’ that’s a pretty lame nickname. Weak.” On May 6th, Warren signalled her determination to keep the battle going: “But here’s the thing. You can beat a bully not by tucking tail and running but by holding your ground.” On May 11th, she took Trump to task for opposing a federal minimum wage and government oversight of the banking system, and tweeted, “Your policies are dangerous. Your words are reckless. Your record is embarrassing. And your free ride is over.” Trump kept it up with the “goofy” label and added another: “Pocahontas.” This was a reference to an awkward bit of Warren’s biography: as a faculty member at the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard law schools in the eighties and nineties, Warren, who would appear to be about as white as a white lady can get, had listed herself as a minority—specifically, as a native American. Warren grew up in Oklahoma, and has said that her parents used to tell her they had Cherokee and Delaware heritage, but her self-identification became a controversy in her 2012 Senate campaign, against Scott Brown, who tried to portray it as opportunistic or just delusional. Voters didn’t seem to mind so much; she defeated Brown by a margin of seven points. (A genealogist who looked into the matter said she might have been one-thirty-second Cherokee.) After Trump revived the issue, Warren tweeted, “We saw when Scott Brown attacked my family & his staff made tomahawk chops & war whoops. They lost big. MA voters knew better.” She added, “We get it, @real Donald Trump: when a woman stands up to you, you’re going to call her a basket case. Hormonal. Ugly.”
continued
