Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) did not appear to take kindly to comedian Bill Maher calling her "Pocahontas" to her face, a reference to President Trump's derogatory nickname for her.
During an interview on HBO's "Real Time" that aired Friday, Maher criticized Trump's tax plan as favoring the wealthy and asked Warren why more working-class people still backed Trump and were not with the Democratic Party.
"They're still with him. They're not with you," he said. "Explain to me what that disconnection is."
"Actually, I'm going to push back. I disagree with you," Warren said. "When you talk—"
"Well, his fans are not with you," Maher shot back. "Come on. They don't like you, Pocahontas."
He grinned and his left-leaning crowd laughed, but Warren did not smile or even acknowledge the joke, moving on with her remarks about the progressive agenda.
Trump frequently refers to Warren as "Pocahontas" as a jab at her supposed Native American ancestry. Warren was criticized during her 2012 Massachusetts senatorial campaign for listing herself as a minority in directories of law professors earlier in her career.
The Washington Post Fact-Checker found that Warren relied on "family lore" rather than official ancestral documentation to make the claim that she had Cherokee and Delaware Indian heritage:
A genealogist at the New England Historic Genealogical Society initially had said there was documented evidence that Warren was 1/32 American Indian, alluding to a family newsletter that had indicated her great-great-great grandmother was Cherokee, the Boston Globe reported early in the controversy. But this point was later corrected, as neither the Globe nor the genealogical society had proven the existence of that document.