‘Heartbroken’ Trump Critic Ann Coulter: He’s a ‘Shallow, Lazy Ignoramus’ – By Lloyd Grove (thedailybeast.com) / March 28 2018
At a ‘debate’ Tuesday night with neoliberal blogger Mickey Kaus, Coulter explained how she went from Trump diehard to bitter angst—and what her prescription for him would be.
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.
