Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) is desperate to get her polling numbers back up — so desperate, she’s resorted to giving dating advice for the readers of Elle Magazine.
In a cringey video posted late Wednesday, Warren answers Elle readers’ questions, including whether they should dump their boyfriend, whether they should find a new roommate, and whether they should vote for her to tax the wealthy (spoiler alert: they should so that she can pay off their student loans).
WATCH:
You deserve better. Dump the guy who ghosted you, convince the roommate to let you adopt a dog, and I'll take care of canceling your student loan debt! https://t.co/YIMb9o1Y8P
— Elizabeth Warren (@ewarren) January 9, 2020
“I’ve been casually dating a guy for the past three months, but now he’s ghosting me. He won’t return my texts but he still looks at all my Instagram Stories. What do I do?” one Elle reader asked.
Warren, apparently not realizing what “ghosting” actually means, responded that the questioner should “dump” the man, even though the man had already solved the problem by refusing to answer the woman’s calls and texts. “You deserve better,” Warren notes. “Dump the guy who ghosted you.”
As for whether a questioner should get a dog her roommate doesn’t want, Warren says get one anyway, roommate be damned: “Be specific! Go to a shelter together!”
Clearly, at least one of Elle’s “inquiring readers” was a plant.
“I’m a few years out of college and I have a ton of student loans, but between moving and my entry level salary, I’ve racked up a lot of credit card debt. Which should I try and pay off first?” one reader asked, rather conveniently.
Warren’s answer was predictable: pay off the credit card debt and then vote for me so that I can handle the student loans.
“I have a plan for that,” Warren answered. “And that is: We need to cancel student loan debt. This makes no sense at all. We’re crushing an entire generation with student loan debt.”
“So the first thing is come help me do this. I have a two-cent wealth tax on the great fortunes in this country, and we can use that money for a whole lot of stuff but part of it is to cancel student loan debt for 43 million Americans. So there’s the big answer,” she added.
“In the meantime, make sure you’re making at least your minimum payments on both – your student loans and your credit card, because otherwise you get caught in penalties and penalty rates of interest,” she concluded.
The embarrassing exchange didn’t find many fans on social media, even Democrats and Warren supporters, who compared the candidate to her failed 2020 competitor, Beto O’Rourke, who made every effort to be “cool” on the campaign trail, posing for Vanity Fair in skinny jeans and riding a skateboard into a rally.
“Elizabeth Warren is Like that Awkward cringy Mom who tries to be cool around her teenager son or daughters friends,” one twitter user responded to the video.
“I mean, I agree with everything she says here technically (especially getting a dog) but she does it in such a cornball way that it still makes me cringe,” said another.
“Cringe” was actually the most oft-used term among the video’s viewers.
“You’re trying too hard to speak millennial; if he ‘ghosted you,’ then you can’t really dump him, he’s already gone,” said one of Warren’s harshest critics. “Go take another portrait photo with a supporter and incorrectly call it a ‘selfie.'”
Warren is currently running fourth for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination and, despite making inroads in early primary states like Iowa and New Hampshire over the summer and in the early fall, is not projected to win any of the first several Democratic presidential primaries.