Trump adds Wounded Knee massacre to repertoire in attack on Sen. Elizabeth Warren

One hundred years after U.S. soldiers killed and maimed hundreds of Sioux men, women and children at the Wounded Knee massacre in South Dakota, Congress formally apologized in 1990 by expressing its "deep regret on behalf of the United States."

On Sunday night, President Donald Trump used that same massacre as a punchline in his latest broadside against Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., the Democratic presidential hopeful whom he regularly calls "Pocahontas" in jeering reference to her claims of American Indian heritage.

Alluding to a Warren video, Trump wrote: "If Elizabeth Warren, often referred to by me as Pocahontas, did this commercial from Bighorn or Wounded Knee instead of her kitchen, with her husband dressed in full Indian garb, it would have been a smash!"

Critics found that message jarring, even from a president who has repeatedly ignored calls from politicians on both sides of the aisle, historians and American Indian groups to stop calling Warren "Pocahontas."

"Plus 300 of my people were massacred at Wounded Knee. Most were women and children," tweeted Ruth H. Hopkins, a Dakota/Lakota Sioux writer who has been a contributor at Teen Vogue, the Guardian and elsewhere. "This isn't funny, it's cold, callous, and just plain racist."

Trump's tweet came amid another extraordinary late-night Twitter barrage as the president — battered by public blame for the ongoing government shutdown and new bombshells about his links to Russia — also lashed out at Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos and quoted from a racially charged immigration column by Pat Buchanan.

His attack on Warren, who officially jumped into the 2020 presidential race last month, drew perhaps the biggest reaction online thanks to its invocation of a particularly disgraceful chapter of U.S. ­history.

When the U.S. commander, Col. James W. Forsyth, ordered Big Foot's people to surrender their weapons on Dec. 29, 1890, shooting suddenly erupted and the soldiers surrounding the camp began indiscriminately gunning down the Indians.

"Women and children were riddled with shrapnel. People ran, but the soldiers pursued them. Bodies were later discovered 3 miles from camp," Hirsch wrote. "When the smoke cleared, 146 men, women, and children lay dead. Others perished from their wounds or froze to death in the hills."

Trump has already faced backlash for his use of "Pocahontas" to describe Warren, particularly after he unleashed the taunt in the Oval Office at a November 2017 event honoring Navajo code talkers.

In October, Warren released the result of a DNA test showing that she did have Native American ancestors a number of generations ago — a result that only egged the president on and also drew criticisms from the Cherokee Nation and others. Trump and his administration have accused Warren of unfairly benefiting from her claims of American Indian heritage while she was a professor at Harvard, an allegation fact-checkers have debunked.

For many critics, Trump's use of the mass killing at Wounded Knee — along with his reference to the Battle of the Little Bighorn, where hundreds of U.S. soldiers and American Indians died in Gen. George Armstrong Custer's infamous last stand in 1876 — took his Warren attacks to a new level.

That wasn't Trump's only late-night tweet on Sunday that drew notice for its racial overtones. Shortly after his Wounded Knee messages, Trump posted two tweets quoting from a Pat Buchanan column to support his push for a wall on the southern border.

Buchanan's column explicitly accuses Democrats of wanting to encourage immigration because, he writes, the party is "hostile to white men because the smaller the share of the U.S. population that white men become, the sooner that Democrats inherit the national estate."