Donald Trump told NBC News that Sen. Elizabeth Warren is “racist” and “a total fraud” after attacking him during a Hillary Clinton rally in Ohio on Monday.
"She made up her heritage, which I think is racist. I think she's a racist, actually because what she did was very racist," Trump said in a phone interview.
The presumptive GOP presidential nominee has revisited a 2012 attack on Warren used during her contentious Senate race against Republican Scott Brown. Brown claimed Warren dishonestly listed herself as Native American while working as a faculty member at the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard to help her career. Warren has denied having disingenuously used her heritage for an advantage.
“She used the fact that she was Native American to advance her career. Elizabeth Warren is a total fraud. I know it. Other people who work with her know it. Elizabeth Warren is a total fraud," Trump said.
In the phone interview Trump re-upped his “Pocahontas” nickname for the Massachusetts senator, which some in the party have cautioned him against using in his attempt to appeal to a wider swath of the electorate.
"I do what I do. I've listened to this for a long time - at the beginning of the primaries, ‘He should do this, he should do that.' I won in a landslide," Trump said.
The real estate mogul added that he hopes Clinton chooses Warren as her running mate, saying he would “speak very openly about her if she is.”
Warren has been one of Trump’s fiercest attack dogs on the Democratic side, a role she relished while making her campaign debut with Clinton in Cincinnati.
“He will crush you into the dirt to get whatever he wants,” Warren said of Trump. “That’s who he is.”
