And just like that, the 2020 presidential campaign kicked off. Elizabeth “Honest Injun” Warren didn’t even wait for the 2019 ball to drop in Times Square before announcing her bid for the White House. We’d guess that most Americans are beyond tired of the relentless campaign cycle, making Warren’s announcement — less than two months after the 2018 midterms — worthy of about 300 million eye rolls, sighs, curses, or other expressions of political exhaustion.

Nevertheless, she persisted, so we’ll offer some brief observations.

Being the first big name to launch her campaign does not make Warren the frontrunner. Like a few of the other Democrat presidential hopefuls, Warren will be in her 70s by Election Day 2020, and there are younger alternatives — one of whom is also a woman and an actual minority.

Which brings us to the real problem with Warren: She routinely pretends she’s something she’s not. We’re not just talking about her hilariously inept attempts to prove some imagined Native American heritage — a lie she used to advance her academic career before adapting it for political gain. In fact, as we predicted more than once, she used her ancestry claim to seed her presidential aspirations, though it was conspicuously absent from her exploratory committee launch video.

Far more consequentially for the nation, Warren pretends she’s for the little guy and the middle class. Her announcement was replete with references to how her political career was inspired by fighting Wall Street fat cats after the 2008 financial collapse. She claims to stand for the middle class and minorities against systemic oppression from the racist and the rich. That too is a lie, not because those things don’t ever happen but because “social justice” is merely Marxism repackaged. Warren and her fellow Democratic Socialists used the financial crisis — itself created by Democrat policies — to double down on bigger government and fatter cats. In other words, the very policies she claims help the middle class actually harm most Americans. Indeed, as she says, “America’s middle class is under attack.” By Democrats.

But never mind that; Warren and probably a dozen other Democrats are hoping that those lies, mixed with a healthy dose of fake news and Trump Derangement Syndrome, will propel them to victory in 2020.