My face spends so much time in my palms I’m forgetting what the sky looks like, and I long for the days when we could mock a politician for months for misspelling “potato.”
Trump was holding a ceremony today to honor Native American Code Talkers, whose language constituted a “code” enemies could not break in WW II, when his mind wandered from the Indians in the room to the only other Indian he knows of.
″You were here long before any of us were here,” Trump said to the veterans. “Although we have a representative in Congress who they say was here a long time ago. They call her Pocahontas.”
By “they,” Trump means “I,” by “representative” he means “senator,” and by “Pocahontas” he means Elizabeth Warren. Code talkers indeed.
Sarah Huckabee Sanders — and isn’t she a lump off the old clod? — batted away suggestions that this was inappropriate and offensive by attacking Warren for lying about her heritage to advance her career. The Atlantic found that particular charge untrue back in 2012, when Warren’s Native American heritage, or lack thereof, was a big issue in her race against Scott Brown. Nothing has ever emerged to indicate otherwise, yet Trump, ever the pro wrestling heel at heart, keeps the smear alive by adding a smear of his own. Keep the storyline alive; you never know when you might need it.
The sad thing is that it works. That five-year-old Atlantic story went to No. 3 on the magazine’s trending list today. It’s a pretty long way down before you learn that, while Warren listed herself as a minority in professional publications and societies, she did not use it on applications for college or jobs. She always said Cherokee ancestry was family oral history, and I see no reason to disbelieve her. Madeleine Albright found out she was Jewish from the press.
The lesson in all this is that Trump could fuck up a one-car funeral, which I suspect his own will be. Please, please, please do not ever let him honor any Holocaust survivors. He’ll tell them they look well-fed.