Liberal hardliner Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) took to Facebook last week to lambast a financial industry executive who has publicly praised her and donated to her campaign after she mistakenly assumed he was a supporter of President-elect Donald Trump.
In a post on her Facebook page, Warren singled out Whitney Tilson, chief executive of the firm Kase Capital, New York Times financial columnist Andrew Ross Sorkin noted on Monday.
"Tilson knows that, despite all the stunts and rhetoric, Donald Trump isn’t going to change the economic system," Warren wrote. "The next four years are going to be a bonanza for the Whitney Tilsons of the world."
In fact, Tilson supported Hillary Clinton's failed presidential bid and in 2012 donated to Warren's Senate campaign. During the 2016 campaign, he donated $1,000 to Clinton to attend an event where Warren spoke, the Times reported.
"Ms. Warren appears to be suffering from the same affliction that Mr. Trump’s critics accuse of him: a knee-jerk, fact-free reaction to something she had read in the news," Sorkin wrote.
In this case, Ms. Warren seems to have come across a Bloomberg News article that includes some quotations from Mr. Tilson. But she didn’t read to the bottom or dismissed it before firing off her zingers.
In the article, Mr. Tilson had said, "I think Donald Trump conned them," in reference to voters. "I worried that he was going to do crazy things that would blow the system up. So the fact that he’s appointing people from within the system is a good thing." (He even said he took "glee" in voters’ anger over that.)
The part Ms. Warren may have missed toward the bottom was this: "I’m a fan of Dodd-Frank, I think banking should be boring," he was quoted as saying, where he was also identified as a Clinton supporter. "I worry about Wall Street returning to being a casino."
In response to complaints from Tilson and his wife regarding what they say is an inaccurate portrayal of their views, Warren's office said they would make just one change to the Facebook post: removing the portion that inaccurately identified the Tilsons as "billionaires."
The Tilsons are millionaires, and self-styled "patriotic" ones. Tilson was an early member of its group calling itself the Patriotic Millionaires, which supports efforts to raise federal taxes on wealthy individuals.
Tilson has acknowledged that tax hikes sought by the group will produce "not even a meaningful small amount" of additional federal revenue.