TRUMP CALLS WARREN‘ POCAHONTAS’ AT EVENT WITH NAVAJO CODE TALKERS
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump returned to his own kind of code talking Monday by deriding Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren as “Pocahontas” at a White House event honoring Native American war heroes.
“You were here long before any of us were here,” Trump said as he honored three Navajo code talkers from World War II. And then he added, without naming Warren: “We have a representative in Congress who they say was here a long time ago. They call her Pocahontas. But you know what, I like you.”
In fact, Trump deployed that nickname for the Massachusetts senator repeatedly during the 2016 presidential campaign.
Trump made the comment as he stood near a portrait of President Andrew Jackson, which he hung in the Oval Office in January. But Jackson also is known for signing the Indian Removal Act of 1830, in which the Cherokee Nation was removed from its lands in what is now known as the “trail of tears.”
The Navajo Nation suggested Trump’s remark Monday was an example of “cultural insensitivity” and resolved to stay out of the “ongoing feud between the senator and President Trump.”
White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders, asked about criticism of Trump’s remarks, said a racial slur “was certainly not the president’s intent.”
“It is deeply unfortunate that the president of the United States cannot even make it through a ceremony honoring these heroes without having to throw out a racial slur,” Warren said in an interview on MSNBC.
Questions about Warren’s heritage emerged during her 2012 Senate race, when directories from the Association of American Law Schools from 1986 to 1995 surfaced that put Warren on the association’s list of “minority law teachers.” Warren said she listed herself with Native American heritage because she hoped to meet people with similar roots.
In a 2012 interview with The Associated Press, Warren said she and her brothers were told of their heritage by their parents, the late Don and Pauline Herring.