The president has a long history of offensive comments about Native Americans. (Trump loves using captive audiences who can’t object to his offensive comments.)Īlthough the point of this particular insult may not be to offend Native Americans, it’s no surprise that Trump is indifferent to their complaints.
The men did not object, but they were hardly in a position to do so: They are veterans being honored by the commander in chief, and given that they are also seeking support for a code-talker museum, they have little incentive to criticize him. According to a pool reporter, Trump’s comment was met with silence in the room. The president continues to use the nickname at this point not because he is ignorant of the offense he is causing but because he seeks to cause offense. The nickname insults the original Pocahontas, a tragic figure who was kidnapped, and then later traveled to England with her husband John Rolfe, where she died it conflates Pocahontas’s Powhatan heritage with other groups and it is frequently used to mock Native Americans. While he means to belittle Warren, they feel that it is also belittling to them. Native American groups have long criticized Trump for calling the senator Pocahontas. And he used the ceremony to snipe at a political rival, delivering a personal insult while using an offensive nickname. He did so while standing in front of a portrait of Jackson, infamous for driving Native Americans out of the southeastern United States. During an event honoring a specific group of Native American veterans of the Second World War, Trump suddenly veered into congratulating the men as exemplars of the all Native American peoples since time immemorial. That is, of course, Trump’s favorite nickname for Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, who described herself as part Cherokee earlier in her career. Then he added: “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.
Pocahontas trump code#
Only after mounting pressure during his 2016 campaign did Trump disavow the claims.“I just want to thank you because you’re very, very special people,” Trump said, after a characteristically vague and nearly meaningless description of the role played by the men, who during World War II served in the Marines, using native languages as a code that the Japanese couldn’t break. He was a high-profile force behind the so-called birther movement the lie that questioned whether President Barack Obama, the nations first Black president, was eligible to serve. Trump built his political career on questioning a political opponents legitimacy.
The question is not even considered complex, according to lawyers who have reviewed her circumstances. Harris, who was tapped this week by Joe Biden to serve as his running mate on the Democratic ticket, was born in Oakland, California, and is eligible to be president under the constitutional requirements. The president said he considered the rumors very serious. Speaking from the White House, Trump told reporters he had heard rumors that Harris, a Black woman and US-born citizen whose parents were immigrants, does not meet the requirement to serve in the White House. On Thursday, Trump gave credence to a false and racist conspiracy about Harris' eligibility to be vice president, fueling an online misinformation campaign that parallels the one he used to power his rise into politics. Trump was also asked if he had an issue with a woman of colour being in the presidential race, to which he said: "None whatsoever." He said he did not see Harris as a threat at all. There was nobody - including Pocahontas - nobody treated Biden so badly as Kamala," he said. And I watched, you know, pretty good parts of them, and she treated Biden worse than anybody else, by far. They were very boring, but they were debates nevertheless. The President replied that he had not been blunt, and that Harris had treated Joe Biden - his Democratic adversary for the November elections - worse than anyone else.