Sen. Elizabeth Warren has officially remained neutral when it comes to endorsing a Democratic presidential candidate, but she didn’t hesitate to say that she’s cheering on her Senate colleague Bernie Sanders.
“He’s out there. He fights from the heart,” Warren said Thursday after being asked if Sanders, who lags behind Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton in delegates, should drop out of the race. Speaking at a press conference in Massachusetts, she stopped short of making an endorsement but added, “This is who Bernie is, and he has put the right issues on the table for the Democratic Party and for the country in general. So I’m still cheering Bernie on.”
RELATED: Elizabeth Warren: Donald Trump is a ‘loser’
A progressive darling, Warren has made college affordability, Wall Street oversight and the expansion of Social Security benefits core issues of her platform in the Senate. Those are topics at the heart of Sanders’ campaign, as well.
While Warren declined to reveal which candidate she voted for in the Massachusetts Democratic Primary a month ago, she said she plans to make an endorsement — but doesn’t “have a timeline.”
When asked about Clinton’s path to the nomination, Warren said she told the former secretary of state to avoid certain perils regarding big business.
“This is about the future, making it clear how you plan to reign in Wall Street and that you are not going to surround yourself with people who are beholden to the financial services industry,” she said, according to NBC affiliate station NECN.
For most of the 2016 election cycle, Warren has been relatively quiet. But she recently became more vocal, criticizing controversial rhetoric from Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump. On Thursday, the Massachusetts Democrat called Trump a failed businessman who inherited a fortune from his father and then maintained it “by cheating people, by defrauding people, and by skipping out on paying his creditors.”
“Donald Trump claims that the reason he’s qualified to be president of the United States is that he is a very, very, very successful businessman,” she added. “Donald Trump is not a great business success and it’s time he’s called on it.”
Let’s be honest – @realDonaldTrump is a loser. Count all his failed businesses. See how he cheated people w/ scams like Trump U.
— Elizabeth Warren (@elizabethforma) March 21, 2016
Her remarks came days after a Twitter and Facebook tirade, where at one point she called Trump a “loser” and faulted him for his “petty bullying, attacks on women, cheap racism, flagrant narcissism.”
Responding to earlier criticisms from the senator, Trump took issue with Warren’s Native American heritage in an interview with The New York Times.“She’s got about as much Indian blood as I have. Her whole life was based on a fraud. She got into Harvard and all that because she said she was a minority,” he said.
Warren invoked her 2012 Senate campaign, when she ousted incumbent Republican Sen. Scott Brown, who claimed that she exploited her Native-American heritage to get jobs or get into schools.
‘‘If Donald Trump thinks that by using Scott Brown’s hate-filled attacks on my family he’s going to shut me down, then he better think again,’’ said Warren. ‘‘It didn’t work before and it’s not going to work now.”
