It was a setup that must have been hard for Elizabeth Warren to resist.
“There are people who say it really doesn’t matter who wins,” Ellen DeGeneres told the Massachusetts senator and Hillary Clinton surrogate on her show Monday. Warren, who has spent much of that past year baiting Donald Trump on both Twitter and the campaign trail, decided to answer her by taking First Lady Michelle Obama’s valuable advice about “going high” when her opponents “go low.”
As Warren put it, “This is really about what these people have spent their lives doing.” Instead of beginning by bashing Trump, she highlighted that Hillary Clinton has spent her whole professional life “fighting for children, fighting for women, fighting for human rights, fighting for equality, fighting for healthcare.” She described Trump as a man born into wealth, who spent his life building his fortune by “cheating” people.
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“So, it’s a question of who’s going to lead this great country,” she said. “I’m all in with Hillary Clinton on this.”
Airing on the eve of Election Day, the interview with DeGeneres revealed a more serene and less fired-up Warren that we have seen over the last several months, both on Twitter and on television.
Back in June, when Trump still had control of his Twitter account and would hurl periodic insults at the U.S. senator he likes to call “Pocahontas,” Warren shot back on The View, “What this is really about is can they bully me into shutting up? Can they just be nasty enough and ugly enough and throw enough stuff in my direction that I’ll say, ‘Oh’ and just go back into the shadows. The answer is nope, not happening.”
By July, immediately following Trump’s dark and disturbing speech at the Republican National Convention, Warren was telling Stephen Colbert, “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. 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.”
And there there was her most recent tweetstorm against the candidate after he started to claim that the election would “rigged” against him. “Give me a break, @realDonaldTrump. You’re not losing because it’s rigged. You’re losing because we see through your creepy bullying,” Warren tweeted at Trump. “Anyone with children knows that whining about imaginary cheating is the last refuge of the sore loser.”
But just as Hillary Clinton has actively chosen to stay as positive and big picture-oriented as she possibly can in these final hours, declining to even mention the latest good news from the FBI on the stump, Warren too decided not to use her platform on Ellen to attack Trump.
Telling DeGeneres she will spend Election Night alternating between eating popcorn and her fingernails as she watches the results come in, Warren spread the love to all of the “terrific women” candidates who are “challenging incumbents” down ballot.
Asked by the host what it will mean for young girls, and young boys, to potentially see a woman as president, Warren talked about her two young granddaughters. “I look at these two girls and I think, this is your chance, in this election, to see that women stand up for themselves, they fight their own battles, and women can win.”
With one more day to go, Warren appears to be done fighting her battle against Donald Trump. And she hopes she never has to take him on again.
