Trump Wants To Test Warren DNA Himself, But His Feelings on It Are Hilarious
It’s rare I find myself in agreement with Mika Brzezinski’s consort, but Joe Scarborough actually managed to make something resembling a point on Twitter after Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s DNA test came out on Monday.
Warren, colloquially known as “Fauxcahontas” or “Lieawatha” (the latter being my personal favorite), proved all the critics — especially Donald Trump, who challenged her to do the test — wrong by proving she had Indian heritage. Except, this being Warren, it could be as little as 1/1024th Native American heritage.
That’s 0.09765625 percent. To put that another way, the Constitution Party — which received 0.15 percent of the vote in the 2016 presidential election — could have gotten 15.3 times more popular vote than Elizabeth Warren got Native American DNA.
Scarborough noted this might not be the best look less than a month out from a major national election. “MEMO TO DEMOCRATS: Please do your part in keeping the most divisive figures in your party out of the news for 22 days,” Scarborough wrote. “It just can’t be that hard.”
MEMO TO DEMOCRATS:
Please do your part in keeping the most divisive figures in your party out of the news for 22 days.
It just can’t be that hard.— Joe Scarborough (@JoeNBC) October 16, 2018
Given that the risible test results came on the same day that the press was all warmed up to spend the next few news cycles excoriating President Trump for out-of-context quotes from his “60 Minutes” interview, this was a fine example of Warren snatching defeat from the jaws of media victory in the name of self-aggrandizement.
And, of course, the president was more than willing to add a cheerful rejoinder to the whole display.
The president, as you might remember, said he would donate $1 million to charity if the woman he calls Pocahontas would take a DNA test. There’s some manner of controversy on whether it was contingent on her winning the 2020 Democrat nomination and then taking the test during the debate — Trump told a reporter it was — but he also said he would only accept the results if it was done personally.
He also had another stipulation for the payment, however, which he relayed to a reporter who asked him about it as he visited Georgia on Monday to survey the damage caused by Hurricane Michael.
“I’ll only do it if I can test her personally, OK?” Trump said, according to The Hill. “That will not be something I enjoy doing, either.”
There was also another caveat Trump didn’t bring up in Georgia — the fact that it actually had to show that Warren actually had Native American heritage.
“I will give you a million dollars, to your favorite charity, paid for by Trump, if you take the test and it shows you’re an Indian,” Trump said during a July 5 speech. “I have a feeling she will say ‘no.'”
The results, which Warren say are “strong evidence” she had Native American ancestry, are more likely strong evidence that she’s exited the orbit of reality.
Even the Stanford University professor who did the genetic testing concluded that “the vast majority” of Warren’s lineage was as lily-white as the crowd at a Dave Matthews Band show. However, the evidence for her Pocahontas-ness lies in “an unadmixed Native American ancestor in the pedigree at approximately 8 generations before the sample.”
By “approximately 8 generations before the sample,” that means roughly six to 10 generations earlier, according to the Boston Globe. Charitably estimating, that’s 1/64 Native American, or 1.5 percent of her genetic makeup. Ten generations would be the 0.09765625 percent number. The median would be 1/256th Native American, or roughly 0.4 percent of her genetic makeup.
In other words, at the median value she manages to beat the Constitution Party. Congratulations, I guess. In the meantime, I’m supposedly about 5 percent Jewish, which means it constitutes roughly three to 10 times more of my background than Warren’s Native American heritage. I would be laughed at — and expect to be laughed at — if I claimed to be the first Jewish person to occupy a post. Yet Warren was listed by Harvard as “the first woman with a minority background to be tenured” at the university. She was also prominently listed as a minority woman by the University of Pennsylvania, making dubious her claim that she didn’t actively inform her employers of her putative heritage.
I’m rather in disagreement with the president on this — I don’t think he needs to retest her. I don’t think that any candidate would put out a faked report this damaging to their own cause. The thing is that Sen. Warren thought the media would cover for her. They tried, but the problem is that people can read.
Hilariously, Democrats don’t think that Warren is too big of a problem. Take this response to Scarborough’s tweet, which hilariously identified him as a Republican:
Memo to Republicans. We don’t want your advice. We will try and win without resorting to cheating and suppressing the vote. Who cares about Warren right now besides the media and Republicans? She is not on the ballot.
— cmf1952 (@flynnc15) October 16, 2018
Let’s leave aside the fact that @flynnc15 might want to check on Warren’s website, which makes it plain she is on the ballot in 2018. (Of course, this being Massachusetts, she’s up by somewhere between 22 and 36 points, depending on the poll — but still, that’s very much being on the ballot.)
Forget also the fact that Joe Scarborough, who has publicly disowned the GOP and spends the weekday hours between 6 to 9 a.m. trashing any and all things conservative on the political hovel of basic cable, is about as Republican these days as Elizabeth Warren. Let’s even look away from the demagogic part about trying to “win without resorting to cheating and suppressing the vote.”
Let’s, instead, look at the part about “Who cares about Warren right now besides the media and Republicans?” Well, pretty much everyone who’s paying attention, since Warren wanted them to care. She apparently thought this report would exorcise some of the demons left over from one of the most egregious examples of identity politics that Washington has ever seen.
What, exactly, convinced her this would be the case? How did she draw the conclusion that nobody would do the math and find this utterly preposterous? Even the Cherokee Nation was decidedly unimpressed with the stunt and called Warren out. Why on earth would she think this escapade was going to help her party’s chances in the run-up to the midterms?
Joe Scarborough was right. Democrats need to convince Elizabeth Warren to stay out of the spotlight for the next few weeks. From the looks of this whole debacle, I have four words for them: Good luck with that. I’d say there’s a better chance she ends up taking the president up on his offer to be tested by him personally.
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