Monitoring desk
WASHINGTON
US Senator Elizabeth Warren, a liberal firebrand who has taken on Wall Street and traded barbs with Donald Trump, on Monday became the most prominent Democrat to announce a challenge to the Republican president in 2020.
Warren said she had formed an exploratory committee, which will allow her to begin raising money to compete in what is expected to be a crowded Democratic primary field before the November 2020 presidential election.
She said on Twitter she would announce her decision on whether to run early in 2019.
“America’s middle class is getting hollowed out an opportunity for too many of our young people is shrinking,” she said. “So I’m in this fight all the way. Right now Washington works great for the wealthy and the well connected. It’s just not working for anyone else.”
Trump, in a phone interview with Fox News, said he would love to run against Warren and again ridiculed her assertion of Native American ancestry. Asked if he thought Warren really believed she could defeat him, Trump said: “I don’t know, you’d have to ask her psychiatrist.”
The Democratic presidential field could eventually include Senators Kamala Harris, Cory Booker and Kirsten Gillibrand, as well as former Vice President Joe Biden. Julian Castro, former President Barack Obama’s housing secretary, formed an exploratory committee this month.
Warren welcomed the “strong and growing group of Democrats” making arguments similar to those she is making, saying: “That’s how we build a movement. We do it together.”
In searching for a candidate to run against Trump, Democrats will grapple with the tension between the party’s establishment and liberal progressive wings that flared during the 2016 nominating primaries between former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Senator Bernie Sanders, an independent who ran under the Democratic banner.
A Warren candidacy can expect opposition from Wall Street. In the US Senate, she has been a strong voice on financial issues and a self-described defender of the ordinary American against powerful interests.
Restricting banks
Following the 2007-2009 global financial crisis, Warren emerged as a leading critic of Wall Street and continues to advocate for stiffer regulation and oversight, including reinstating a rule that would separate banks’ retail business from their riskier investment banking activities.
Warren, a member of the Senate Banking Committee, has fought the Trump administration’s efforts to weaken post-crisis financial rules, going as far as to attack moderate Democrats who backed a May rewrite of the 2010 Dodd-Frank reform law.
In a September interview marking 10 years since the financial crisis, Warren was asked about breaking up big banks. “Oh yeah,” she told the New York Times. “Give me a chance.”
She also has opposed the administration’s efforts to undermine the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, an agency she helped create, and has pressured the Federal Reserve to take a tough line on scandal-hit lender Wells Fargo & Co.
Many of Warren’s policy positions have focussed on economic inequality. She recently offered legislation calling on the US government to manufacture generic drugs to reduce their cost. In 2017, she joined other senators in a proposal to extend the federal Medicare health insurance programme for seniors to include everyone.
