Caricature by DonkeyHotey flic.kr/p/Ct4G4K https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

Love him or hate him, you have to admit that Donald Trump has a talent for finding an opponent’s sore points and needling them mercilessly. A recent target of his has been Elizabeth Warren who, since last year’s campaign, he has called Pocahontas. The nickname, which started out as Fauxcahontas, has to do with Elizabeth Warren brazenly lying about being some measurable portion American Indian due to the “cheekbones” of one of her ancestors.

The taunts have begun to have an effect. From this fundraiser, we can see that the fraud she perpetrated on her employer is hurting her image and she’s trying some very weak jujitsu to try to turn the tables and raise some money from the credulous in the meantime.

Let’s look at the various parts of this.

Yes, we learn about our family’s heritage from our family. BUT having “high cheekbones” is not only not “heritage” it is actually racist when used as an indicator of American Indian ancestry because it actually presumes “they all look alike.” In particular, there are enough pictures of Cherokees from the last century that you can see that they are no more likely to uniformly have “high cheekbones” than your typical Scot or Dane. Plus, subsequent genealogical research has shown that Warren is about as “Cherokee” as your typical Laplander.

Where Warren really goes off the rails is when she claims she never asked for or received any benefit from her lying. She and her supporters claim over and over that she never received any professional benefit from her lies. This is not true.

My favorite Elizabeth Warren story involves a cookbook. Warren, who was at that time posing as a trailblazing Cherokee, actually contributed recipes to a recipe book with the name, I kid you not, “Pow Wow Chow.” But here’s the best part of the story. She plagiarized some of the recipes. Yes indeed, her version of “pow wow chow” came directly from a famous French chef. … Warren is a bit of an academic grifter. She’s willing to fake her way to the top. When she came to Harvard Law School, she was — believe it or not — considered by some to be a “minority hire.” She listed herself as a minority on a legal directory reviewed by deans and hiring committees. The University of Pennsylvania “listed her as a minority faculty member,” and she was touted after her hire at Harvard Law School as, yes, the school’s “first woman of color.”

I can’t imagine any Republican of any Native American ancestry being able to play the cigar store Indian by offering a recipe for “Pow Wow Chow.” I also can’t imagine why a university would have any reason to tout Warren as a “person of color” or American Indian unless she had told them she was on her employment application.

Elizabeth Warren is a fraud. Period. Full stop. She’s seeing the wheels come off her 2020 campaign as her lack of ethics becomes more widely known. She’s striking back at Trump’s attacks but the one thing that we know about Trump and Twitter is that once he knows you’re upset it only gets worse.