Warren simply isn’t striking an intimidating figure these days, mostly because she makes herself an easy punchline. Take, for example, the controversy centring on her ethnic heritage. Armed with family anecdotes but no legitimate documentation, she has long claimed Native American ancestry, going so far as to classify herself as a minority in the Association of American Law Schools directory. (Her evidence is less than compelling .) But what really makes Republicans gleeful isn’t that Warren might have her ethnic history wrong. It’s the absurdity of a white woman passing herself off as a minority to an academic community. That hypocrisy — there’s that word again — makes it all too easy for opponents to ridicule Warren’s commitment to both diversity and affirmative action, two issues Republicans would love to take off the table in the next election. All of this boils down to the fact that, while progressives that take Warren seriously, Republicans definitely do not — and, at least at the moment, they aren’t paying a price for that stance. Has Trump suffered for referring to Warren as “Pocahontas”? Not at all. His base, which successfully sent him to the White House, never tires of the joke. What consequences did McConnell bear from gagging her on the Senate floor? A couple hundred protesters outside his house — annoying, to be sure, but in Washington that's a pretty run-of-the-mill Tuesday. Ultimately, Warren received another round of applause from her echo chamber, while the GOP got its conservative Attorney General. It’s not hard to see who came out on top in that round. Warren may have another, more devastating loss on her horizon. Actual voters — i.e. real people, not professional politicos in D.C. or NYC — aren’t digging Warren as the front woman of the new progressive resistance. A January WBUR poll showed that 46% of Massachusetts voters want to see someone new in her seat. That means, as early as next year, Republicans could handily knock one of the left’s liberal icons out of the game. Forget about how she’d do in a 2020 presidential race. Good luck fighting the possible return of Romney in 2018, Liz. On top of everything else, Warren’s record in Washington could crumble under the Trump Administration. Her crowning legislative achievement — the creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) — is at the top of the GOP’s budget chopping block. Chairman of the House Financial Services Committee Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R.-Tex.), who has jurisdiction over these issues, characterised the CFPB as an unconstitutional “rogue agency” that should be “functionally terminated” with a simple majority vote in a recent Wall Street Journal opinion piece . It’s rare for any government program to be truly repealed in Washington, and even rarer yet for a legislator to suffer the humiliation of watching an entire agency she created be dismantled while she’s still in office. That’s quite the distinction Warren is on the verge of earning — and a stunning example of professional failure. All things considered, the GOP would be lucky to have Elizabeth Warren as an opponent on the democratic ticket. She’s clearly vulnerable to criticism both personal and political, her CFPB triumph may soon be a relic of the Obama era, and her phony grandstanding is more comical than it is powerful. It’s no wonder that Republicans love that Warren is becoming the de facto leader of the left. The truth is that she makes it seem all too easy for Republicans to win.