Elizabeth Warren lashes out at Donald Trump: He is a 'thin-skinned, racist bully'

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last updated 10 June 2016

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) excoriated Donald Trump Thursday during a speech at a legal conference, calling him a "thin-skinned, racist bully" prone to "nasty temper tantrums" who should be ashamed of himself for using "the megaphone of a presidential campaign to attack a judge's character and integrity" simply because he thinks he has "some God-given right to steal people's money and get away with it."

The presumptive Republican nominee, Warren said, is "just a guy who inherited a fortune and kept it going by cheating people. When that's your business model, sooner or later you're going to run into legal trouble, and Donald Trump has run into legal trouble." Trump University targeted the most vulnerable people and left them in debt, Warren said, and "in America, we have the rule of law that means no matter how rich you are, no matter how loud you are, no matter how famous you are, if you break the law you can be held accountable, even if your name is Donald Trump."

By attacking the judge presiding over the Trump University fraud cases, Judge Gonzalo Curiel, Warren says it shows Trump is upset that Curiel is "following the law instead of bending it to suit the financial interests of one wealthy and oh-so-fragile defendant." Curiel is bound by the federal code of judicial ethics not to respond to Trump's comments, and Trump picking on him is "exactly what you would expect from a thin-skinned, racist bully," Warren said. Trump is "race-baiting a judge" who is "one of countless American patriots who has spent decades quietly serving his country, sometimes at great risk to his own life," Warren added. "Donald Trump is a loud, nasty, thin-skinned fraud who has never risked anything for anyone and who serves no one buy himself, and that is just one of the many reasons he will never be president of the United States."

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Catherine Garcia has worked as a senior writer at The Week since 2014. Her writing and reporting have appeared in Entertainment Weekly, The New York Times, Wirecutter, NBC News and "The Book of Jezebel," among others. She's a graduate of the University of Redlands and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.