Who better than Sen. Elizabeth Warren to give her instant reaction to Donald Trump’s Republican National Convention acceptance speech live on Stephen Colbert’s Late Show Thursday night?
No one on the left—including Hillary Clinton—has been as effective at getting under Trump’s skin as Warren has. The woman Trump derisively calls “Pocahontas” (when not labeling her “goofy”) has been an unrelenting critic of both his dangerous rhetoric and disastrous policy proposals from the moment he effectively clinched the nomination in May. Since then, she has refused to back down, telling The View recently that Trump “can’t bully me into shutting up.”
All of this will make Warren a vital surrogate for Clinton, whether or not she ends up on the ticket as her running mate—an outcome that is looking more and more unlikely as the candidate’s VP decision approaches. And, as expected, she came out swinging with Colbert.
ADVERTISEMENT
In the cold open of Colbert’s show, the host went to Warren’s dressing room to ask if there was any way he could announce on his show that she would be Clinton’s running mate. Warren said if it were going to be her, she would know it by now, so “probably not,” but when she went back in the room, Colbert removed the “I” from “VIP” on her door just in case.
Warren was more straightforward during their interview, calling the RNC “the nastiest, most divisive convention that we’ve seen in half a century.” While she could admit that people “have good reasons to be angry,” Trump “does not have the answers” to people’s problems.
“Every time you kind of scratch the surface a little bit and see what Donald Trump is really talking about, what he’s really talking about is what he’s talked about all his life and that is how to improve the world for Donald Trump,” she said, adding that his proposed tax cut would help himself more than anyone else.
Colbert pushed back, asking why followers of Bernie Sanders shouldn’t go over to Trump instead of following a “Washington insider” like Hillary Clinton. In her view, Democrats believe that the government needs to work for “all of us,” while Trump’s message is that “what you need to be afraid of is every other American.”
“I’ve got to tell you, that speech tonight, he sounded like some two-bit dictator of some country that you couldn’t find on a map,” Warren added. “He sounded like a dictator of a small country rather than a man who is running for the highest office of the strongest democracy on the face of this Earth.”
“Everyone is underestimating Donald Trump,” Warren said later. “He is one dangerous man and we need to take him seriously. Take him out now.”
