President Donald Trump on Tuesday unleashed a torrent of tweets redoubling his racist attacks on Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), after Warren’s DNA test results were questioned by the Cherokee Nation.
Trump, in his trio of tweets, again slandered Warren by referring to her as “Pocahontas (the bad version),” using a racial slur he has regularly employed in attacking her claim that she has Native American roots.
Warren’s claimed heritage has stirred controversy throughout her political career, dating to when she was a professor at Harvard. Trump, however, has used racist insults as a way of challenging her contention.
In one tweet, Trump referred to Native Americans as “being of Indian heritage,” a term often considered pejorative.
Warren on Monday released results from a DNA test that she said showed “strong evidence” she has Cherokee heritage from an ancestor “six to 10 generations ago.” The Cherokee Nation, in response, called the test “inappropriate and wrong,” saying that “a DNA test is useless to determine tribal citizenship.”
“Even they don’t want her,” Trump said in response to the Cherokee Nation’s statement.
Earlier this year, Trump challenged Warren to take the DNA test, and pledged to donate $1 million to charity if it confirmed her claim.
“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,” the president said at a July campaign rally.
“I’m going to get one of those little kits, and in the middle of the debate, when she proclaims that she’s of Indian heritage because her mother says she has high cheekbones, we will take that little kit,” the president said. “But we have to do it gently because we’re in the Me Too generation, so we have to be very gentle.”
Warren on Monday asked Trump to donate the $1 million to the National Indigenous Women’s Resource Center, a nonprofit that seeks to protect Native American women from violence.
Trump answered the request by falsely denying that he ever made such a pledge.
Later, he offered to make the donation “only... if I can test her personally.”