Sen. Warren’s DNA won’t change national debate
Here’s what matters about Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s DNA test:
❚ It’s a strong indication she’s running for president.
❚ It shows that the absurd is now the norm in American politics.
❚ It’s more evidence that Vladimir Putin doesn’t have to spend any more money trying to sow division and racial resentment in America: We’re doing a bangup job of that all by ourselves.
In case you managed to look away from the car wreck that is American politics, here are the facts:
Warren, who is frequently derided by Donald Trump as “Pocahontas,” produced a DNA test that shows strong evidence she has Native American ancestry.
She tweeted her demand for Trump to make good on his promise to pay $1 million if she could prove her heritage.
“Please send the check to the National Indigenous Women’s Resource Center,” she tweeted.
No doubt, the money could be well used by the group, which is “working to protect Native women from violence. More than half of all Native women have experienced sexual violence, and the majority of violent crimes against Native Americans are perpetrated by non-Natives,” according to Warren’s tweets.
There’s also no doubt that Warren was hoping for the high ground with this bit of performance art.
But there is no high ground in American politics today. It’s all about the mud. It’s all about reacting to Trump’s immature, insensitive and amoral behavior.
The president’s world view is perfectly illustrated Sunday on “60 Minutes.” When asked by Lesley Stahl about mocking Christine Blasey Ford at a rally, and whether he was implying she lied, he said.
“I’m not gonna get into it because we won. It doesn’t matter. We won.”
This is America’s political reality: the end justifies any means.
Or as Trump told Stahl: “I’m president – and you’re not.”
Trump became president by appealing to America’s racists.
The quintessential example is Trump’s insistence that America’s first black president was not qualified to hold office because he was not born in the United States.
It didn’t matter that Barack Obama produced his birth certificate.
It won’t matter that Elizabeth Warren offered evi-
dence that is not compatible with the radical right’s conspiracy theories about her.
She provided documentation to the
to disprove right-wing claims that she was hired at Harvard because said she had Native American ancestors. It was her credentials, not a belief about her ethnicity, that got her the job, the Globe concluded.
It won’t matter to those who make themselves feel better by insisting woman and people of color get good jobs based on affirmative action, not qualifications.
Warren had the DNA test.
But it won’t matter.
Why? Because the attacks on Warren aren’t about her any more than the birther conspiracy was about Obama.
It’s about Trump’s cynical belief that appealing to racism and misogyny is a winning formula in a country where those sins were baked in from the beginning.
A country where his presidency demonstrates the vehemence of the backlash against recent progress toward equality for women, people of color and people who are LGBTQ.
A country where an intelligent, accomplished woman is reduced to proving her ethnic background, rather than being judged on the basis of her abilities, her ideas and her accomplishments.