Elizabeth Warren Roasted a Supporter on Facebook

Photo by AFGE on Flickr/Creative Commons

It looks like Elizabeth Warren’s social media crusade against political enemies may have gone off course.

The Massachusetts senator appears to have zeroed in on a Wall Street hedge fund manager, who had seemingly positive things to say about Donald Trump’s Cabinet—an otherwise obvious target for Warren’s scorn—and proceeded to roast him on Facebook. Except, as the New York Times reports, that criticism may have been misplaced.

“Hedge fund managers like Whitney Tilson are thrilled by Donald Trump’s economic team of Wall Street insiders,” she wrote in a post December 1, after it was announced that Trump would be tapping former Goldman Sachs executive Steve Mnuchin to head the Treasury (Warren, because she is typically skilled at coming up with viral burns, called Mnuchin the “Forrest Gump of the financial crisis“).

She was reacting to this quote from Tilson, who runs a firm called Kase Capital Management, as reported in Bloomberg: “I think Donald Trump conned [voters]. I was worried that he was going to do crazy things that would blow the system up. So the fact that he’s appointing people from within the system is a good thing.”

But it turns out, as the New York Times’ Andrew Ross Sorkin describes it, Warren may have “condemne[d] the wrong man.” Tilson is a donor and booster of Warren’s, a rare voice on Wall Street arguing in favor of Dodd-Frank banking regulations, and an opponent of Trump’s candidacy (and supporter of Democrat Hillary Clinton’s). Sorkin talked to Tilson, and the man expressed “dismay” after reading her comments.

In fact Tilson, in that same Bloomberg interview, expressed concern about the specter of deregulation under Trump’s appointees, and also had this to say: “I’m a fan of Dodd-Frank, I think banking should be boring. … I worry about Wall Street returning to being a casino.”

It may be the case that Warren still takes issue with Tilson’s stance. She does disagree with him, after all, about whether there is anything positive to say about Trump’s Wall Street-staffed Cabinet, which is on pace to become the wealthiest in history. And despite a lot of chatter about this—it also has been mentioned in her hometown paper, the Globe—she hasn’t taken down the Facebook post, and an aide reportedly told Tilson she doesn’t plan to (although she did remove the word “billionaire,” which had been included in an earlier version of the post, as Tilson is not worth more than a billion dollars).