Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren on Saturday formally launched her presidential bid, while issuing a call to fight economic inequality. Warren launched her campaign from Everett Mills, a historic site in Lawrence, Massachusetts, where immigrant workers had gone on strike in 1912.
“This is the fight of our lives,” she said, while attacking big businesses and a system she said was rigged against ordinary Americans.
Warren is one of President Donald Trump’s most vocal critics. He had once referred to her as “Pocahontas”, after accusations that she had falsely claimed Native American heritage in a Harvard directory. Warren later apologised after she used a DNA test to try and show her disputed ancestry.
“The man in the White House is not the cause of what is broken,” CNN reported Warren as saying at her rally. “He is just the latest and most extreme symptom of what’s gone wrong in America. A product of a rigged system that props up the rich and powerful and kicks dirt on everyone else. So once he’s gone, we can’t pretend that none of this ever happened.”
Warren, also a Wall Street critic, is known for her efforts to to create an authority to regulate large banks, called the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
Democrats will have to choose from several contenders who want to take on Trump in the election. Multiple members of the party have already announced their desire to run, including Tulsi Gabbard, Kirsten Gillibrand and Kamala Harris. The US has not yet had a woman president.
Trump’s campaign reacted to Warren, calling her a fraud and claiming that America will reject her “dishonest campaign”, Reuters reported.
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