Elizabeth Warren Is Trump in Professor’s Clothing

E lizabeth Warren believes that she is treated differently than are many other American politicians because she is a woman. For once, Warren is correct: Were she a man, people would be far more likely to see her for who she actually is — which, once one gets past her pseudo-academic affect and poll-studied indignation, is Donald Trump in a Harvard professor’s pantsuit.

Warren is a little more refined than Trump — and, as a result, she is more transparent in her artifice. But the ingredients are the same. She is a bully who seeks office for its imprimatur. She is an egomaniac who responds well to praise. (In 2019, a simple endorsement was sufficient to get her to propose that “black trans and cis women, gender-nonconforming, and nonbinary people are the backbone of our democracy,” which is a sentence that nobody else has ever constructed, or will ever again construct, in English.) And, because she is a narcissist, she is incapable of admitting her mistakes — even when not doing so means adopting intellectual positions that would have made Prospero blush. At root, Warren is a shell, an opportunist, an actor. She was white, then she was Native American, then she was white again. She was a Republican, then she was a Democrat. She was against money in politics, until that money began to follow her, rather than her opponents, and, suddenly, she favored it. Her life story is malleable and Gatsbyesque, with the only consistent narrative being that she, Elizabeth Warren, is the hero of the age.

Consider, by way of example, the sheer size of the hole that Warren has dug for herself in the course of debating America’s ongoing inflation crisis. Warren’s initial position on inflation was that the United States should ignore the flashing lights that had been triggered by the federal government’s unyielding profligacy during the Covid pandemic, and continue to spend as much money as was humanly possible. To this end, she backed the American Rescue Plan (“what’s wrong with these people?” she asked of the Republicans who opposed it); she insisted that the Democrats needed “to get as much of Build Back Better across the finish line as possible” — all three and a half trillion of it, if necessary; and she advocated “canceling [up to] $50,000 in student-loan debt” for 36 million borrowers.

And when the excessive spending that she had demanded did, indeed, make inflation much worse? Then, Warren tried to shift the blame away from herself and her ideas by spouting illiterate, demagogic nonsense. “Wondering why your Thanksgiving groceries cost more this year?” Warren asked. “It’s because greedy corporations are charging Americans extra just to keep their stock prices high.” “Prices have gone up,” she told the public. “Why? Because giant oil companies like Chevron and ExxonMobil enjoy doubling their profits. This isn’t about inflation. This is about price gouging for these guys, and we need to call them out.” Worse still, Warren has begun to take aim at the people who are trying in earnest to fix the mess. Yesterday, after the news broke that the Federal Reserve had raised interest rates once again, Warren attacked the move as “extreme,” and implied that the hike in the rate — rather than the malady the hike in the rate is attempting to address — would “throw millions out of work.” “I’ve been warning” about this, she concluded.

From a rank-and-file progressive, such behavior would be merely irresponsible. From Elizabeth Warren, it is fatal. We’re not talking here about Bernie Sanders, whose relentlessly benighted economic outlook represents a perverse part of his appeal. We’re talking about the Esteemed Professor Elizabeth Warren, a self-styled policy maven who is beloved by all the worst people on the Wonk Archipelago. One might well expect a Sanders or an AOC or a Cori Bush or an Ed Markey to start excreting primitive hot takes, to start arguing that actually, inflation is caused by greedy corporations, who, for some inexplicable reason, have chosen this exact moment to break their four-decade cycle of good behavior. But Elizabeth Warren? The Sage Queen of the Senate? That just hits the gong from the side.

In truth, the only surprise here is that it has taken so long for Warren to expose herself for who she really is — not an expert, but a browbeater. And, as a browbeater, her favorite themes are uncannily similar to one Donald J. Trump’s. Ruminating upon Georgia’s 2018 gubernatorial election recently, Warren referred to the duly elected victor in that race as “the Republican who is sitting in Stacey Abrams’ chair.” Attempting to reopen a box that has long been closed, Warren continues to insist that “Michael Brown was murdered by a white police officer in Ferguson, Mo.” In the course of her many unhinged post-Dobbs rants, Warren has lamented that, in America, crisis-pregnancy centers “outnumber abortion clinics,” and declared that “we” — by which she apparently meant whichever part of the American government she next seeks to imbue with dictatorial powers — “need to shut them down here in Massachusetts, and we need to shut them down all around the country.” The Supreme Court displeases her? She calls for packing it. The filibuster is inconveniencing her? She calls for nuking it. Her preferred candidate didn’t win the Democratic primary? The race was “rigged.” As for free speech? That, apparently, is a right she should enjoy but others shouldn’t. Speaking directly to Amazon last year, Warren confirmed that her aim was “to break up Big Tech so you’re not powerful enough to heckle senators with snotty tweets.”

Sprinkle in a little random capitalization, add in some exclamation points, and append an incongruous “Thank you!” to their tails, and all of these statements could have been written by Donald Trump — who must presumably be kicking himself for not having thought to soften the edges of his boorishness by prepending the word “professor” to his name.