Why did Donald Trump call Elizabeth Warren Pocahontas during his 90-minute address to Congress?

Get the Full StoryDonald Trump takes issue with absolutely everyone who provides even the barest hint of pushback. His old allies, acquaintances, and even friends have found themselves in the red zone after daring to speak ill of the president, and Trump hasn t grown up a bit since his first term. This is a man who threw his own vice president under the bus when, in 2020, Mike Pence refused to break the law and uphold Trump s stolen election lie. The man who belittles and mocks his own allies Marco Rubio got a face-full at his March 2025 Congressional address so its little wonder he s unflinching in his attacks on opponents like Elizabeth Warren. Warren has been anti-elite since the start, falling into a similar camp as the far more mainstream Bernie Sanders. She s spent her career pushing for better banking regulations, consumer protections, and a more equitable economy. She s the exact last person a billionaire like Trump would ever cozy up to, and he s spent the last near-decade doing the exact opposite. Trump spent his first term slinging around crappy, grade-school nicknames like candy, and he returned to a favorite for Elizabeth Warren during his Congressional address. Pocahontas has become a tired line among Republican figures, one which they frequently revive to mock Warren, and you d think it would ve lost nearly all its teeth over the years. It feels like a pitiful retread of 2016, when Trump dredged it up, but he still left people with questions. Why do Republicans call Elizabeth Warren Pocahontas? Donald Trump calls out Senator Elizabeth Warren during his address to Congress pic.twitter.com B6xunFQ7XB Deadline DEADLINE March 5, 2025 The Pocahontas nickname has followed Warren for years, and it s largely kept alive by the petulant pinecone occupying the Oval Office. He claims full credit for the mocking title which references easily the best-known Native American figure in history thanks, Disney and Trump whips it out whenever his pride takes a hit. None of which is to say that Warren is not deserving of pushback, but it would be nice if the president of the United States could conjure more maturity than a fourth grade bully. Pocahontas, for the three people in the back who just woke up out of a coma, was a Pamunkey woman who lived in the late 1500s, and who was captured by colonists as a teenager and later taken to England, where she married, bore a son, and died at age 21. For many Native American woman in particular, Pocahontas has come to represent generations of Indigenous women and girls commodified, sexualized, and taken from their communities, never to return. She s also a Disney princess, thanks to 1995 s Pocahontas, and has become a broadly-beloved but often misrepresented semi-historical figure. Trump calls Warren Pocahontas as a mocking way to call out the Democrat s claim of Indigenous identity. For decades, Warren claimed Native American ancestry, even saying her heritage has been part of my story, I guess, since the day I was born. She identified herself as Cherokee for years, and listed herself as American Indian on several profiles, tests, and professional publications, which first came under fire by Republicans in 2012, during her run for Senate. Trump began taunting Warren with the name in 2016, on the campaign trail, after she emerged as one of his most outspoken critics. Used by Trump as a snarky, caricature-haunted shorthand, Pocahontas drew jeering war whoops from his rally crowds, and began to take on the additional implications of a racial slur. Chuck Hoskin, now Principal Chief of the Cherokee Nation, observed at the time, She doesn t deserve it. And I think it s a term that he means in a derisive way. Is Elizabeth Warren Cherokee? Unfortunately, there is no evidence to substantiate Warren s Cherokee claim. The Cherokee are a densely interconnected network of closely-related extended families, and tribal citizenship in any of its three federally-recognized branches is based strictly on blood relation, verified through official rolls. These extensive records of Cherokee people were kept by the U.S. government and by Cherokees themselves before, during, and after the Trail of Tears, initiated by President Andrew Jackson s Indian Removal Act of 1830, which force-marched thousands of Cherokees from their homelands in Southern Appalachia, to present-day Oklahoma. An estimated 25 of those who made the journey, didn t survive it. The inherited trauma of removal still reverberates through Cherokee people. Warren surely meant no harm by mistakenly claiming Cherokee ancestry. A born Oklahoman, the senator s Okie roots date back to at least her great-grandparents, so it s likely the Warren family legend of Cherokee heritage began generations ago, and was repeated to her. In Oklahoma and throughout the South, it became fashionable starting in the 1860s for white families to claim a Cherokee princess great grandmother, in part to justify and romanticize an imagined connection to the Southland, in contrast to the invading Union army from the North. This Confederate-coded Cherokee fairy tale has become so prevalent that there are probably twice as many Americans claiming Cherokee heritage than there are actual Cherokees. While Warren s self-identification was probably an honest mistake, it promotes a romantic and exotic fiction made up by colonizers much like Disney s Pocahontas that dehumanizes and whitewashes actual Indigenous people. And it s an aggravatingly common trope among celebs. Notably, Pretendian celebrities who have also falsely or mistakenly claimed Cherokee ancestry include Johnny Depp, Blake Lively in a L Oreal commercial, no less , Quentin Tarantino, Ian Ousley, and Kelsey Asbille. Under pressure by Trump, who challenged Warren to take a DNA test, Warren capitulated in 2018. Her DNA test irritated many Native Americans; firstly, Trump is no valid arbiter of Native status, and secondly, genetic testing is not a valid criteria anyway. In any case, results showed very little connection back to America s original peoples, with trace DNA suggesting a possible Native ancestor between six and 10 generations ago. And while Warren may boast some small small genetic links to Native Americans, there is no DNA test delineating particular Indigenous tribes, much less proving she s Cherokee. Warren s Native ancestor, if any, could have been Indigenous to anywhere from northern Canada, to the tip of Tierra del Fuego. As for Trump, he s hauled out the Pocahontas label at every opportunity, maybe most egregiously at a 2017 White House event honoring the surviving Navajo Code Talkers who served in World War Two. You were here long before any of us were here, Trump intoned, adding, we have a representative in Congress who they say was here a long time ago. They call her Pocahontas. Natives took notice. National Congress of American Indians President Jefferson Keel, a Chickasaw Vietnam veteran, condemned Trump s use of the name Pocahontas as a slur to insult a political adversary. He pointed out, Native people serve in the Armed Forces at a higher rate than any other group in the country, and have served in every war in this nation s history, and we honor the contributions of Pocahontas, a hero to her people, the Pamunkey Indian Tribe in Virginia, who reached across uncertain boundaries and brought people together. Once again, we call upon the President to refrain from using her name in a way that denigrates her legacy. That call for decency was made nearly a decade ago. But Trump, grudge-nursing admirer of Andrew Jackson, and a shambling, diapered slinger of slurs, shows no sign of getting new material.

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