Trump’s Democratic rivals don't seem especially forthcoming about who they are.
"An epidemic of false identities, massaged résumés, and warped ancestries has broken out among the current Democratic presidential primary candidates.
"Senator Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) for years claimed Native American ancestry. An embattled Warren ironically took a DNA test that only proved her critics’ contention that she was no more of Native American heritage than the vast majority of Americans.
"Another Democratic candidate, Robert Francis O’Rourke, is a rich white male who grew up in affluence. O’Rourke some time ago adopted the name “Beto,” an abbreviation for the Spanish “Roberto.” The Spanish-speaking, Irish-American O’Rourke, with a wink and nod, has assumed a useful near-Latino identity.
"That ruse became a caricature in O’Rourke’s 2018 race for the Texas Senate. The second-generation Cuban-American incumbent, Senator Rafael Edward “Ted” Cruz, was portrayed by the media as the non-Spanish-speaking “white guy” pitted against the more authentic Irish-American Latino “Beto.”
"Few would know that New York City mayor Bill de Blasio was actually born with the alliterative European name Warren Wilhelm Jr. With today’s politically correct calibrations of avoiding Northern European nomenclature, the Latinate “de Blasio” apparently ranks higher than the overtly German “Wilhelm.”
"It has long been a populist tradition that presidential candidates downplay their financial success or even fabricate a “born in a log cabin” myth of early poverty and adversity. But recently, Democratic candidates have taken that trope to identity-politics extreme." . . .
