Donald Trump called Elizabeth Warren "Pocahontas,” because of course he did

In a Friday interview with New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, Donald Trump mocked Elizabeth Warren by referring to her as "Pocahontas."

In Dowd's weekend column describing the interview, she wrote:

When I asked if [Trump] had been chided by any Republicans for his Twitter feud with Elizabeth Warren, he replied, "You mean Pocahontas?" So much for reining it in.

Trump said something similar in March after Warren called him a "loser" and a reporter asked him about the comments: "You mean the Indian?" Trump said of Warren.

What did Trump's comment refer to?

Trump's racially charged insult refers to a controversy Warren faced over her ancestry during her 2012 Senate campaign.

Warren says she grew up being told that she had Cherokee heritage. "Everyone on our mother’s side — aunts, uncles, and grandparents — talked openly about their Native American ancestry," she wrote in her 2014 book, A Fighting Chance. "My brothers and I grew up on stories about our grandfather building one-room schoolhouses and about our grandparents’ courtship and their early lives together in Indian Territory."

This became an issue during her campaign when reports emerged that Harvard had once touted her Native American heritage as proof of its faculty's diversity. Warren, however, couldn't produce definitive proof of her Cherokee ancestry, and neither could genealogists.

This led to speculation that Warren had been a fake "diversity hire," or that she had abused the affirmative-action system to gain an advantage over other candidates.

However, as Garance Franke-Ruta reported for the Atlantic in 2012, there's no evidence that Warren ever used claims of Native American ancestry to help her get a job.

While Warren was listed as a minority in the Association of American Law Schools Directory of Faculty, she had declined to apply as a minority to Rutgers Law School, and had listed herself as "white" while teaching at the University of Texas. The head of the committee that recruited Warren to Harvard also said he had no memory of her Native American heritage ever coming up, and the 1995 Harvard Crimson article reporting on her tenure made no mention of it.

It's true, Franke-Ruta learned, that Warren wouldn't meet the criteria to officially qualify as Cherokee. She only claimed to be 1/32 Cherokee, and she'd need to be at least 1/16. She also doesn't have a known direct ancestor on the Dawes Rolls, which is a strict requirement for membership in the Cherokee Nation.

But just because Warren can't find hard evidence of Native American heritage doesn't mean she doesn't have any, Franke-Ruta said.

And even if she doesn't, that wouldn't make her a liar. Hazy oral histories about Native heritage are especially common in Oklahoma, where Warren grew up, and she would have no particular reason to disbelieve the stories she was told growing up.

Franke-Ruta notes that the shaky reliability of oral history has confounded other public figures — like Madeleine Albright, who didn't know until reporters discovered it that her own parents had escaped the Holocaust, or Marco Rubio, who mistakenly believed that he was the "son of exiles" from Castro's Cuba when his parents actually came over before Castro took power.

What does it mean for Trump, specifically, to bring this up?

As Dowd alluded to, it appears to be an escalation of a Twitter feud Trump has been having with Warren over the past week.

Warren has increasingly been playing the role of anti-Trump attack dog, with scorching Facebook posts about Trump's bigoted tactics and late-night interviews calling him a "business loser."

Trump, in response, is resorting to familiar tactics — launching personal attacks and giving his opponents demeaning nicknames (like "Little Marco" or "Lyin' Ted").

It is, of course, more than a little racist to mockingly conflate Native American identity with "Pocahontas."

"Trump’s inability to discern the difference between Sen. Warren and Pocahontas is no accident," Cherokee Nation citizen Mary Kathryn Nagle told MSNBC's Adam Howard on Monday. "Instead, his attack on her native identity reflects a dominant American culture that has made every effort to diminish native women to nothing other than a fantastical, oversexualized, Disney character."

That kind of insensitivity is par for the course for Trump, as is questioning the ancestry of his political opponents. Trump, after all, rose to political prominence by promoting "birther" conspiracy theories about Obama's heritage.

It's also interesting that Trump, who rails against "political correctness," would suggest that Warren took advantage of the affirmative action system. Many conservatives oppose affirmative action because they believe it gives unfair advantages to undeserving minorities and puts more-qualified white people at a disadvantage.

Trump has been somewhat ambivalent on affirmative action lately. "I'm fine with it, but we have it, it's there," Trump said on Fox News Sunday in October. "But it's coming to a time when maybe we don't need it."

In 1989, though, he railed against the "tremendous advantage" that "a well-educated black" has in the job market. And he recently claimed that women have it easier than men in today's culture because men are "petrified to speak to women anymore."

Clearly, though, Trump isn't scared to say much of anything to women — no matter how offensive or demeaning his words may be.

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