Washington Post reporter Annie Linskey on Wednesday suggested Sen. Elizabeth Warren's (D., Mass.) decision to take a DNA test was justified because she was going to have to take one eventually to address her claim to Native American heritage.
Warren, a presidential hopeful, has claimed Cherokee ancestry for years and was listed as a minority faculty member at Harvard Law School, but critics such as President Donald Trump called on her to take a DNA test. She finally did last year and found evidence of a very distant Native American ancestor, prompting mockery from the right for having such a tenuous claim to being Cherokee, while also receiving backlash from Native American groups and many on the left.
Camerota was incredulous when Linskey said Warren had to take a DNA test sooner or later, but the Post reporter, who previously covered Warren for the Boston Globe, explained that concerns about Warren’s claims of Native American heritage were dogging her with people across the spectrum.
"She was going to have to do this DNA test," Linskey said.
"She was?" Camerota asked. "I just want to challenge you on that. You don’t think she could have said, ‘I’m not going to humor Donald Trump’s, you know’—"
"It wasn’t Donald Trump," Linskey interjected. "She was being asked this question by every single Sunday show host. I mean, every single one. Every event she was at, people were asking her about it."
Linskey went on to say that even Warren’s "random little events" with people from Massachusetts towns involved questions about getting a DNA test.
"I remember random little events where a person from, you know, Weymouth would walk up and say, ‘Hey, you know there’s this new thing, there’s a DNA test, why don’t you just do it?’ It was constant," Linskey said.
"You can argue that this wasn’t the greatest way for her to introduce herself to a lot of people, but her calculation was that she was just going to have to do it, and I don’t disagree with that," Linskey concluded.
Warren’s campaign-style video about her DNA test results initially received some positive press before the Globe had to correct that record, clarifying she was at most 1/64th Native American and possibly only 1/1,024th. It only got worse when Native American groups, led by the Cherokee Nation, blasted her for staking her claims to identity on such grounds.
Some progressives sided with the Cherokee Nation, leading some of Warren’s advisers to suggest she apologize. She has defended her ancestry, however, saying she does not lay claim to any tribal citizenship.