Right-wing firebrand Ann Coulter, whose 2016 campaign book In Trump We Trust touted the many virtues of the Republican nominee, is having second, third, and possibly even fourth thoughts about Donald J. Trump.
“I knew he was a shallow, lazy ignoramus, and I didn’t care,” Coulter admitted to an audience largely composed of College Republicans and a few hecklers at Columbia University on Tuesday night.
It was the sort of anti-Trump invective that Coulter would share privately with pals, including this reporter, over a wine-soaked dinner during the first year of the new administration, but in recent weeks she has increasingly voiced her displeasure in public forums.
This time, Coulter—wearing her trademark slinky black cocktail dress, accessorized by a sparkling, handcuff-sized bracelet—repeatedly trashed her former hero during a supposed debate in Columbia’s Roone Arledge Cinema with her good friend, neoliberal blogger Mickey Kaus (modeling a plain blue suit and blue patterned tie).
The ostensible focus of the conversation—moderated by Kevin Can Wait showrunner Rob Long, a rare Hollywood conservative (suitless, unshaven)—was immigration policy. It’s a topic on which Coulter and Kaus largely agree (namely, curb the flow of indigent, ill-educated, unskilled arrivals and get rid of the “illegals” who depress the wages of working-class Americans). Also on the agenda was Trump’s apparent lack of interest in fulfilling his central campaign promise to erect a “big, beautiful wall” on the U.S. border with Mexico.
The debate also touched upon the opioid crisis—again, a catastrophe created by “Mexicans.” Kaus, in contrast to Coulter, argued that the United States can and should honor a long-standing tradition of admitting a reasonable number of refugees. Coulter, meanwhile, approvingly cited the strict-enforcement positions of the late Democratic congresswoman Barbara Jordan of Houston, the first African-American woman elected from the South, who argued for restricting the hiring of undocumented workers—in the national interest—when she chaired the U.S. Commission on Immigration in the 1990s.
Both Coulter and Kaus agreed that, in large part due to an “anti-Trump surge,” the GOP is likely to lose the House and possibly even the Senate in the 2018 midterm elections.
“It kind of breaks my heart,” Coulter acknowledged of her disappointment with the president, and she recounted a profanity-laced shouting match she had with Trump in the Oval Office last year over what she saw as his lackluster follow-through on immigration policy. “He’s not giving us what he promised at every single campaign stop.”
Long’s opening question to Kaus: “Mickey, if a couple of years ago you had written a book entitled In Trump We Trust, would you just feel like a total idiot right now?”
“I’d be pretty disappointed. I might even be tweeting nasty things about our president,” replied Kaus, a dutiful Democrat whose vote for Trump in November 2016 was his first for a Republican presidential or any other kind of candidate. “He’s been completely feckless,” Kaus added, noting that illegal immigration from Mexico declined in the initial months of Trump’s presidency but then “started to go back up as people started to realize that Trump’s a paper tiger.”
It was four nights after Coulter had aimed a bitter Twitter blast at the 45th president of the United States—who had complained last Friday, after signing the $1.3 trillion omnibus spending bill that contained generous funding for liberal social and cultural programs favored by Democrats, including the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, but zero dollars for his vaunted wall, that he would never do such a thing again.
“Yeah, because you’ll be impeached,” Coulter had tweeted to her 1.94 million followers, one of whom is Trump. (Later during the debate, she repeated a report that the president was seriously considering vetoing the spending legislation, but after White House chief of staff John Kelly explained that such a veto would mean missing his planned weekend at Mar-a-Lago, Trump said “f--- it!” and signed the bill instead.)
