GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump likes to skewer his opponents with insulting nicknames — a la Sleepy Joe Biden, Lyin’ Ted Cruz, Lil’ Marco Rubio. The former President also has a history of mispronouncing the names of his female political opponents, including Vice President Kamala Harris and his closest competitor in the Republican primaries, former Governor Nikki Haley.
(Trump referred to Haley as Nambra, instead of her birth name Nimarata, and falsely claimed she was not eligible to run for president as her parents were not U.S. citizens when she was born.)
In 2017, at an event honoring Native American veterans at the White House, then-President Trump referred to U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) as “Pocahontas” — a reference to the fact that Warren had for decades publicly identified herself as partly Native American.
[Note: In 2019, Warren released DNA test results indicating that she has a Native American ancestor six to 10 generations back, and apologized to the Cherokee Nation for identifying herself as a Native American.]
After the Native American veterans event at the White House, the National Congress of American Indians criticized Trump’s remarks and said: “We regret that the president’s use of the name Pocahontas as a slur to insult a political adversary is overshadowing the true purpose of today’s White House ceremony.”
Others, including conservative writer Michael Graham who coined the term faux-cahontas for Warren, don’t think Trump’s use of the word was a racist slur. Knocking Trump’s style but defending him from a racist charge, Graham wrote in 2017 that “Trump’s critics are wrong to claim Trump was being racist by dropping the ‘P’ word. Rude? Insulting to his guests? Totally inappropriate? Absolutely.”
But not racist, Graham insists, charging that the “nicknames Warren’s been given by the Right aren’t slurs against Native Americans. They’re attacks on Warren and her play at identity politics.”
Either way, the assignation that the Right has made cling to Warren is used against her whenever she makes a stand, on the premise that because she was disingenuous about her ancestry she is also disingenuous about everything else. For some critics, it’s enough to discredit Warren even on issues where she has demonstrated expertise.
After Democratic nominee Harris publicly promoted a federal ban on price-gouging in the food and grocery industries, Warren showed her support on social media and wrote: “Massive food corporations have kept prices up nationwide to exploit consumers and make a profit. It’s time to bring them down.”
Faux-cohontas is back! https://t.co/zxzxwR2WJX
— Laura Ingraham (@IngrahamAngle) August 21, 2024
Conservative FOX News political pundit Laura Ingraham replied to the post by writing: “Faux-cohontas is back!”
Ingraham said it’s a “lie” that food companies are price gouging, and argued that “Their margins are shrinking or flat bc of increased energy costs, labor costs, ins. costs. Excessive fed. borrowing, printing and spending started the mess.”
(Note: Those costs are up, but so are profits at most of the major chains and more than Harris and Warren have called for a look at the books.)