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Trump’s ‘Pocahontas’ attack leaves fellow Republicans squirming




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.

Presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump took aim at Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) at a rally in Richmond, Va., on June 10. He called Warren “Pocahontas,” a jab at her claim that she is of Native American descent.

“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?”

His swipes at her have intensified as the senator has emerged as one of his fiercest adversaries. On Thursday, she endorsed presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, and the two women met privately on Friday.

The latest gibes come amid a weeks-long uproar over Trump’s repeated criticism of U.S. District Judge Gonzalo Curiel as biased and unfair because of his Mexican heritage. The claim drew a storm of denunciation, including a strong rebuke from House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.), who called it “the textbook definition of a racist comment.”

By comparison, the response to the Pocahontas remarks have been mixed and in many cases muted — a sign of how jittery GOP leaders are still trying to find their comfort level with his rhetoric.

“Oh, I think it’s done in good humor,” said Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.), who heads the National Republican Senatorial Committee, the organization charged with electing Republican senators in 2016.

Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), normally a ferocious Trump foe, was similarly unfazed. It’s pretty funny, I thought,” Graham said. “I think what he said about the judge was racist. When you’re talking about a politician, you got to be able to take a joke. … If this bothers you, you need to get out of politics.”

But others were alarmed.

“He needs to quit using language like that,” said Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla.), a member of the Chickasaw tribe and one of two Native Americans in the House. “It’s pejorative , and you know, there’s plenty of things that he can disagree with Elizabeth Warren over, this is not something that should, in my opinion, ever enter the conversation. … It’s neither appropriate personally toward her, and frankly, it offends a much larger group of people. So, I wish he would avoid that.”

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who is up for reelection in a state with one of the highest proportions of Native Americans in the country, also chastised Trump.

“I just don’t engage in personal insults — that is a personal insult,” he said.

The “Pocahontas” line spurred chatter at former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney’s ideas summit Friday in Park City, Utah, where some attendees said they were aghast.

Stuart Stevens — the chief strategist on Romney’s 2012 presidential bid, who, like Romney, has vowed not to vote for Trump — said the candidate’s use of “Pocahontas” to attack Warren was both racist and inappropriate.

“If you said this in a sixth-grade class, the teacher would tell you, ‘Don’t say this,’ ” Stevens said.

“This is a sick guy, and Americans are not longing for a president who’s going to go out and use ethnic slurs against people,” he said. “It’s amusing in the same way telling dirty jokes around a frat house can get laughs, but most people grow out of that. It’s childish.”



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