Elizabeth Warren’s DNA Results Put Trump on Defensive, but Also Raise Questions

WASHINGTON — It is a racial taunt made by the president of the United States, not unlike his discredited claim that Barack Obama was not born in America.

And just as President Donald Trump’s embrace of birtherism led to the remarkable spectacle of President Obama’s birth certificate being distributed in the White House, Trump’s unrelenting mockery of Sen. Elizabeth Warren as “Pocahontas” — questioning her claims about having Native American heritage — has prompted Warren to release the results of a DNA test that she says provide proof of her ancestry.

There is “strong evidence” that Warren has Native American pedigree “6-10 generations ago,” according to a document she released Monday from Dr. Carlos Bustamante, a renowned geneticist. The error rate is less than 1 in 1,000, he said.

Warren’s elaborate attempt to neutralize Trump’s attacks represented the surest sign yet that she intends to run for president in 2020. Not only did the Massachusetts senator release the DNA results, but she created a fact-check website that details her Native American ancestry and her Oklahoma roots. The site also includes documents that Warren says make clear her heritage “had no role whatsoever” in her advancement during her academic rise as a Harvard law professor — as some Republicans have asserted.

And in a carefully choreographed video that featured interviews with her conservative relatives, her former law school colleagues and Bustamante, a professor at Stanford University — as well as clips of the president mocking her — Warren fires what amounts to a warning shot against Trump.

Warren’s unusual step illustrated her willingness to spar with Trump on his own terms. But in the eyes of the senator and her advisers, they had little choice: the news media would have kept questioning her about her heritage as long as the president persisted in his mockery, so best to answer his challenge, however undignified it might seem. And, one of her aides said, she is eager to contrast her humble background with the president’s inherited wealth.

The video she released features footage from earlier this year in which Trump vowed to contribute $1 million to her favorite charity if she took a DNA test and it showed she had Native American roots.

Then, as she talks to Bustamante over a speaker phone, Warren says: “Now the president likes to call my mother a liar, what do the facts say?” before the geneticist tells her she “absolutely” has Native American ancestry.

Her DNA test, unsurprisingly, did not lead to a presidential retreat.

“Who cares, who cares?” Trump told reporters on the South Lawn of the White House on Monday morning after being asked whether he would fulfill his promise to make a donation to charity. Then he denied having made such a vow, saying: “I didn’t say that. You better read it again.”

But he did say that, at a July rally in which he talked about a potential future debate against Warren, where he would dare her to take the test. “And we will say, ‘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,’ ” he said.

Warren, who called for Trump to write a check to the National indigenous Women’s Resource Center, responded in kind on the president’s favorite platform.

“Having some memory problems, @realDonaldTrump?” she wrote on Twitter. “Should we call for a doctor?”

Yet even as she sought to defuse the issue, Warren was criticized on both the right and the left Monday. Conservatives mocked her for releasing a test that indicated she is anywhere between 1/64th and 1/1,024th Native American.

“Elizabeth Warren hasn’t dealt with a problem, she has highlighted it and opened up other avenues for attack,” wrote the editor of the conservative National Review, Rich Lowry, on Twitter. “For Trump, 1/1024th will be priceless material.”

And liberals, as well as conservatives, said Warren had still not adequately addressed why she changed her ethnic identity from white to Native American as a law professor in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

“Warren’s gotta say she shouldn’t have listed herself as Native American 30 years ago and apologize profusely and sit down with community leaders that agree to meet with her,” said Josie Duffy Rice, a progressive writer. (Warren has said she began identifying as Native American to honor her heritage because many of her older relatives were dying in that period).

Cherokee Nation, which is based in Oklahoma, also criticized Warren, saying in a statement she was “undermining tribal interests” by claiming Native American heritage. (Warren, responding to the criticism, said “DNA and family history has nothing to do with tribal affiliation or citizenship, which is determined only — only — by Tribal Nations,” adding: “I respect the distinction, & don’t list myself as Native in the Senate.”)

Analysts across the political spectrum wondered why she would take this step now instead of waiting until after the midterm elections.

Warren provided a sample of her DNA in August and she received the report back last week. An aide said she wanted to release it as soon as possible.

But releasing the DNA results are only the latest step of a monthslong effort by Warren, who is facing re-election next month, to prepare for a 2020 presidential bid and to inoculate herself against attacks from both Democrats and Republicans.

She previously disclosed academic records indicating she did not use her ancestry to win preferential treatment as a law professor, released 10 years of tax returns and has sought to cultivate ties with the country’s Native American tribes.

While she has not formally committed to running for president, she said recently that she was taking “a hard look” at it. And this pre-emptive public relations offensive Monday indicates not only that she is all but certain to enter the race, but that she intends to strenuously avoid being vulnerable to the sort of slashing opposition research campaigns that have felled past White House hopefuls. “Sen. Warren knows this is going to be a campaign issue for her and she is trying to clean up the record before she gets into the race,” said Jennifer Psaki, a former Obama White House official, invoking birtherism and the 2004 attacks on John Kerry’s military service as previous themes that bedeviled Democratic presidential candidates.

“It may not work and it probably won’t slow Trump down from attacking her,'’ she added, “but she has watched enough of these effective conspiracy campaigns by the right to know that the best antidote to absurd lies and smear campaigns is the truth, even if it means acknowledging the false attack.”

It is not unusual for white Americans to carry traces of Native American ancestry, and the methods used to determine Warren’s ancestry were sound, geneticists said Monday.

But Native Americans are not well represented in large genetic databases, and precise calculations about who contributed these genes, and when, are difficult to impossible. In any event, ancestry is not the same as cultural heritage, scientists noted, and genetic testing does not resolve the question of whether an individual should be considered Native American.

Yet Warren clearly is looking at the issue through the prism of the political demands of the moment, namely demonstrating to her own party that she will aggressively confront the president in a 2020 campaign that now appears inevitable. The video Warren released includes footage of her three brothers, and other relatives who still live in her native Oklahoma, who declare their Republican loyalties but call the president’s belittling nickname “ridiculous” and “silly.”

It also offers Warren an opportunity to remind voters of her red-state roots, and Warren does just that: speaking in her Sooner lilt, with the strains of a steel-guitar in the background, she invokes her “Momma” and her “Daddy” and depicts herself with her family, beer in hand, back in Norman, Oklahoma.

She attempts to repurpose Trump’s attacks on her as an attack on her family, concluding the 5 1/2-minute video with swelling music and a broadside against the president.

“My parents were real people, the love they shared, the struggles they endured, the family they built, the story they lived will always be on my heart,” she said. “And no one, not even the president of the United States, will ever take it away from me.”

But by day’s end, Warren got a reminder of the sort of political foe she is up against.

Speaking to reporters in Georgia, where he was inspecting hurricane damage, Trump said he would only keep his $1 million pledge “if I can test her personally,'’ then added: “That will not be something that I enjoy doing.”