Trump Jokes About Wounded Knee Massacre, Is Still Weirdly Obsessed with Elizabeth Warren’s Heritage
Photo by Scott Eisen/Getty Politics News Elizabeth Warren
Welcome to another day in the hellish fever dream that is the U.S. under the Trump administration. This Monday, we have the displeasure of delving into yet another installment in Donald Trump’s strange, racially charged fervor against Sen. Elizabeth Warren. It’s an obsession that is here to stay, apparently.
Sunday night, the president tweeted about the Democratic Senator’s Dec. 31 Instagram Live video, in which she introduced her husband Bruce H. Mann and enjoyed a beer. Earlier on New Year’s Eve, she had announced she was entering the 2020 presidential race. Awkwardness of the video aside (it almost felt like a meta-nod to the idea of voters favoring candidates they would want to crack open a cold one with), it was a fairly benign addition to Warren’s Instagram presence. Not to Trump, however, who saw the opportunity to pounce on one of his favorite subjects: Warren’s heritage.
The two have sparred over Warren’s alleged Native American ancestry in a very ugly public discourse. The president began calling the Massachusetts Senator “Pocahontas” in 2017 as a jab at her previous claims of Native American ancestry. This October, she took a DNA test to prove her assertions, a political mistake that alienated Native American communities and may have cost her a large swath of voters.
It still hasn’t shut Trump up on the subject, either, with his latest tweets showing a nonchalance towards the U.S. government’s past violence against Native Americans.
If Elizabeth Warren, often referred to by me as Pocahontas, did this commercial from Bighorn or Wounded Knee instead of her kitchen, with her husband dressed in full Indian garb, it would have been a smash! pic.twitter.com/D5KWr8EPan
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 14, 2019
Best line in the Elizabeth Warren beer catastrophe is, to her husband, “Thank you for being here. I’m glad you’re here” It’s their house, he’s supposed to be there!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 14, 2019
Trump’s tweets reference the Battle of Little Bighorn, a victory for the Lakota, Northern Cheyenne and Arapaho against the U.S. Army, and the Wounded Knee Massacre, in which hundreds of Lakota men, women and children were killed by U.S. soldiers. Needless to say, the president’s casual, joking invocation of the massacre of Native Americans is yet another example of his racist ideology.