UPDATED WITH VIDEO Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren didn’t take the bait tonight when she appeared on HBO’s Real Time With Bill Maher. She didn’t respond to Donald Trump’s earlier taunts, she didn’t answer Maher’s suggestion that she run for president – and she neither cracked a smile nor lashed back when Maher called her Pocahontas.
Speaking about middle-class Trump voters, Maher said, in the one-on-one top-of-show interview with Warren, “They don’t like you, Pocahontas.”
If the intention of repeating Trump’s grade-school slur was a laugh or a rise, the HBO host got neither from Warren, who paused for a moment as Maher and the audience chuckled, then continued making her point about Americans mostly favoring specific progressive policies on minimum wage, expanding Social Security, student financial aid and taxation. “The progressive agenda is America’s agenda,” Warren said.
“They’re with you on the issues but then they vote for him,” Maher responded, leaving the derogatory name behind like road kill.
Trump and other right-wingers have derided Warren’s claim that her ancestry includes Native Americans. During his run for the office, Trump, with no evidence whatsoever, said Warren “made up her heritage.”
While Warren didn’t respond to Trump’s taunts, she did explain why she attended his inauguration: “I watched. I wanted to see it. I wanted it burned in my eyes.” Real Time later tweeted the quote:
Maher got a better response from Warren with another Trump reference. At the end of the interview, he referenced Trump’s red-meat prediction to the NRA today that Warren might seek the Oval Office in 2020. “No pressure,” Maher joked, this time getting a smile and a goodbye hug from the senator.
Also on tonight’s episode was former Energy secretary Ernest Moniz and roundtable guests Rob Reiner, venture capitalist Nick Hanauer and conservative commentator Tara Setmayer.
