The New York Times’ Alexander Burns rushed to the defense of one of their 2020 presidential hopefuls on Sunday: “Elizabeth Warren Condemned Trump in Reno. He Answered in Las Vegas With a Slur.” And what horrible “slur” would this be?
The clash began Saturday morning with a populist denunciation of President Trump’s policies, delivered in Reno, Nev., by a Democratic senator who is one of his most ferocious critics.
It intensified within hours, with a sarcastic, racially incendiary jibe -- “Pocahontas” -- lobbed by Mr. Trump himself during a visit to Las Vegas.
Oh, that one. Warren, of course, got into some embarrassment by her insistence that she has Native American ancestry, including calling herself Cherokee in a local Oklahoma cookbook in 1984, despite zero evidence to back up her genealogical claim.
The current occupant of the Oval Office, sweeping into an event of his own in Las Vegas, could have easily ignored the presence of a combative critic some 400 miles away. But Mr. Trump did not, instead looking away from the ostensible subjects of his visit -- Mr. Heller and the tax cuts he helped pass -- to swing repeatedly at Ms. Warren.
Burns tried hard to shame Trump and the GOP for criticizing Warren’s phony claims.
He labeled her, not for the first time, as “Pocahontas,” a biting reference to Ms. Warren’s description of herself as having Native American ancestry. Mr. Trump and other Republicans have questioned that claim, sometimes drawing criticism from Native American tribes for their mocking language.
....
His audience laughed along and erupted in boos aimed at Ms. Warren and Ms. Rosen, seemingly encouraging Mr. Trump. The president, who drew a backlash in November for calling Ms. Warren “Pocahontas” during an event with Navajo military veterans, noted that he had faced calls to apologize for the epithet.
The Times also tried to shame Trump about the above incident back in November, evidently without effect.
Burns tried to portray Trump as picking on Warren.
....While Mr. Trump often speaks in harshly derogatory terms about his political adversaries, Ms. Warren appears to inspire distinctive scorn among his likeliest Democratic challengers for re-election. None of more than a dozen other Democrats known to be eyeing 2020 has drawn such a contemptuous label from the president, or faced as much early pressure to answer his swipes as Ms. Warren.
Burns could not let the American Indian angle go.
“How does he do that? He attacks Jacky Rosen and he throws out a racial slur at me,” Ms. Warren said, retorting that she would not be “shut up” and noting -- as long as Native American heritage was under discussion -- that the National Congress of American Indians had condemned the family separation policy.
While the Times accuses Trump of racial attacks upon the ceremony, the paper isn’t bothered by Warren’s claim of a phony Native American heritage to further her academic career at Harvard. As if that itself isn’t racially charged.
Mollie Hemingway at The Federalist wrote a good roundup of the parts of Warren’s unflattering past, one the Times has yet to tell.
Warren claimed to be Native American despite there being no evidence of that claim being true. This false information was something she didn’t claim as a student, but began putting in her professional bios for a few years when law school faculties were hungry for minority faculty. Harvard University proudly proclaimed her as a minority female on the basis of information she provided....The only way the Pocahontas insult makes sense is as a joke about Warren’s false claim of being Native American. He’s not insulting her for being a Native American, because she’s not Native American. He’s highlighting how she gave employers and others false information about her tribal status while at Harvard and elsewhere.
