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WASHINGTON — Elizabeth Warren, the Massachusetts senator who has built an outsize profile as an economic populist and a progressive foil to President Trump, formally announced on Monday that she is exploring a run for the presidency in 2020.

In a video released online, Warren, 69, offered a broad rebuke of Republicans from Ronald Reagan to Trump, painting a picture of a nation controlled by a small class of billionaires and corporate interests who have bought and paid for lax regulation by their party in Washington. She cast herself as the champion who will change that.

“Our government’s supposed to work for all of us, but instead, it has become a tool for the wealthy and well-connected,” Warren said, weaving the story of her life in with her telling of America’s economic discontent — complete with charts.

“We can make our economy work for all of us. We can rebuild America’s middle class, but this time, we’ve got to build it for everyone,” Warren said, explaining that she is launching an exploratory committee, which will allow her to raise money for a likely presidential campaign, but does not officially make her a candidate.

Warren is the best-known political figure so far to officially test out what is expected to be the most crowded Democratic presidential field in a generation. Her announcement signals the start of a boisterous primary, in which at least a dozen serious candidates will likely jostle for the attention of voters in a party that is united by frustration with the president but deeply divided over how to beat him in 2020.

Warren’s answer, as laid out in her announcement video, is with a laser focus on themes of unfairness and economic inequality in America. Those same themes helped fuel her rapid rise from being a respected academic with an expertise in bankruptcy law to a titan of the liberal left who is one of the top fund-raisers in the Senate. In the video, Warren also emphasized the role of race, saying that, while things have gotten tougher for all working families, minorities face a “steeper and rockier” path because of discrimination.

“Corruption is poisoning our democracy,” Warren says, over footage of outgoing House Speaker Paul Ryan with a cake showing a dollar sign, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin holding a sheet of money, and finally — 2 minutes and 33 seconds into the video — a shot of Trump. “Politicians look the other way while big insurance companies deny patients lifesaving coverage, while big banks rip off consumers, and while big oil companies destroy this planet.”

Perhaps more than anyone else in the field, Warren has cast herself as a fighter, scrapping with Trump directly in public speeches and on Twitter, where she has called him a “money grubber” and urged the Cabinet to remove him from office using the 25th Amendment. For his part, Trump has shown a fixation with Warren above and beyond the rest of the potential 2020 Democrats — he has tweeted about her 30 times, for example, compared to just once in recent years about Senator Cory Booker, another prospective candidate — and his frequent taunts about her claims to Native American heritage led Warren to release the results of a DNA test in October showing evidence of distant ancestry.

https://www.bostonglobe.com/news/politics/2018/12/31/elizabeth-warren-launch-exploratory-committee-major-step-possible-run/ICwu79gb8npxzICRNkhrKJ/story.html?p1=BGHeader_SmartBar_Breaking