It was a bad time for Sen. Cory Gardner to be caught in an elevator with a reporter. Donald Trump had just referred to Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts as “Pocahontas” — again — and the Republican freshman from Colorado was struggling to figure out how to respond.
“I think people need to be treated with respect, and that’s what we’ve demanded from everyone,” he offered.
But was it racist?
Gardner clammed up. He politely referred further questions to his press secretary.
So it went for Republicans on Capitol Hill on Friday, forced to contend with yet another provocative comment by their presumptive presidential nominee — clambering for safety as Trump launched another boundary-pushing attack.
“Get used to it,” said Republican pollster Whit Ayres, a Trump critic. “This is your life for the next five months.”
The furor over Trump’s assaults on the impartiality of a Latino judge had just begun to subside when he lobbed two tweets Friday morning responding to Warren, who had lambasted him as a “thin-skinned, racist bully” in a speech the previous evening.
“Pocahontas is at it again!” Trump
wrote in one. “Goofy Elizabeth Warren, one of the least productive U.S. Senators, has a nasty mouth.”
“No, seriously — Delete your account,” Warren tweeted back. One of the senator’s supporters secured Pocahontas.com and redirected it to Warren’s campaign site.
The real estate developer has repeatedly invoked the 17th-century Native American figure to refer to Warren, an allusion to controversy about her heritage. The senator
has said she grew up amid family stories about her Cherokee lineage, but that account has not been proved.
Trump began going after Warren’s claimed ancestry earlier this year, responding to the senator’s repeated slams of him as a “loser” and a bully. “Who’s that, the Indian?” he
said at a March news conference when asked about Warren. “You mean the Indian?”
Romney told CNN on Friday that he was worried Trump’s language could lead to “trickle-down racism” in the country.
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