Hours after President Obama delivered his formal endorsement of Hillary Clinton for the Democratic presidential nomination yesterday, Elizabeth Warren, a darling of the Party’s most liberal wing, also fell in line behind the party’s presumptive nominee. She closed out a day in which the Democratic Party, for the first time, offered presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump a taste of the full arsenal of firepower that will be trained on him from now until the general election in November.
Warren, who appears to derive real pleasure from attacking the New York billionaire, appeared on MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow Show and delivered an endorsement of presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton that was in large part really a denunciation of Trump. She called the New York billionaire “a small, insecure bully who thinks he’s going to get his way by throwing nasty tantrums, by giving people ugly names, by saying racist and other kinds of outrageous things.”
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She said, “I’m ready to get in this fight and work my heart out for Hillary Clinton to become the next president of the United States and to make sure that Donald Trump never gets any place close to the White House.”
Wrapping up a primary season that has dragged on far longer than almost anyone expected, Warren’s endorsement demonstrated that the Democratic Party is ready to begin in earnest the process of coalescing behind the former secretary of state.
It’s hard to overstate the importance of Warren’s endorsement of Clinton. The Massachusetts senator’s intense focus on increasing regulation of the financial services industry had cast her as one of Clinton’s chief antagonists within the Democratic Party early in the campaign. And because Clinton’s chief rival, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders constantly hammered Clinton for her connections to Wall Street, he created the impression that he and Warren were more closely aligned than either was with Clinton.
Warren’s decision to throw her support to the former secretary of state will make it easier for the most liberal element of the Democratic electorate -- from which Sanders draws most of his support -- to back Clinton. While there will be an element of Sanders’ base that will never back Clinton, her support will help reduce that resistance.
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And even as she endorsed Clinton, she praised the Vermont senator for his focus on social justice, income inequality and more.
“What Bernie Sanders did was just powerfully important. He ran a campaign from the heart,” she said. “And he ran a campaign where he took these issues and he really thrust them into the spotlight. And he also brought -- these are issues near and dear to my heart. And he brought millions of people into the political process. He brought millions of people into the Democratic Party.”
Warren’s appearance on Maddow’s show came not long after she delivered a blistering denunciation of Trump at a meeting of the American Constitution Society, calling him, among many other things, “a loud, nasty thin-skinned fraud who has never risked anything for anyone and who serves no one but himself.”
Another of the Democratic Party’s heavyweights, Vice President Joe Biden, tore into Trump at the same event, calling Trump a racist whose blatant disrespect for the authority of the courts would endanger the country.
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Trump, he said, “cannot be trusted to respect the independence of the judiciary as a president.”
Noting Trump’s racially tinged attacks on the Mexican heritage of a judge who is presiding over a case related to now-defunct Trump University, Biden said, “These are words in my view of one who would defy the courts if they ruled against him as president.”
“It's not the racism that worries me,” Biden added. “We've dealt with racists before. It's the potential impact on the court.”
The coordinated assault on Trump came a week after President Obama dedicated an appearance in Elkhart, Indiana to excoriating the “crazy” economic proposals that Trump has made, and Clinton herself ripped his “dangerously incoherent” foreign policy ideas.
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The Democratic unity of purpose was made clear by Sanders, who briefly addressed the press after a meeting with President Obama Thursday. Even while emphatically promising to stay in the Democratic race through the Democratic nominating convention in July, he indicated that keeping Trump away from the White house was an overriding goal.
“Donald Trump would clearly in my mind and I think the majority of Americans be a disaster as president of the United States,” he said, vowing, “I will do everything in my power, and I will work as hard as I can to make sure that Donald Trump does not become president of the United States.”
