Today’s Clown Show

Today in an event honoring Navajo Code Talkers that was attended by three of the surviving “talkers,” Trump went off on Elizabeth Warren, calling her “Pocahontas.”

“You were here long before any of us were here. Although we have a representative in Congress who they say was here a long time ago. They call her ‘Pocahontas,’ ” he said with a chuckle. “But you know what? I like you.” The audience was quiet.

I have said in the past that Trump has no class. He’s like a black hole that sucks away any trace of class.

Warren has been a consistent critic of Trump’s and, prior to joining the Senate, was one of the key advocates for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. That agency has been at the center of a fight over the past several days as Trump tries to overhaul it. Warren criticized Trump’s efforts in an interview with The Washington Post on Monday.

Unsurprisingly, many Native Americans have taken offense at Trump’s use of Pocahontas’s name to disparage a political opponent. So, too, have many Republicans. When Trump used the expression in 2016, Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla.) expressed his disdain.

“It’s neither appropriate personally toward her, and frankly, it offends a much larger group of people,” Cole said at the time. “So I wish he would avoid that.” Instead, Trump not only used it Monday, but also did so after explicitly mentioning that MacDonald’s “great friend” Tom Cole was in the audience.

The “MacDonald” referenced above is Peter MacDonald, one of the surviving Code Talkers. Whether MacDonald and Cole actually are friends, or whether Trump was just being a dick toward Native Americans, I do not know.

If you’ve been wondering what the hell is going on with the the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, do see “What the Hell Is Going On at the C.F.P.B.?” by Abigail Tracy at Vanity Fair. In brief, after longtime director Richard Cordray announced he was leaving, “he promoted his chief of staff, Leandra English, to the agency’s No. 2 position, and declared in a letter to bureau staff that she would step in as acting director,” Tracy writes. But Trump picked former congressman Mick Mulvaney to be the acting director until someone is confirmed by the Senate. In the past Mulvaney has called the CFPB a joke that shouldn’t exist. Mulvaney is expected to dismantle the agency.

But then this happened: English filed a lawsuit against Trump to stop Mulvaney from taking over as acting director.

Mulvaney appeared to escalate the battle on Monday, showing up to work armed with donuts; English countered with a post-Thanksgiving e-mail signed ”acting director.” At present, both are hard at work at the same job.

In an interview, Liz Warren sided with English:

Pressed on whether the law clearly authorizes the president to fill such vacancies, Warren challenged that premise. “Dodd-Frank is quite specific: It provides its own succession planning,” she told me. “There is no vacancy for President Trump to fill.”

Just another day in the clown car …