BOSTON (CBS) - Sen. Elizabeth Warren, as you might have noticed, doesn't sugarcoat it.

Campaigning alongside Hillary Clinton Monday, she aggressively trashed Donald Trump on policy and personal grounds.

In doing so, she provided Trump and his surrogates a good opportunity to score some political points of their own.

Is Warren's open hostility towards the financial services sector good for our economy or not? What are the tax and budgetary implications of her call for the erasure of all student debt?

And what are we to make of her indictment of the greed of Wall Street investment bankers, delivered a few feet away from a candidate who has pocketed huge fees from those same bankers?

It was a good chance to showcase the strength of his anti-establishment message, and the weakness of Clinton's branding.

But Trump didn't do that.

Instead, he and surrogate Scott Brown dug out the old anti-Warren chestnut about her claims of partial Native American heritage, with Trump branding her a "racist" and Brown demanding she take a DNA test.

Bad choice.

That story hurt Warren briefly during the 2012 Senate race when it looked like she had fraudulently exploited affirmative action policies. But no solid evidence of that ever surfaced to rebut her denials and those of her academic mentors.

And the story backfired on Brown when he doubled down on it anyway.

If and when the Trump campaign gets serious, they have material to work with.

But first they have to kick their addiction to lazy, fact-free political smears.

Listen to Jon's commentary: