After spending months mocking Sen. Elizabeth Warren's (D-Mass.) claim that she has Native American ancestry and demanding that she prove it, President Donald Trump feigned ignorance on Monday when confronted with the fact that the senator had taken a DNA test confirming that she has an ancestor who was Native American.
On the White House lawn, the president was asked about his reaction to Warren's test, which revealed that one of her ancestors, likely from six to 10 generations ago, was a Native American.
"Who cares?" Trump replied hastily.
When pressed about the $1 million Trump publicly offered to give to the charity of Warren's choice if she produced DNA evidence of her family background, the president flatly denied making the offer--despite widely-available footage of him doing so on July 5 at a rally in Great Falls, Montana.
"I didn't say that," Trump told a reporter. "No, you'd better read it again."
To clear up any confusion, a number of journalists and critics posted the president's remarks from July on social media.
The White House has backed up Trump's attacks on Warren in recent months, with Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders saying last November that Warren's so-called "lies" about her ancestry "to advance her career" were more offensive than the president's insistence on calling the senator "Pocahontas."
But on Monday one of Trump's top advisers, Kellyanne Conway, appeared to deny that a controversy over Warren's heritage had ever taken place, calling the test the president had specifically asked the senator to take "junk science."
"I haven't looked at the test," Conway told reporters. "I know everybody likes to pick their junk science and sound science depending on the conclusion it seems some days, but I haven't looked at the DNA test and it really doesn't interest me to be frank with you."
The White House's especially brazen denialism was slammed by several critics on social media.
