Forget Elizabeth Warren's DNA Test. Never Forget That Melania and Trump Are Birthers

Before we get too deeply involved in the silly story about Elizabeth Warren having to prove through DNA testing that she is, indeed, Native American, let’s not forget something the right-wing media has allowed to drift out of everyday conversation. The man who kept demeaning Warren by calling her “Pocahontas” is the man who also tried to demean the nation’s first black president in a similar way.

Donald Trump is the face of the bigoted birtherism conspiracy theory that asserted that Barack Obama wasn’t born in the United States, which supposedly makes Obama a non-American. Never mind that many men such as Ted Cruz and John McCain were not born on U.S. soil, and still ran to become president of the United States. Most of the folks who believed the bigoted birtherism theory about Obama had little problem with Cruz or McCain—the issues raised about them were mostly about arcane readings of the Constitution or simply political. For Obama, it cut deeper and resonated with nearly all of the Republican Party.

If the message they sent was too subtle, here it is: White men like Cruz and McCain are automatically considered full Americans until proven otherwise. Black men like Obama are suspect, and will forever remain suspect, even when idiotic theories are debunked a thousand times over.

And for those who believed Trump’s wife, first lady Melania Trump, would be some kind of steadying force in the White House obviously missed all the times she revealed herself to believe in the bigoted birtherism theory just as much as her husband.

Yes, even a woman who was born in a foreign country and whose U.S. citizenship was granted under suspicious circumstances had the audacity to suggest that the first black president wasn’t fully American. That’s why no one should be surprised that Melania Trump declared recently that she was sending a not-so-subtle message to the media with her much-discussed jacket—something the White House denied at the time.

And even after Obama took the unprecedented step of releasing his long-form birth certificate—something none of the white presidential candidates had to—Donald Trump kept up the bigoted conspiracy theory. That’s who we are dealing with. That’s who Warren was responding to with the release of her very personal DNA results.

It’s nauseating. But it has convinced even some mainstream journalists to ignore the bigotry of Trump’s gambit and instead try to turn this into a question about Warren’s history.

People. Stop allowing the Trumps to lead you by the nose. They are comfortable with bigoted conspiracy theories. That doesn’t mean we have to give them credence. Neither should we allow the fast-moving 24/7 news cycle to convince us to forget that this is who they are and likely always will be.

https://www.theroot.com/forget-eliza...-me-1829751688

Why is it not grotesquely offensive for a person to pretend to be a Native American for personal gain?

The same people who are defending Warren over maybe having one ancestor in a thousand who might have been native American - are the same people who lost their minds over cultural appropriation when a white girl wore a chinese dress to her school disco?

Having one exceptionally distant ancestor maybe being Native American, does not make you Native American.

What a surprise, Warren was shown to be a liar but let’s not forget, Trump is the real bad guy. Could you come across as more of a partisan?

She's clearly got no claim on being Native American. You're right that Trump says stupid stuff, but we already knew that and are reminded daily by the media, in the same way we are reminded of Brexit.

Stopped reading at good men like Ted Cruz, Cruz is a nutter.

He's better than Trump, at least.

How is Elizabeth Warren a Native American? By that logic, I'm both a Mongol and a Moor.

What a fail on your part: http://time.com/4305738/donald-trump...th-eligibility

Trump repeatedly tried to say Senator Cruz wouldn't be eligible for the presidency for being Canadian-born, on top of saying the Senator's wife is ugly and that his father assassinated President Kennedy. So no, he didn't consider him full American even as people kept telling him Cruz could run for president.

And Senator McCain? Sure, the President didn't comment on the former presidential candidate's eligibility to run for president, but perhaps that's because the late-Senator wasn't running for president when the Golden Raspberry winner was. Instead, the multi-time Emmy nominee refused to acknowledge the fact that decorated veteran Captain McCain was a war hero, and even refused to pay lip service after the Purple Heart recipient's death.

His attacks on Senator Warren were in fact further examples of his mocking someone for being white.

I'm not saying he's not racist or that he's a good president or whatever, but stop making this about race, because it isn't, and it's only going to help him win in 2020.

Cruz stands against everything leftism, socially and fiscally. Leftists like you should hate him. All this shows is how partisan you are. No wonder people are leaving the left.