President Donald Trump launched another sustained attack against Senator Elizabeth Warren, a leading political rival for 2020. Trump was speaking during a midterm campaign rally on Thursday. While reviving his “Pocahontas” nickname for Warren, Trump asked his supporters during the rally to imagine him in a debate with the Massachusetts Senator where he said he would challenge her to submit a DNA test to prove she indeed has Native American ancestors.
Trump joked that he would give 1 million dollars to Warren’s favorite charity if she took the DNA test and proved she’s Indian.
“I have a feeling she will say no” the president concluded. Trump accused Warren of living off her status as a minority and later suggested that he would in fact gently throw her the genetic testing kit because “we are living in the #meToo generation.” The president said that he was going to get one of those little kits and in the middle of the debate when “she claims that she’s of Indian heritage because her mother says she has high cheekbones I would gently toss it to her.” Trump added that he would gently toss that kit to make sure he doesn’t hurt or injure her even though it probably weighs two ounces.
However, Senator Warren got back to Trump a few hours later. Warren took note of Trump’s child separation policies. She said, “Hey Trump, as you keep obsessing over my genes, your administration has been conducting DNA tests on little children since you separated them from their parents.” The tweet continued to accuse the president of being “too incompetent” to reunite the separated children in time to meet a court order. Warren finished the tweet asking the president to “maybe focus on the lives he is destroying.”
This was the second time in a week that Trump had targeted Senator Warren in his campaign rallies. It also appears as if the president is attacking perceived rivals for the presidency in 2020. On Monday, for example, Trump told supporters the he actually wondered why the media would even bother to cover Senator Warren, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, or former Vice President Joe Biden. All these people have expressed interest in challenging Trump for the presidency in 2020.
Former Trump campaign manager Steve Bannon told NBC News that he expects Trump to continue making sharp contrasts between himself and all the potential Democratic presidential candidates including Senator Kamala Harris, Kirsten Gillibrand, and Cory Booker. The November primaries are also seen as Trump’s first-ever re-election effort and the president will have to put in a lot of work to avoid any embarrassing defeats.
Senator Elizabeth Warren has always claimed that she’s of Native American heritage. She said that this is what her mother told her and that she has never had any reason to doubt her. We don’t know whether Warren has ever subjected herself to any form of DNA or genetic tests but it seems that Trump is ready to make her take the test. The President also went on an extended rant about Jon Tester, the current Democratic senator from Montana. Trump wants unseat him in favor of a GOP candidate in the coming midterms.
