Donald Trump has long deployed the name “Pocahontas” to diminish Elizabeth Warren as an affirmative-action grifter who exaggerated her Native American heritage to climb to the top of her profession. For the white-grievance set, it’s a powerful piece of rhetoric, designed to mock Warren and her fellows who think they know better. Predictably, the elites routinely side with Warren in this juvenile war of words. Civility!

But let us put aside niceties for a moment and state the obvious: the questions over Warren’s Native American heritage are legitimate, of her own making, and have the potential to torpedo her presidential aspirations in 2020. Many Democrats, and some in the press, have dismissed the debate over Warren’s ancestry as somehow out-of-bounds, akin to Trump’s ridiculous quest to find Barack Obama’s “missing” birth certificate. Warren’s case is not the same at all.

The Obama birther charade was a fabrication rooted in nothing but mouth-breathing racism. But the Warren story can be traced back more than 30 years. Beginning in 1986, she listed herself as a minority in a national directory of law professors for nearly a decade while teaching at the University of Texas and University of Pennsylvania. She once contributed to a Native American cookbook as “Elizabeth Warren, Cherokee.” She told Harvard Law School that she was Native American, and was identified that way in Harvard records without objection. It’s illogical to suggest that these claims were the reason she was able to climb to the pinnacle of American public life, but they do come off as a little weird, worthy of further inspection and kitchen-table conversation. And the whole story is perfect chum for Trump.

At a time when race and identity are twisting up our politics, Warren knows her personal history is a vulnerability as much as the president does. That’s precisely why the Massachusetts senator released the glossy video addressing her family’s background, to arm her supporters with some talking points and make clear that she won’t take Trump’s punches lying down. Warren may be a bespectacled Harvard professor, but anyone watching her career knows she rarely shies away from a fight. The Bernie bros will surely disagree, but over the years, Warren has done more than most any Democrat to break down her party’s orthodoxy on corporate power. She’s as tenacious as anyone in the U.S. Senate and any Democrat mulling a challenge to Trump.

“With that video, you see someone who is tough, someone who is willing to be emotional and show herself, and show that there is a human impact from the attacks Trump makes,” said Jennifer Palmieri, a former senior adviser to President Obama and Hillary Clinton. “It was meant to show, ‘I’m going to take you on.’ Whether or not it was a great idea, well . . . we will see.”

In the clip, Warren is seen visiting her ancestral home of Oklahoma, showcasing her Republican roots, and interviewing several relatives to validate a now-famous piece of family lore: that her great-great-great-grandmother was part Native American. Warren revealed the results of a Stanford DNA analysis showing that she likely had a Native American ancestor between 6 and 10 generations back. The data point was in turn presented to Trump as proof of her biographical claims, packaged into a big media rollout for Monday. All this hard political work—the DNA test, the fancy video, the big Boston Globe piece, the Google search ads, the splash page, the finely tuned messaging—and how did Trump respond to this ruthless counter-offensive? Exactly as you’d expect. He laughed at her and moved along.