As she prepares for an expected run for president in 2020, it is increasingly clear that Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) will borrow from the playbook of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.).

Only without the charm of America’s favorite democratic socialist.

“Come on. They don’t like you, Pocahontas.”

More from LifeZette TV

MORE NEWS: Trump Silences Critics After Israel, 2 Arab Countries Sign Deal Declaring “the dawn of a new Middle East,”

Like Sanders, Warren has taken to knocking former President Barack Obama. Like Sanders, she is running on a hard-left platform. She even has adopted Sanders’ “millionaires and billionaires” refrain.

But Warren carries baggage that Sanders did not have. It is clear Warren will be dogged by past scandal over allegations she lied about her ethnicity to gain admission to Harvard University. The Massachusetts senator got a taste of that Friday when liberal comedian Bill Maher called her “Pocahontas” during an appearance on his HBO show.

Do you agree that protesting is acceptable, but rioting is not? Yes No Email Address (required) By completing the poll, you agree to receive emails from LifeZette and that you've read and agree to our privacy policy and legal statement Results Vote

Maher made the comment while asking Warren why President Donald Trump can pledge to eliminate the estate tax that only the super-wealthy pay and still hold on to his working-class base of support.

[lz_third_party align=center width=630 includes=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K_mggO-WPis]

“And they’re still with him,” he said. “They’re not with you. Explain to me what that disconnection is.”

Warren said she was going to “push back” against the assertion.

MORE NEWS: Conservative Vanguard, Carl Higbie: ‘Government grossly oversteps with mask mandates’

“Come on,” Maher interjected. “They don’t like you, Pocahontas.”

Warren paused but otherwise ignored the jibe, and continued with her answer, arguing that Americans agree with progressives on economic issues.

Maher’s Pocahontas remark was clearly a friendly jab, delivered with a smile. The studio audience laughed appreciatively. Still, it was a reminder that the issue is not going away — particularly if Warren does run against Trump, who has demonstrated an eagerness to go for the jugular of any opponent.

Trump, in fact, made a Pocahontas reference as recently as Friday when he spoke to the National Rifle Association’s Leadership Forum in Georgia.

From 1986 to 1995, Warren listed herself as Native American in the directory of the Association of American Law Schools. When she was a professor at Harvard University Law School in 1996, the university’s student newspaper repeated the claim.

But the Boston Herald in 2012, when Warren was running for the Senate, exposed the claim as false. She initially denied knowing why Harvard was promoting her as Native American. Later, she acknowledged that she listed herself as Native American in the law school directory in hopes of meeting other American Indians. She attributed her claims of being a Cherokee Indian to “family stories.”

Warren has made it clear that if she runs for president — for now, she officially is only promoting a book — she will do so from the Sanders end of the political spectrum. Warren said on SiriusXM’s “Alter Family Politics” program last month that she was “troubled” by Obama’s decision to accept a $400,000 speaking fee in September at a health care conference sponsored by a Wall Street firm.

In an interview published Monday by The Guardian, Warren accused Obama of using macroeconomic statistics to gloss over the fact that the “experiences of most Americans is that they are being left behind in this economy. Worse than being left behind, they’re getting kicked in the teeth.”

Sanders occasionally offered similar critiques of Obama for lapses in progressive orthodoxy. They backfired when Democrat Hillary Clinton slammed him for criticizing the most popular figure in the party during the presidential primaries. It is not hard to imagine a more mainstream Democrat doing the same thing to Warren in 2020.

At an event in Chicago on April 22, Warren displayed trademark hyperbole in trashing Republican attempts to repeal the Affordable Care Act in class warfare terms.

“A lot of people described it as, yes, knocking 24 million off health insurance and raising the cost to middle class families so that you can produce a tax break for a handful of millionaires and billionaires was not brutal enough for a big chunk of the Republican Party, and that’s why the bill failed,” she said.

[lz_related_box id=”393895″]

Such remarks are sure to sell well with Warren’s left-wing base, but it grossly mischaracterizes the internal debate over heath care within the Republican Party. The 24 million figure Warren cited comes from a Congressional Budget Office projection of how many fewer people would have health insurance under the GOP plan than under current law. Many experts have called the estimate dubious, as best.

To take just one example, it concluded that 5 million would voluntarily give up Medicaid — even though it is free to them — just because the government would no longer require them to sign up.

In addition, the reason that conservatives in the House of Representatives opposed the initial repeal effort was not they wanted to kick more people off of insurance, as Warren suggested. They opposed it because they believed it would not result in lower premiums necessary to draw more healthy people into the insurance market.

Whether the conservative critique is right or wrong is a matter of legitimate debate. But the motives that Warren ascribes to Republicans are cartoonish. And it reveals a hard-edged style that could complicate her path in 2020 should she choose to run. It is a style that was on display at the same event in Chicago in which she distorted the Republican debate over Obamacare.

“I hope they leave their bodies to science,” she joked. “I would like to cut them open.”