Hours after Democratic Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren officially announced her candidacy on Saturday in Lawrence, Massachusetts, the US President recalled her previous controversial claims of Native American ancestry.
Trump referred to Warren as Pocahontas, asking her if she was going to run as the first Native American presidential candidate.
The tweet was a reference to Warren’s claims that she was of Native American descent, which date back to her 2012 victory over then-Republican Sen. Scott Brown of Massachusetts. In October 2018, she underwent a DNA test to prove her ethnicity, yet this enraged some tribal leaders of the Cherokee Nation. The senator apologised and explained that her statements had been based on her own understanding of her family history.
"I am not a person of color; I am not a citizen of a tribe," she said. "Tribal citizenship is very different than ancestry. Tribes and only tribes determine tribal citizenship."
The President also wrote, “see you on the campaign TRAIL” at the end of his tweet, specifically capitalizing the last word. While Trump is known for his habit of capitalizing words in his tweets to emphasize their importance, the word “trail” was interpreted by the media as a reference to the "Trail of Tears", the name given to the forced relocation of Native American tribes that led to the death of as many as 8,000 Cherokee between 1830 and 1850, the Hill reported.
Just before Warren’s announcement, Trump’s 2020 campaign manager Brad Parscale issued a statement saying that Warren “has already been exposed as a fraud by the Native Americans she impersonated and disrespected to advance her professional career, and the people of Massachusetts she deceived to get elected.”
“The American people will reject her dishonest campaign and socialist ideas like the Green New Deal, that will raise taxes, kill jobs and crush America's middle-class. Only under President Trump's leadership will America continue to grow safer, secure and more prosperous,” the statement reads.
