Portside

Earlier on Friday evening, the presumptive Republican nominee tweeted his wish that Hillary Clinton choose Elizabeth Warren as her running mate, calling the liberal U.S. Senate icon “goofy” in three consecutive tweets, clearly trying to brand the senior senator from Massachusetts. He then called Warren a “fraud” over her claiming Native American ancestry.

The attacks on Warren’s claim of indigenous ancestry are four years old — Scott Brown tried and failed to paint Warren as a liar during her 2012 U.S. Senate campaign, and the attacks backfired when a group of Brown’s staffers were caught on video whooping and chopping in the air. While it remains unclear whether Warren has or doesn’t have Cherokee blood, she stopped identifying as part-Native American in the nineties, saying it was a failed effort to find colleagues “for whom ‘Native American’ is part of their heritage and part of their hearts.”

Sen. Warren clapped back at the billionaire real estate magnate in a fiery series of tweets. She first attacked the presumptive Republican nominee’s timing, suggesting his attacks were cowardly, as he waited several days before responding to the diss tweets she sent out on May 3 — and he put the attacks out on Friday night, a notoriously low-publicity time in the media.

On Tuesday, Warren had called Trump a divisive narcissist who “incites supporters to violence” and “puts our servicemembers at risk by cheerleading illegal torture.”

Warren compared Trump to Scott Brown, whom she defeated easily in an 8-point rout in 2012, warning him that throwing around cheap insults about ancestry is a sure-fire way to lose an election. The Massachusetts senator also reminded her 350,000-plus followers that Trump was one of the loudest voices behind the “birther” movement against Obama, in which conservative conspiracy theorists believed the then-candidate was not a natural-born American citizen.

After that, Warren laughed off Trump’s effort to label her as “goofy,” using Trump’s signature writing style of ending tweets with one-word exclamations (i.e. “Sad!”). This is a pattern Warren mercilessly repeated throughout her epic response to Trump’s attacks, proving that the former Harvard professor and longtime consumer advocate is a black belt at Twitter beefs.

Sen. Warren dug deeper, branding Trump as a “bully,” and maintaining that the only way to defeat bullies is to hold fast and defend yourself. She hinted that the right-wing billionaire was a one-trick pony who relied on personal attacks because he can offer little in the way of substantive policy proposals.

Warren finished off Trump with two final tweets, vowing that she would do her part to hold Trump accountable through the remaining months of the election, and that she would do everything within her power to keep him out of the White House.

Your move, Donald.

Zach Cartwright is an activist and author from Richmond, Virginia. He enjoys writing about politics, government, and the media. Send him an email: zachcartwright88@gmail.com.