Trump on Elizabeth Warren: “You’d have to ask her psychiatrist” if she thinks she can win

Trump Fox News New Year's Eve Warren

Donald Trump finally responded to Elizabeth Warren’s announcement that she’s running for president.

He introduced a new concept to his branding of her: She’s nuts.

The response took place during an interview for tonight’s Fox News All-American New Year.

In an exclusive interview set to air during Fox News’ ‘All-American New Year’ special Monday night, President Trump suggested that only Massachusetts Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s “psychiatrist” knows whether she thinks she can win the White House in 2020….Fox News’ Pete Hegseth asked Trump whether Warren really thinks she could make him a one-term president.”Well, that I don’t know,” Trump responded. “You’d have to ask her psychiatrist” …”Elizabeth Warren will be the first,” Trump told Hegseth in the phone interview. “She did very badly in proving that she was of Indian heritage. That didn’t work out too well.” …”I think you have more than she does, and maybe I do too, and I have nothing,” Trump said, referring to tribal heritage. “So, we’ll see how she does. I wish her well, I hope she does well, I’d love to run against her.”

As with all branding, it only works if there’s a kernel of truth to it.

Trump had repeatedly branded Warren as a fake Indian by using the name “Pocahontas” for her. Now he’s suggesting she needs psychiatric help.

The claim of being nuts is made against Trump, but I have a feeling it will sting Warren more because Warren is not a flamboyant showman like Trump. Her entire political reason for being is that she is the rational, methodical technocrat. She also comes to the table with a low likability factor (likability is not the same as favorability, just ask Hillary).

The Democrat/liberal punditry already is worried.

CNN’s Harry Enten called Warren a below-par candidate:

Multiple outlets are worried she’s Hillary 2.0. Politico writes that Warren battles the ghosts of Hillary:

…How does Warren avoid a Clinton redux — written off as too unlikable before her campaign gets off the ground?In interviews with POLITICO, nearly a half-dozen current and former Warren advisers and associates acknowledged the rap on her, even as they dismissed it as little more than D.C. chatter. Any comparison to Clinton will recede, they said, once Warren hits the campaign trail in early states and weaves her own narrative in front of real voters. Amplified by an advanced video and digital operation her team has assembled over the past year-and-a-half, in part to help humanize her as a candidate, Warren will quickly remind people of her early years as an anti-Wall Street, pro-consumer crusader, they argue….“Elizabeth is not that,” a onetime Warren adviser said of portrayals of the senator as cold or unlikable. The person was given anonymity to address the Clinton comparison frankly. “I don’t think it’s fair. I know her. I think she is a warm and affectionate person. Once she’s on the stump and gets going on her economic message, she’s quite good … Hillary had three decades’ worth of animosity — it was just the way the world had treated her — that had built a crust around her that you really couldn’t penetrate. I don’t feel like Elizabeth has that kind of edge to her.”“All of us are just scratching our heads over why this is happening. She has a great operation, she’s very smart about it all,” added Warren’s biographer, Antonia Felix….

The Atlantic wonders if Warren can escape Hillary’s legacy, Elizabeth Warren Doesn’t Want to Be Hillary 2.0:

An odd thing happened to the woman who came onto the scene as an anti-banking, anti-establishment, burn-down-the-castle revolutionary: Elizabeth Warren became the castle….Warren’s team doesn’t like the Clinton comparisons. They see any of that talk as reeking of sexism, people seeing one woman as the same as another woman because of their gender and aspirations. But so far, at least, the Clinton comparisons aren’t being made about any of the other women who have been just as obvious in recent months about their 2020 intentions.

Colin Reed, a Republican strategist and former Scott Brown advisor, noted that Warren’s timing is terrible:

By launching first, Warren gets ahead of the rest of the salivating pack of Democratic presidential hopefuls. In an ideal world, being first in would lead to a bounce from a cycle of flattering news coverage. But it’s New Year’s Eve, and most people are focused on anything but presidential politics. Plus, the early reviews from the press are far from flattering, littered with references to her unproven claims of Native American ancestry….So why go today? As former Obama communications director Anita Dunn told the Boston Globe, Warren “had what I think many people believe was a very rocky fall.” Standing still meant the risk of getting lumped in with all the other looming presidential announcements, and potentially never making it out of the starting gate.Warren begins her journey in a position of weakness. Unlike 2016 when activists were begging her to run with DRAFT WARREN movements, the Massachusetts Senator feels like yesterday’s news. Polls indicate that Democrats are in the mood for a fresh face, with a survey from USA Today/Suffolk University last week showing voters “excited” about a potential candidate that is “someone new.”

Like Hillary, Warren is just too prepackaged, too contrived, too controlled by handlers, and comes across as stale and unlikeable. The New Year’s Eve Day rollout of her campaign, like the pre-midterms rollout of her DNA test, is a good case in point.

Tags: 2020 Democratic Primary, Elizabeth Warren

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