Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren officially launched her 2020 presidential campaign Saturday at a rally in Lawrence, Massachusetts.
Warren last month became the first major Democratic name to jump into the 2020 presidential race when she announced that she is forming an exploratory committee to run for the White House.
"The man in the White House is not the cause of what is broken, he is just the latest and most extreme symptom of what's gone wrong in America," Warren said on Saturday of President Donald Trump, as quoted by CNN. "A product of a rigged system that props up the rich and powerful and kicks dirt on everyone else. So once he's gone, we can't pretend that none of this ever happened."
The formal start of Warren's White House campaign comes as the Democratic primary intensifies by the day, with numerous candidates including Sens. Kamala Harris and Cory Booker already in the race, and others, like Sens. Bernie Sanders and Amy Klobuchar, expected to jump in soon.
Other potential candidates include former Vice President Joe Biden, who recently claimed he is the “most qualified” person to serve as president, fueling speculation that he might make a 2020 bid for the White House.
Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg said on Friday that he would decide by the end of the month whether to seek the presidency.
In a warning to some of those rivals, Warren touted her refusal to accept donations from lobbyists, corporate PACs or the support of super PACs, and challenged "every other candidate who asks for your vote in this primary to say exactly the same thing."
In the days leading up to Saturday's announcement, noted CNN, Warren had been weighed down by new questions over her past claims to Native American heritage. The Washington Post reported that Warren wrote in 1986 that her race was "American Indian" in a Texas state bar registration card, adding to the list of instances in which the senator self-identified this way.
The disclosure prompted yet another public apology from Warren, just days after she had expressed remorse to Cherokee leaders for using a DNA test last year to try to show her Native American ancestry.
Last April, Warren called on the Israeli government to respect the rights of Palestinian Arab protesters on the Gaza border. The protests, dubbed the “March of the Return”, have been occurring on a weekly basis since March 30 and have been orchestrated and encouraged by Hamas.