Rep. Jamie Raskin has accused Donald Trump of using a “racial and ethnic slur” against Senator Elizabeth Warren.
During his address to Congress, Trump referred to Warren as “Pocahontas,” a long-running joke about how she falsely claimed to have Native American ancestry.
In an interview with MSNBC’s Velshi, Raskin said that it was Trump who deserved to be censured rather than Texas Rep. Al Green, who heckled the president during his address and was consequently removed from the chamber.
He complained:
Al Green was making a very strong, valid, substantive point, which is there is no mandate to destroy Medicaid. The vast majority of Democrats rejected the idea of censuring him.
And really, if we were censuring anybody, it should have been Donald Trump, who I don’t think had been back to our chamber since he incited a violent insurrection against us.
And then he used his pulpit in order to call a sitting member of the United States Senate Pocahontas.
So I think a racial and ethnic slur from the president was a far greater insult to the dignity and decorum of our chamber.
Watch the clip below:
Pocahontas was a Native American woman from the Powhatan tribe who helped English settlers at Jamestown.
She is famous for allegedly saving Captain John Smith and later marrying John Rolfe, which helped bring peace between her people and the English.
Her name was immortalized in the 1995 Disney feature film Pocahontas, which is loosely based on her life.
The truth behind Elizabeth Warren’s supposed ancestry emerged in 2018 when she was preparing to run for president.
Amid growing skepticism about her claims, she was forced to release a DNA test that confirmed she was 0.0009765625%.
This percentage is equivalent to around 1 in 1024, which amounts to less Native American DNA than the average American citizen.
“I’ve put it all out there, it’s there for anyone to see,” she eventually admitted.
“Tribal citizenship is very different than ancestry,” she continued. “Tribes and only tribes determine tribal citizenship.”
