Elizabeth Warren Gets Savagely Trolled By Her Own Tribesmen
Late Monday afternoon, the Elizabeth Warren for Indian campaign experienced a notable setback as Chuck Hoskins Jr., Secretary of State for the Cherokee Nation, released a press statement to mock the candidate’s recent attempt to prove her Indian heritage by means of a DNA test. “A DNA test is useless to determine tribal citizenship,” Hoskins wrote. “Senator Warren is undermining tribal interests with her continued claims of tribal heritage.”
The candidate was not immediately available for comment, but a campaign staffer, speaking on condition of anonymity, was quoted as saying “I’m not even sure we have the right kind of Indian here. We’re going for feathers, not dots. So if this is some weird south Asian thing, Mr. Hoskins has it wrong. What kind of name is that anyway? If it was, like, Chuck Soars With the Eagle, or something, we would be all ears, but I guess I am just confused. I mean, Secretary of State for an Indian tribe? What the fuck, even, is this?”
Campaign volunteers claim that morale has suffered significantly as a result of Mr. Hoskin’s statement, down from a notable high this morning when Warren produced the DNA test proving definitively or so that the candidate had anywhere between 1.6% to 0.00098% of sweet, sweet Injun blood. With momentum now grinding to a halt, senior campaign officials worry about attrition, though outside analysts project staff losses to be minimal, noting that there simply aren’t lucrative opportunities for people who have wasted so much time needlessly trying to prove that someone is something they are not.
True believers of the candidate and the campaign itself soldier on, however, suggesting that it isn’t necessarily about the issue itself — an issue that one strategist described as “what the hell are we even talking about?” — but about raising Warren’s national profile and giving Republican President Donald Trump the chance to say something stupid and racist. And while some have suggested that talk like this is nothing more than managing expectations from a failing campaign, others in the Democratic establishment have expressed concern for how campaign rhetoric has changed the narrative for how Warren’s ancestry is to be understood and why it matters. “Wait. I thought we were saying that Warren didn’t claim Indian heritage,” said one official working in the DNC. “Or that it didn’t matter because she didn’t get any benefit from that. So am I still supposed to be mad when Trump does his ‘Pocahontas’ thing or are we just owning it now?”
As for Trump’s September promise to pay a million dollars to the charity of Warren’s choice should she produce DNA evidence that proves she has Native American ancestry, odds makers are characterizing the chances as unlikely. “If this unfolds the way it looks like it will unfold,” an executive at an online political website cautioned, “two things will happen that have never happened before. First, Trump will leave a bill unpaid. Second, the Democrats will have been goaded into doing something ridiculously stupid as a means of calling a Republican bluff. The Republicans will then ruthlessly mock the Democrats for having done something ridiculously stupid.”