“It is never too late to give up your prejudices”
―
Jan. 2016: Coulter Trusts Trump: During the 2016 campaign, Coulter wrote a book-length endorsement of her preferred candidate, In Trump We Trust.
January 6, 2021: Coulter Breaks Ranks:
But Coulter changed her mind as the violent spectacle of gun-toting Trump acolytes storming the United States Capitol in armed standoffs with cops unfolded on global television screens.
“We finally got the authoritarian liberals have been talking about,” right-wing firebrand Coulter told The Daily Beast. “And I want to point out what a gigantic pussy he is.
Who are these people still supporting Trump and this nonsense ‘stop the steal’? I don’t understand why. Why are you doing this for Trump when he doesn’t give a crap about you? These poor, working-class Americans, hanging on by their fingernails! ”
thedailybeast.com, Jan. 6, 2021
Coulter, August 2023:
“Trump can barely speak English. He’s a gigantic baby. The only reason he crushed in 2016 is because of immigration — the wall, deport illegal immigrants, the travel ban (which imposed limits on travel from several predominantly Muslim countries).”
“If Trump gets the nomination, I say he will lose.”
November 11, 2022, Conservative Coulter, post 2022 Midterms, via Twitter via The Bulwark
Ann Coulter @AnnCoulterTo Trump: You had your chance, with a Republican House and Senate. You handed domestic policy to your son-in-law and Gary Cohn. You handed foreign policy to your son-in-law and a country that gave your son-in-law $2 billion. Shut the fuck up, forever.10:05 PM ∙ Nov 11, 2022
30,206Likes5,386Retweets
“All Roads Lead to Mar-a-Lago”: Inside the Fury and Fantasy of Donald Trump’s Florida
Roger Stone, Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, Ben Shapiro—they’ve all made their way to the Sunshine State, fueling and profiting from a tabloid culture that turns politics into spectacle, arguably Florida’s greatest export.
BY JOE HAGAN
AUGUST 10, 2021
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/08/the-fury-and-fantasy-of-donald-trumps-florida
[Excerpts:]From a distance we see the Breakers hotel, where Roy Cohn spent some of his last days watching the ocean while dying of the AIDS virus he denied having. “I loved Roy Cohn,” she says of the political fixer whose first job for Trump, in 1973, was defending his practice of barring Black people from his rental properties. “I wish I could have met him.”
Coulter was a regular reader of the New York Post and thought Trump was a doofus. But a funny thing happened. In December 2014, Drudge came to her house to ring in the New Year, just the two of them, and came up with the title of Coulter’s latest book, ¡Adios, America!: The Left’s Plan to Turn Our Country Into a Third World Hellhole, her diatribe against illegal immigration. To stir up outrage, Coulter promoted the book in an interview with prominent Mexican American anchor Jorge Ramos on Fusion, the Hispanic media channel, and compared Mexican immigrants to ISIS terrorists. “If you don’t want to be killed by a Mexican, there’s nothing I can tell you,” she said. Drudge splashed the headline on his site, and Trump’s campaign requested a copy of the book the same day. Then Trump appeared to use it as the basis of his first speech as a candidate at Trump Tower. “I mean, I pushed the whole Mexican rapist thing, but I put it a lot better than Trump did,” Coulter says.
After Trump won the election, Coulter began a regular correspondence with his adviser, Corey Lewandowski, and occasionally saw her private opinions spring up in Trump’s public commentary. Coulter felt she was having some influence. But the worm turned in 2019. “I was flying back down to Florida that day from New York,” recounts Coulter. “I see on the Drudge Report: ‘No Wall Funding.’ And I’m just rip shit.”
Feeling betrayed, she whipped off a tweet calling Trump a “disloyal actual retard.” Drudge followed soon after, pivoting his site to become critical of Trump, who noticed the shift and claimed that Drudge had experienced a “nervous breakdown” and “sold out.”
Coulter, who remains in touch with Drudge, suggests that he, like herself, was simply angry over Trump’s broken promises on the wall funding.
Ann Coulter has lost traction in the Trumpified media, her failure to pledge total fealty making her persona non grata. The style she helped create had long since run amok and morphed into something else, an entire industry of partisan carnival barkers on cable and talk radio who cashed in on what Coulter and her pals pioneered.
Trump vs. Coulter: Who is winning?
The story was about Donald Trump sparring with Ron DeSantis. Then Ann Coulter showed up in the ring
By Jennifer Graham@grahamtoday
Jan 18, 2022
[Excerpt:]
To conservative firebrand Ann Coulter, there’s no debate over whether the “king of Florida” is GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis or former President Donald Trump.
“Trump is done. You guys should stop obsessing over him,” Coulter wrote in an email to The New York Times, which recently examined tension between DeSantis and Trump.
Though it came at the end of the story, Coulter’s quote got the internet’s attention. Trump supporters took to Twitter to point out the crowd at Trump’s recent rally in Arizona, and to say that it’s Coulter, not Trump, who is done. Others, however, took Coulter’s remark to be proof that Trump has no chance to win the presidency in 2024, given that she was one of his supporters in 2016.
In fact, Coulter v. Trump is a rematch with all the suspense and excitement of “Rocky VIII.” Coulter’s support of Trump was always dependent on his immigration policy, and once it became clear he would not deliver the promised wall on the southern border, she turned on him.
Ann Coulter Is Rooting for a Trump-DeSantis Throw-Down. She’s Not Alone.
Jan. 23, 2022
Ms. Cottle is a member of the editorial board.
Ann Coulter has a gift for pushing just the right buttons to inflict maximum irritation. She has been a top-tier troll since Donald Trump was little more than a failed casino magnate.
Which makes Ms. Coulter’s recent attacks on the former president — her onetime political idol — at once delectable and illuminating. Take her contrarian assessment of Mr. Trump’s chokehold on the Republican Party.
“No one wants Trump,” she asserted in a column last week. “He’s fading faster than Sarah Palin did — and she was second place on a losing presidential ticket.”
Parsing recent polling data, Ms. Coulter made the case that high approval for Mr. Trump among Republicans is less about his enduring appeal than about the G.O.P. having been boiled down to a Trumpian rump. Increasingly, she contended, “the only people calling themselves ‘Republicans’ these days are the Trump die-hards.”
Ms. Coulter’s anti-Trump bile is not entirely new and carries the bitter fury of a disillusioned believer. While an early and enthusiastic MAGA convert — during the 2016 campaign Ms. Coulter cheekily proclaimed herself ready to die for her candidate and penned a cringey hagiography titled “In Trump We Trust: E Pluribus Awesome!” — she began souring on his presidency pretty quickly over his failure to make good on his more draconian immigration promises. (Ann really wanted that border wall.)
When Ms. Coulter turns, she does not go gently. Her critiques of Mr. Trump have included calling him “a shallow, lazy ignoramus,” “a complete moron,” “a blithering idiot” and “a lout.” She now considers his entire presidency a flop. “Trump accomplished everything he was ever going to accomplish at 2 a.m.” on election night in 2016, she emailed me last week. “The best thing that could have happened to the Republican Party (and the country) would have been for him to be vaporized at the moment he was announcing his victory. Pence would have been afraid to betray Trump’s supporters. Trump wasn’t!” [Boldface added]
Of late, Ms. Coulter has begun poking at Mr. Trump from a very specific angle: comparing him — unfavorably — to Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida.
Mr. DeSantis is a ticklish topic around Trumpworld. The governor rose to power by becoming a mini-Trump, and the former president still considers Mr. DeSantis his creation. But the governor is clearly eyeing the White House in 2024, and, unlike other potential candidates, he has not pledged to sit things out if Mr. Trump runs. Such disloyalty does not sit well with the former president, and there are rumblings of a brewing feud between the two Florida Men. As the water cooler chatter goes: Mr. Trump sees Mr. DeSantis as an ungrateful upstart, while Mr. DeSantis sees Mr. Trump as expecting too much groveling.
Earlier this month, when Mr. Trump called politicians who refuse to reveal their booster status “gutless,” it was seen as a slap at Mr. DeSantis, who has been shifty about his booster situation. A few days later, Mr. DeSantis voiced regret over not aggressively opposing the nationwide lockdown that Mr. Trump ordered early in the pandemic.
Republicans are eager to downplay tensions that risk undermining party unity.
But Ms. Coulter is eager to fan the flames. “Trump is demanding to know Ron DeSantis’s booster status, and I can now reveal it,” she tweeted about the kerfuffle. “He was a loyal booster when Trump ran in 2016, but then he learned our president was a liar and con man whose grift was permanent.”
Ms. Coulter, it seems, has found a shiny new leader with whom to antagonize her former hero. “For months now, Trump’s been playing the aging silent film star Norma Desmond in ‘Sunset Boulevard’ to DeSantis’s younger, prettier Betty Schaefer,” she wrote in her column Wednesday, which closed with this punch to the throat: “Give voters a populist conservative who’s not a con man and a liar and they’ll be ‘Republicans’ again. No wonder Trump hates DeSantis.”
In her email, Ms. Coulter got even more personal. “DeSantis is better than Trump, for many, many reasons, including: He won’t bring Jared and Ivanka into the White House.” She also expressed confidence that Mr. DeSantis can handle Mr. Trump. “He’s mostly just ignoring the 11-year-old. Unlike Trump, DeSantis has a day job.”
Having split with Mr. Trump, Ms. Coulter has an obvious interest in pushing the line that he is a washed-up relic. That said, the gal has a track record for sensing — and exploiting — political vulnerabilities.
She is also just one tiny piece of a bigger predicament the G.O.P. is facing. Every whisper of discord between Mr. Trump and other Republican leaders is going to be devoured — and amplified — by a political class still obsessed with the former president and his influence.
There are plenty of reasons for this. Many Trump critics are panting to see the ex-president’s acolytes and enablers, like Mr. DeSantis, pay a price for snuggling up to him for so long.
Old-school Republicans are hoping that the party’s up-and-comers will start putting some distance between themselves and the chaos of the Trump era, a necessary step toward rescuing the G.O.P. from its MAGA quagmire.
As for the political media, it loves a good fight. And any fight featuring the former president promises to be tacky, unhinged and entertaining.
Going forward, Ms. Coulter won’t be the only force tweaking Mr. Trump and focusing on any hint of friction. As usual, she’ll simply be more shameless about it than most.
No, Ann Coulter, I Am Not Responsible for the ‘Great Replacement’ Theory
Documenting how a diversifying electorate might help Democrats is not the same as inciting fears about “replacement.”
Ann coulter, in so many words, thinks that I am responsible for the mass shooting in Buffalo in mid-May.
Not me alone. After the shooting, Coulter wrote a column dismissing the idea that Republican politicians and commentators had popularized the “Great Replacement” theory, a conspiracy theory that the young, white Buffalo shooter cited as a motivation before killing 10 people at a supermarket in a predominantly Black neighborhood. Instead, Coulter argued that the theory had been popularized by political analysts and Democratic operatives who have predicted that the nation’s changing demographics will benefit Democrats over time.
In particular, Coulter, the Fox News host Tucker Carlson, and others on the right have cited the work of journalists like me, the Brookings Institution demographer William Frey, and the electoral analysts John Judis and Ruy Teixeira, authors of The Emerging Democratic Majority, claiming that, by writing about demographic change and its electoral impact, we are responsible for seeding the idea that white Americans are being displaced. “If you don’t want people to be paranoid and angry, maybe you don’t write pieces like that and rub it right in their face,” Carlson, who has relentlessly touted replacement theory on his show, declared in a recent monologue.
. . .
It might go without saying that documenting demographic change is not the same as using it to incite and politically mobilize those who are fearful of it. It’s something like the difference between reporting a fire and setting one. But given how many right-wing racial provocateurs are trying to disavow the consequences of their “replacement” rhetoric, it apparently bears explaining how their incendiary language differs from the arguments of mainstream demographic and electoral analysts.
Let’s start with defining replacement theory. It’s a racist formulation that has migrated from France to far-right American circles to some officials and candidates in the GOP mainstream. In its purest version, the theory maintains that shadowy, left-wing elites—often identified as Jews—are deliberately working to undermine the political influence of native-born white citizens by promoting immigration and other policies that increase racial diversity. This conspiracy theory was the inspiration, if that’s the right word, for the neo-Nazis who chanted during their 2017 march in Charlottesville, Virginia, that “Jews will not replace us.”
This leads to perhaps the most important divergence between replacement theory and theories of demographic change. Those on the right who push replacement theory tell their mostly white supporters that they are locked in a zero-sum competition with minorities and immigrants who are stealing what rightfully belongs to them: electoral power, economic opportunity, the cultural definition of what it means to be a legitimate American. “There’s always this underlying theft—they are taking these things by dishonest means; they are taking what is yours,” explains Mike Madrid, a longtime Republican strategist who has become a leading critic of the party’s direction under Trump.
By contrast, I and other analysts have emphasized the interdependence of the white and nonwhite populations. Building on work from Frey, I’ve repeatedly written that America is being reshaped by two concurrent demographic revolutions: a youth population that is rapidly growing more racially diverse, and a senior population that is increasing in size as Baby Boomers retire but that will remain preponderantly white for decades. (The Baby Boom was about 80 percent white.) Although these shifts raise the prospect of increased political and social tension between what I called “the brown and the gray,” the two groups are bound together more than our politics often allows. A core reality of 21st-century America is that this senior population will depend on a largely nonwhite workforce to pay the taxes that fund Social Security and Medicare, not to mention to provide the medical care those seniors need.
While the likes of Carlson and Coulter tell white Americans to fear that immigrants or people of color are replacing them politically, financial security for the “gray” is impossible without economic opportunity for the “brown.”
. . .
The refusal of many GOP leaders to condemn replacement theory even after the Buffalo shooting, and their determination to block greater law-enforcement scrutiny of violent white supremacists, underscores how far we are from that world. To me, the safest forecast about the years ahead is that the Republican Party and its allies in the media will only escalate their efforts to squeeze more votes from white Americans by heightening those voters’ fears of a changing country. I’d like to be wrong about that prediction, too, but I’m not optimistic that I will be.
ROUND TABLE
‘I Don’t Think Trump Will Be the Nominee’: Three Writers Preview the First G.O.P. Debate
Aug. 23, 2023
By Frank Bruni, Ann Coulter and Stuart Stevens
Mr. Bruni is a contributing Opinion writer. Ms. Coulter is the author of the Substack newsletter Unsafe. Mr. Stevens is a former Republican political consultant.
Frank Bruni, a contributing Opinion writer, hosted an online conversation with Ann Coulter, who writes the Substack newsletter Unsafe, and Stuart Stevens, a former Republican political consultant, to discuss their expectations for the first Republican debate and the future of American politics.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/23/opinion/republican-debate-trump-desantis
[Excerpts]Coulter: Also, famous last words, but: I don’t think Trump will be the nominee, but you’d really do the country a solid if you could get Democrats to stop indicting him.
Coulter: Trump can barely speak English. He’s a gigantic baby. The only reason he crushed in 2016 is because of immigration — the wall, deport illegal immigrants, the travel ban (which imposed limits on travel from several predominantly Muslim countries). That is DeSantis this time — without the total lack of interest in carrying it out.
Coulter: If Trump gets the nomination, I say he will lose. I know it, you know it, the American people know it (to paraphrase Bob Dole).
“We should stop defiling the memory of the party of Lincoln by referring to the current organization” as the Republican Party.”