Donald Trump’s general election pivot didn’t last very long. 
 
 
 
 After giving two speeches with teleprompters this week, Trump returned to his unscripted style in a rally in Richmond, Virginia on Friday. In a barely one-third-full arena, he repeatedly called Elizabeth Warren “Pocahontas”, attacked former rival Jeb Bush and complained “New York City is going with the Norwegian form of education”. 
 
 After a week where Trump strained to appear more presidential, it all went out the window in a vintage performance, which even featured a handful of protesters being arrested outside the event. 
 
 Inside the topsy-turvy world of Trump: what I learned on the campaign trail Read more 
 
 Trump has been mired in controversy after asserting that the federal judge presiding over a lawsuit against him is biased because he is “Mexican”. The comments have been called racist by many in his own party, including House speaker Paul Ryan and led to Illinois senator Mark Kirk withdrawing his endorsement of his party’s nominee. 
 
 While Trump has been trying downplay his comments, saying earlier on Friday “freedom of any kind means no one should be judged by their race or their color or the color of their skin”, he reopened the controversy by repeatedly calling Warren “Pocahontas” in an attempt to insult her for saying that she has Native American heritage. The epithet was accompanied by Indian war whoops from the crowd. Several minutes afterwards, Trump then insisted he was “the least racist person”. 
 
 The event, the first rally that he has held since the primary campaign ended, was textbook Trump. He spent the first five minutes bragging about his vineyard in the Old Dominion and then went on to deliver a meandering account of his win in the Republican presidential primary. It featured a long detour about his relationship with legendary Indiana basketball coach Bobby Knight as well as his pledge to have a “winners’ evening” at the Republican National Convention filled with star athletes like Tom Brady and Ben Roethlisberger. 
 
 Trump, who has vocally tried to appeal to Bernie Sanders supporters, probably set his efforts back by referring to the Vermont senator yet again as “Crazy Bernie”. He also yet again expressed his confidence that he can win California in a general election, relating a conversation with an unnamed friend who told him “every liberal in Los Angeles will vote for you”. 
 
 Delete your account: how Hillary Clinton dropped a 'weapon of mass disstruction' Read more 
 
 The presumptive Republican nominee also returned to familiar themes with his pledge to build a wall on the Mexican border, a topic which went unmentioned in his Tuesday night victory speech after winning the last five Republican presidential primaries. Trump said of his signature initiative: “It’s going to be a very beautiful wall, as beautiful as a wall can be.” 
 
 It marked a contrast from a more restrained Trump, speaking jerkily from a teleprompter at the Faith and Freedom Coalition’s annual summit in Washington earlier in the day. There, Trump tried to appeal to a conservative bloc of voters who have looked skeptically at the New York billionaire. Trump insisted “we will protect and defend Christian Americans” and boasted about how, in the Republican presidential primary, he won with evangelicals and “religion, generally speaking”. 
 
 Trump hit key talking points, saying “we want to uphold the sanctity and dignity of life” and asserted “marriage and family is the building block of happiness and success”. He also emphasized the current vacancy on the supreme court, arguing Clinton will “appoint radical judges who will legislate from the bench and the will of the people will mean nothing”. 
 
 It was a brief moment where Trump sounded like a traditional presidential candidate rather than the brash bombastic insurgent who has become the Republican presidential nominee. It didn’t last. After all, why be pro-life when you can be anti-Pocahontas? ||||| Tweet with a location 
 
 You can add location information to your Tweets, such as your city or precise location, from the web and via third-party applications. You always have the option to delete your Tweet location history. Learn more ||||| Donald Trump speaks at a campaign event at Trump Doral golf course in Miami. 
 
 Donald Trump speaks at a campaign event at Trump Doral golf course in Miami. Carlo Allegri/Reuters 
 
 Businessman Donald Trump officially became the Republican nominee at the party’s convention in Cleveland. 
 
 It was a bad time for Sen. Cory Gardner to be caught in an elevator with a reporter. Donald Trump had just referred to Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts as ­“Pocahontas” — again — and the Republican freshman from Colorado was struggling to figure out how to respond. 
 
 “I think people need to be treated with respect, and that’s what we’ve demanded from everyone,” he offered. 
 
 But was it racist? 
 
 Gardner clammed up. He politely referred further questions to his press secretary. 
 
 So it went for Republicans on Capitol Hill on Friday, forced to contend with yet another provocative comment by their presumptive presidential nominee — clambering for safety as Trump launched another boundary-pushing attack. 
 
 [In Florida, Trump attacks rivals — and not just the Democrats] 
 
 “Get used to it,” said Republican pollster Whit Ayres, a Trump critic. “This is your life for the next five months.” 
 
 The furor over Trump’s assaults on the impartiality of a Latino judge had just begun to subside when he lobbed two tweets Friday morning responding to Warren, who had lambasted him as a “thin-skinned, racist bully” in a speech the previous evening. 
 
 “Pocahontas is at it again!” Trump wrote in one. “Goofy Elizabeth Warren, one of the least productive U.S. Senators, has a nasty mouth.” 
 
 “No, seriously — Delete your account,” Warren tweeted back. One of the senator’s supporters secured Pocahontas.com and redirected it to Warren’s campaign site. 
 
 [Elizabeth Warren, Joe Biden lead coordinated Democratic attack on Donald Trump] 
 
 The real estate developer has repeatedly invoked the ­17th-century Native American figure to refer to Warren, an allusion to controversy about her heritage. The senator has said she grew up amid family stories about her Cherokee lineage, but that account has not been proved. 
 
 Presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump took aim at Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) at a rally in Tampa, Fla., on June 11. He called Warren "Pocahontas," a jab at her claim that she is of Native American descent. (Reuters) 
 
 Trump began going after Warren’s claimed ancestry earlier this year, responding to the senator’s repeated slams of him as a “loser” and a bully. “Who’s that, the Indian?” he said at a March news conference when asked about Warren. “You mean the Indian?” 
 
 His swipes at her have intensified as the senator has emerged as one of his fiercest adversaries. On Thursday, she endorsed presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, and the two women met privately on Friday. 
 
 The latest gibes come amid a weeks-long uproar over Trump’s repeated criticism of U.S. District Judge Gonzalo Curiel as biased and unfair because of his Mexican heritage. The claim drew a storm of denunciation, including a strong rebuke from House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.), who called it “the textbook definition of a racist comment.” 
 
 By comparison, the response to the Pocahontas remarks have been mixed and in many cases muted — a sign of how jittery GOP leaders are still trying to find their comfort level with his rhetoric. 
 
 “Oh, I think it’s done in good humor,” said Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.), who heads the National Republican Senatorial Committee, the organization charged with electing Republican senators in 2016. 
 
 Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), normally a ferocious Trump foe, was similarly unfazed. 
 
 “It’s pretty funny, I thought,” Graham said. “I think what he said about the judge was racist. When you’re talking about a politician, you got to be able to take a joke. . . . If this bothers you, you need to get out of politics.” 
 
 But others were alarmed. 
 
 “He needs to quit using language like that,” said Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla.), a member of the Chickasaw tribe and one of two Native Americans in the House. “It’s pejorative , and you know, there’s plenty of things that he can disagree with Elizabeth Warren over, this is not something that should, in my opinion, ever enter the conversation. . . . It’s neither appropriate personally toward her, and frankly, it offends a much larger group of people. So, I wish he would avoid that.” 
 
 Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who is up for reelection in a state with one of the highest proportions of Native Americans in the country, also chastised Trump. 
 
 “I just don’t engage in personal insults — that is a personal insult,” he said. 
 
 [As he moves campaign to battlegrounds, which Donald Trump will show up?] 
 
 The “Pocahontas” line spurred chatter at former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney’s ideas summit Friday in Park City, Utah, where some attendees said they were aghast at Trump’s many race-based lines of attack. 
 
 Stuart Stevens — the chief strategist on Romney’s 2012 presidential bid, who, like Romney, has vowed not to vote for Trump — said the candidate’s use of “Pocahontas” to attack Warren was both racist and inappropriate. 
 
 “If you said this in a sixth-grade class, the teacher would tell you, ‘Don’t say this,’ ” Stevens said. 
 
 “This is a sick guy, and Americans are not longing for a president who’s going to go out and use ethnic slurs against people,” he said. “It’s amusing in the same way telling dirty jokes around a frat house can get laughs, but most people grow out of that. It’s childish.” 
 
 Romney told CNN on Friday that he was worried Trump’s language could lead to “trickle-down racism” in the country. 
 
 When asked why he persists in calling Warren “Pocahontas” and what he makes of the alarm it has caused among some Republicans, Trump responded bluntly in a statement Friday: “Because she is a nasty person, a terrible U.S. Senator, and it drives her crazy.” 
 
 “The Republicans should find it offensive that she scammed the system by faking her heritage, not that I am unafraid to point that out,” he continued in the statement, which was provided by his spokeswoman, Hope Hicks. “Actually, Goofy Elizabeth, her nickname, is far worse.” 
 
 Pocahontas is the nickname of the daughter of a Powhatan chief who was kidnapped by the English about 1613. She converted to Christianity and married an Englishman, a union that is credited with bringing a lull to hostilities between the settlers and American Indian tribes. Her story inspired the popular 1995 Disney animated film of the same name, furthering perceptions of Pocahontas as a princess, although historians say much of what has been written about her is a romanticized legend at odds with the hardships she endured. 
 
 Stephanie Fryberg, an associate professor of psychology and American Indian studies at the University of Washington, said her studies have found that exposing Native American children to images of Pocahontas lowered their sense of collective self-worth. 
 
 “Mr. Trump’s comments reinforce broad stereotypes of Native Americans as Indian chiefs, mascots and princesses, rather than contemporary people who are contributing to society,” she said, adding: “He’s not using the term in any way to be honorific. He using it to mock her.” 
 
 Trump has repeatedly rejected the notion that he is playing to racial fears in his campaign. “I am the least-racist person that you’ve ever encountered,” he told The Washington Post on Thursday. 
 
 Trump has been accused of peddling Native American stereotypes in the past. In 1993, he created an uproar at a House subcommittee hearing by testifying that “organized crime is rampant” in Indian casinos around the nation. At the time, the developer was fighting the expansion of gambling on tribal lands, a direct threat to his casino empire. 
 
 Ditching a seven-page statement he planned to deliver as too “politically correct,” Trump claimed that he could keep mobsters out of casinos but that Native Americans would not be able to. 
 
 “That an Indian chief is going to tell Joe Killer to please get off his reservation is almost unbelievable to me,” he said, prompting objections from lawmakers and indignant scoffs from the audience. 
 
 Trump also questioned the legitimacy of the Mashantucket Pequots, who operate the Foxwoods Resort Casino in Connecticut. 
 
 “They don’t look like Indians to me,” he said. “And they don’t look like Indians to Indians.” 
 
 In 2000, he secretly financed newspaper ads in Upstate New York warning that a casino sought by the St. Regis Mohawk nation would attract criminals and drug users. 
 
 This spring, Trump has repeatedly tweeted about Warren’s ­“phony Native American heritage.” He tried out the Pocahontas line in a May interview with New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, who had asked about his feud with Warren. “You mean Pocahontas?” he replied. 
 
 [Donald Trump just called Elizabeth Warren ‘the Indian.’ Here’s what that’s all about.] 
 
 He has continued to refer to her as “Pocahontas” on the campaign trail since then. A Cree reporter in North Dakota chastised him for use of the name, declaring, “That’s very offensive!” 
 
 On Friday, Trump’s latest barrage left many Republican leaders squirming. 
 
 Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) ignored a question about his use of the name, delivering instead a long explanation about why she had to turn her attention back to a discussion about trade issues. 
 
 “I’m not going to enter into the daily visitation” of Trump’s comments, said Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, who warned earlier this week that the real estate mogul has a dwindling amount of time left to elevate the tenor of his campaign. 
 
 For his part, Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) said he was withholding judgment. “I haven’t seen it,” he said of Trump’s tweet. “Until I see something, I’m very careful.” 
 
 Paul Kane in Washington and Philip Rucker in Park City contributed to this report. ||||| President Trump repeatedly called Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) "Pocahontas" as an insult on the campaign trail, and he shows no signs of stopping. 
 
 During a White House event Monday honoring Native American code talkers — who helped the US in its communication strategy during World War II — President Trump used the event to take another jab at Warren without directly referring to her. 
 
 "I want to thank you because you're very, very special people," he said to the veterans. "You were here long before any of us were. Although we have a representative in Congress who, they say, was here a long time ago. They call her 'Pocahontas.'" 
 
 "Pocahontas" has apparently become Trump’s favorite nickname for Warren, who has said that she had Cherokee ancestors. Trump used the insult numerous times on the campaign trail, including at a chaotic rally in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in an interview with New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, in a meeting with a group of senators in early 2017, and more than once on Twitter. 
 
 Pocahontas is at it again! Goofy Elizabeth Warren, one of the least productive U.S. Senators, has a nasty mouth. Hope she is V.P. choice. — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 10, 2016 
 
 Trump's use of this particular nickname combines several of his worst habits: his inability to let perceived insults slide, his bullying mockery of opponents — and most of all, his general cluelessness on race issues. 
 
 This is just the latest example of Trump saying something blatantly racist 
 
 Trump has decades of racist statements and behavior under his belt. He has a particularly bad habit of essentializing people based on their heritage or ethnicity. Just look at his repeated comments alleging that federal judge Gonzalo Curiel, who presided over two class action suits against Trump University, is biased against Trump because of his Mexican heritage. (Curiel is American, born in Indiana to Mexican immigrants.) 
 
 Or look at Trump's "birther" conspiracy theories about President Obama, which helped Trump rise to political prominence in the first place. Or his seeming inability to talk about black people without also mentioning the "inner city." 
 
 Conflating all Native Americans with "Pocahontas" is another example of Trump's racist habits. 
 
 "Trump’s inability to discern the difference between Sen. Warren and Pocahontas is no accident," Cherokee Nation citizen Mary Kathryn Nagle told MSNBC's Adam Howard. "Instead, his attack on her native identity reflects a dominant American culture that has made every effort to diminish native women to nothing other than a fantastical, oversexualized, Disney character." 
 
 Debra Haaland, the first Native American State Democratic Party Chair of New Mexico, writes: 
 
 Trump’s very use of Pocahontas’ name is disrespectful. The story of Pocahontas is heart-wrenching. Toward the end of her life she left her people, went to England, contracted a disease and died at a very young age. When I think of that story — and the hundreds of sad and disturbing stories of how Native people have suffered throughout history, I can’t imagine making a mockery of their names or their lives. In my culture, we have deep respect for our relatives who have gone before us. It would be an utter disgrace to carry on as Donald Trump has about a Native woman whose life was cut short in a terrible way. 
 
 Why is Trump using this nickname for Warren? 
 
 Trump’s comments may be racist against Native Americans, but he’s using it here to sarcastically suggest that Warren really isn’t Native American. (Which, oddly enough, proves that Trump can also be racist while trying to insult someone for being white.) 
 
 Trump is referring to a controversy Warren faced over her ancestry during her 2012 Senate campaign. 
 
 Warren says she grew up being told that she had Cherokee heritage. "Everyone on our mother’s side — aunts, uncles, and grandparents — talked openly about their Native American ancestry," she wrote in her 2014 book, A Fighting Chance. "My brothers and I grew up on stories about our grandfather building one-room schoolhouses and about our grandparents’ courtship and their early lives together in Indian Territory." 
 
 This became an issue during her campaign when reports emerged that Harvard had once touted her Native American heritage as proof of its faculty's diversity. Warren, however, couldn't produce definitive proof of her Cherokee ancestry, and neither could genealogists. 
 
 This led to speculation that Warren had been a fake "diversity hire," or that she had abused the affirmative-action system to gain an advantage over other candidates. 
 
 However, as Garance Franke-Ruta reported for the Atlantic in 2012, there's no evidence that Warren ever used claims of Native American ancestry to help her get a job. 
 
 While Warren was listed as a minority in the Association of American Law Schools Directory of Faculty, she had declined to apply as a minority to Rutgers Law School, and had listed herself as "white" while teaching at the University of Texas. The head of the committee that recruited Warren to Harvard also said he had no memory of her Native American heritage ever coming up, and the 1995 Harvard Crimson article reporting on her tenure made no mention of it. 
 
 It's true, Franke-Ruta learned, that Warren wouldn't meet the criteria to officially qualify as Cherokee. She only claimed to be 1/32 Cherokee, which is too little to qualify for citizenship in two of the three major Cherokee tribes. She also doesn't have a known direct ancestor listed on the Dawes Rolls, which is a strict requirement for membership in the Cherokee Nation, or on the Baker Rolls, a requirement of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians. 
 
 But just because Warren can't find hard evidence of Native American heritage doesn't mean she doesn't have any, Franke-Ruta said — and even if she doesn't, that wouldn't make her a liar. Hazy oral histories about Native heritage are especially common in Oklahoma, where Warren grew up, and she would have no particular reason to disbelieve the stories she was told growing up. 
 
 Franke-Ruta notes that the shaky reliability of oral history has confounded other public figures — like Madeleine Albright, who didn't know until reporters discovered it that her own parents had escaped the Holocaust, or Marco Rubio, who mistakenly believed that he was the "son of exiles" from Castro's Cuba when his parents actually came over before Castro took power. 
 
 Trump sometimes uses racist attacks to distract from substantive critiques against him 
 
 Trump ultimately settled the Trump University lawsuits for $25 million. They were a major public relations problem for Trump, given damning evidence from documents and testimony from former students that the university was a fraudulent scam that deliberately preyed upon financially vulnerable victims. 
 
 That may have played into Trump's attacks on Curiel — and on Warren, who drew plenty of attention to the scandal during the campaign. 
 
 During one September CNBC interview in which Trump called Warren "Pocahontas," he also made some baffling statements about financial issues — casually lying about whether he personally invests in the stock market, and demonstrating that he knows nothing about how monetary policy works. 
 
 But Trump also launches personal attacks like this as a matter of course — and while he gives plenty of nicknames like "Little Marco" to his male opponents, he seems especially eager to insult women who he feels have wronged him. 
 
 Warren has been one of the Democratic party's most vocal critics of Trump, and she recently got a lot of media attention for being silenced on the Senate floor while criticizing Trump's attorney general nominee. So it's not surprising to see Trump try yet again to take her down a peg. ||||| Park City, Utah (CNN) Mitt Romney suggested Friday that Donald Trump's election could legitimize racism and misogyny, ushering in a change in the moral fabric of American society. 
 
 The 2012 Republican nominee, who has openly opposed Trump's candidacy, went further than he has before in outlining to CNN's Wolf Blitzer how the country's character would suffer in a Trump White House. Trump's rhetoric has caused even some other Republicans to label him a racist, and Romney said he would not be able to paper over his incendiary remarks. 
 
 "I don't want to see trickle-down racism," Romney said in an interview here in a suite overlooking the Wasatch Mountains, where he is hosting his yearly ideas conference. "I don't want to see a president of the United States saying things which change the character of the generations of Americans that are following. Presidents have an impact on the nature of our nation, and trickle-down racism, trickle-down bigotry, trickle-down misogyny, all these things are extraordinarily dangerous to the heart and character of America." 
 
 Trump, speaking at a rally in Richmond, Virginia, Friday night, didn't address Romney's criticism directly but did say, "I am the least racist person, the least racist person that you've ever seen," a line he frequently says at campaign events. 
 
 By Saturday morning, Trump was directly responding to Romney, tweeting, "Mitt Romney had his chance to beat a failed president but he choked like a dog. Now he calls me racist-but I am least racist person there is." 
 
 Mitt Romney had his chance to beat a failed president but he choked like a dog. Now he calls me racist-but I am least racist person there is — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 11, 2016 
 
 He then added, "Don King, and so many other African Americans who know me well and endorsed me, would not have done so if they thought I was a racist!" 
 
 Don King, and so many other African Americans who know me well and endorsed me, would not have done so if they thought I was a racist! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 11, 2016 
 
 He kept up his attacks while speaking at a campaign rally on Saturday in Tampa, Florida, telling the crowd, "I don't think he knows what a misogynist is. Don't forget this guy let us down." He would later double down on the criticism at a campaign event in Pittsburgh. 
 
 Romney considering Johnson 
 
 Romney, who actively sought to recruit an independent, third-party challenger to Trump, also conceded that a credible candidate will not emerge. But he did show a new openness to one non-Trump candidate, libertarian Gary Johnson, whom he did not rule out voting for. 
 
 Johnson's running mate is another former Massachusetts governor, Bill Weld, who once fundraised for Romney. If the ticket was flipped and Weld was the standard-bearer, Romney said he would have no qualms about voting for the libertarian ticket this fall. 
 
 "If Bill Weld were at the top of the ticket, it would be very easy for me to vote for Bill Weld for president," Romney said. "So I'll get to know Gary Johnson better and see if he's someone who I could end up voting for. That's something which I'll evaluate over the coming weeks and months." 
 
 Romney's comments on "The Situation Room" are some of the highest-profile support bestowed upon the libertarian ticket, which is almost certain to be less funded compared to the GOP and Democratic lines. He did however express an uneasiness with Johnson, given his position on marijuana legalization. 
 
 "Marijuana makes people stupid," Romney quipped. 
 
 Johnson said Saturday that others should join Romney in giving the Libertarian nominees a closer look. 
 
 "I think Mitt Romney hit it on the head. He said, 'Hey, I'm going to check out Gary Johnson and see what he's got to say,'" he told CNN's Victor Blackwell on "CNN Newsroom." "I think that kind of scrutiny holds up under the light of day." 
 
 Romney once again ruled out running himself, but he was also candid about independent efforts to recruit a challenger. Several sought-after Republicans, including Ben Sasse and author David French, have taken passes. 
 
 "I think you're not going to find a credible candidate actually running as a third-party contender," Romney said. "The only way to win the White House, in my view, is to become a nominee of either the Republican or the Democrat Party, and simply running to be a spoiler would not give the American people I think the chance to express their own views about Mr. Trump or about Secretary Clinton." 
 
 Trump campaign spokeswoman Katrina Pierson, appearing later on "The Situation Room," dismissed Romney's criticism. 
 
 "This again is just sour grapes from the establishment who have had the power stripped out of theirs hands by a candidate that they do not like because he has managed to do something they have been unable to do for decades," Pierson said. 
 
 And Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus tweeted later Friday, "Respect Mitt and differences but couldn't disagree more. SCOTUS too important to lose for generations. Let's stop this and unify." 
 
 Respect Mitt and differences but couldn't disagree more. SCOTUS too important to lose for generations. Let's stop this and unify. — Reince Priebus (@Reince) June 11, 2016 
 
 In Richmond, Trump alluded to his critics, though he didn't mention Romney by name. 
 
 "These poor people going, 'Never Trump, never Trump' -- they've been doing it for months. They did it with Indiana, they did it with New York -- 'We're going to win New York' -- and I won in a massive landslide." 
 
 'My choice is different' 
 
 Romney again speculated about what might be in Trump's tax returns, which he has repeatedly declined to release, claiming that he's under audit. Asked what might be in there, Romney referred to a months-ago comment by Trump that he could not lose support even if he shot someone on Fifth Avenue in New York City. 
 
 "He's calculated that he could get support even if he shot someone, but if he released his taxes, he'd lose support," Romney said. "So there's something in those taxes that's even worse than shooting someone on Fifth Avenue." 
 
 Yet Romney declined to criticize other Republicans who have harbored similar feelings about Trump but endorsed him. Romney's mentee and vice-presidential running mate, Paul Ryan, has uneasily backed Trump, but Romney declined multiple chances to pass judgment on the speaker's decision. 
 
 "Are you disappointed Paul Ryan has endorsed him?" Blitzer asked. 
 
 "I wish everybody in the Republican Party had rejected Mr. Trump and chosen someone else," Romney said. "But my choice is different than that of the other people, and I'm certainly not going to argue with them about their choice." 
 
 Romney also shared some disappointment in the Republican candidates who wooed him fervently for support, saying they largely shied away from a fight with Trump in the primary. For much of the campaign, Republican candidates squabbled to position themselves as the chief Trump alternative. 
 
 "I don't think he got the scrutiny applied to him that is typically applied to a front-runner by the people running against him," he said, lamenting that they were "firing at each other." "Jeb Bush had a super PAC of over $100 million. And they focused their fire on Marco Rubio and others, as opposed to focusing it on the front-runner." 
 
 But if Romney had ran? 
 
 "Had I been in the race," he said, "I can assure you, I would have taken him on."
– Meet the new Trump, same as the old Trump: On Friday night, Donald Trump held his first rally since the end of the GOP primaries and it resembled his primary rallies right down to attacks on Jeb Bush, the Guardian reports. More than 100 gathered outside the event in Richmond, Virginia, where Trump ditched the teleprompter used in speeches earlier this week, the Washington Post reports. In his meandering speech to a 12,000-seat arena estimated to be somewhere between a half and a third full, Trump boasted about his Virginia vineyard, recapped his primary victories, described Bernie Sanders as "Crazy Bernie" and repeatedly referred to Elizabeth Warren as "Pocahontas" before saying that he should apologize for "doing such a disservice to Pocahontas." He had earlier referred to Warren as "Pocahontas" in tweets Friday morning, which followed her description of him Thursday as a "thin-skinned, racist bully" and a "loud, nasty, thin-skinned fraud." In other coverage: Vox takes a look at reactions to Trump's use of "Pocahontas" as an insult and at the controversy that surrounded Warren's claim to be 1/32 Cherokee. The Hill reports that Sen. Lindsey Graham, a prominent, frequent, and vociferous Trump critic, defended Trump's use of "Pocahontas," saying politicians need to be able to take jokes. "You know she started all of this," he told reporters. "I don't refer to her as Pocahontas. I can see why she would be offended, absolutely," he said. "But given this contest, if this bothers you, you need to get out of politics." The Washington Post has more on GOP reaction to the controversy, which comes as the uproar over Trump's judge remarks was just beginning to die down. "Get used to it," pollster Whit Ayres says to his fellow Republicans. "This is your life for the next five months." In a CNN interview Friday, Mitt Romney denounced Trump and said he was seriously considering voting Libertarian. "Trickle-down racism, trickle-down bigotry, trickle-down misogyny, all these things are extraordinarily dangerous to the heart and character of America," warned Romney. "Mitt Romney had his chance to beat a failed president but he choked like a dog," tweeted Trump on Saturday morning. "Now he calls me racist, " he added, "but I'm the least racist person there is."