Why Did Trump Make the 'Pocahontas' Joke About Elizabeth Warren?

The president’s crack Monday afternoon about “Pocahontas”—aka Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren—was classic Donald Trump.

The setting was inappropropriate: Trump was commemorating the Navajo Code Talkers in a ceremony in the Oval Office and was joined by three of the 13 surviving World War II veterans. The comment was immaterial to the event: “You were here long before any of us were here, although we have a representative in Congress who, they say, was here a long time ago,” Trump told the honorees. “They call her ‘Pocahontas.’” The point was—well, there was no point.

In her briefing several minutes later, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders was asked why Trump would say something many Native Americans might find offensive. “I think what most people find offensive is Senator Warren lying about her heritage to advance her career,” Sanders responded.

She has a point here: Warren did, in fact, misrepresent her ancestry a few times during her career as an academic, continuing during her 2012 race to stand by her unsubstantiated claim she had Cherokee heritage. The assertion she did this to “advance her career” is dubious, as is the assumption what “most people find offensive” is Warren’s claim, not Trump’s gauche and insensitive comment in the presence of elderly Native American war heroes.

What should concern the White House (beyond the president’s cringe-inducing utterances) is that his name-calling distracts from a potential substantive policy victory—namely the wresting away control from liberals the leadership of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Before she was a senator, Warren was the driving force behind the creation of the CFPB in the Dodd-Frank financial services bill of 2010. The Bureau’s unprecedented independence from Congress and trademark regulatory overreach has been a frustration for Republicans, and the departure of the Obama-appointed Richard Cordray gave President Trump an opportunity to make a course correction—and as Shannen Coffin and others have argued effectively, there are justifiable reasons for Trump to name an acting director of his own choosing.