US Senator Elizabeth Warren has formally launched her bid to stand for the White House in 2020 with a speech in which she promised to tackle economic inequality.

She is the latest Democrat to launch a campaign to become the party's presidential candidate.

Even before she had taken to the stage, President Donald Trump's 2020 campaign team had responded calling her a fraud.

It is the first such intervention to target a possible Trump contender.

"The American people will reject her dishonest campaign and socialist ideas like the Green New Deal, that will raise taxes, kill jobs and crush America's middle-class," Mr Trump's campaign manager Brad Pascale wrote.

He also accused her of "impersonating and disrespecting" Native Americans "to advance her professional career," referring to a DNA test she took to prove her Cherokee ancestry. Mr Trump had long been calling her "fake Pocahontas".

Ms Warren has apologised for taking the test.

In her speech on Saturday in Lawrence, in her home state of Massachusetts, Ms Warren called Mr Trump "the latest and most extreme symptom of what's gone wrong in America, a product of a rigged system that props up the rich and powerful and kicks dirt on everyone else".

Source: BBC

BDST: 1102 HRS, FEB 10, 2019
SI