For one, after his inauguration, Trump hung a portrait of the architect of the Indian Removal Act, Andrew Jackson, in the Oval Office. Jackson's legislation resulted in the removal of thousands of Native people from their homelands, including the removal of the Cherokee. This event, which became known as the Trail of Tears, resulted in 17,000 people being forcibly displaced and more than 5,000 dead. The portrait of the architect of this despicable period of American history hung directly behind the podium at which Trump and the Code Talkers stood on Monday, painfully visible to the cameras.

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And that insult came before the program even began.

During the actual program, Peter MacDonald — one of the Code Talkers — spoke about enlisting at 15 years old and being deployed to Guam and Northern China. He also told stories of his fellow veterans, Fleming Begaye (who survived multiple battles and spent a year recovering at a naval hospital) and Thomas Begay (who was on Iwo Jima and later enlisted in the Army to serve in the Korean War).

These stories mean something: They are a mark of the courage and strength of these men, as well as all the other Code Talkers, and are an important part of America’s history.

In contrast, Trump’s remarks contained little specific information about either the men he had chosen to honor, the courageousness of the Code Talkers, or the history of our people. In fact, he boiled the entire history of the indigenous people of the United States down to “(y)ou were here long before any of us were here.” He then referred to Senator Elizabeth Warren as "Pocahontas," a reference to her claims, based on family stories and genealogical research, that she had an ancestor of Native descent in the late 19th century. (The veracity of her family's stories became an issue in her 2012 Senate campaign against then-Senator Scott Brown, and has been repeatedly stoked by President Trump and Brown. In 2016, Brown called for her to take and release the results of a DNA test.)

While Pocahontas’s name is not a racial slur in and of itself, the use of her name to describe one of his political enemies is certainly meant to be an insult in his own easy-to-decrypt coded language. It makes as much logical sense as calling members of the French Resistance during World War II "Ludwig van Beethoven," who was neither French nor alive at the time.