Ann Coulter, author of the new book In Trump We Trust: E Pluribus Awesome!, joined SiriusXM host Alex Marlow on Tuesday’s Breitbart News Daily to talk about the 2016 election, the effect Donald Trump’s campaign has had on the Republican Party, and the folly of conservatives who think Hillary Clinton represents the better of two bad choices.
Coulter agreed with Marlow’s assessment that Trump’s candidacy has revealed the outlines of a “uniparty” in Washington, D.C., more interested in protecting its own interests than representing voters in the heartland.
“Trump has flushed out all the cheap labor fanatics, all the defenders of the globalists, the ones who are in it for their own salaries and not for the country,” she said. “As I say in my book, their slogan is, ‘I only regret that I have but one country to give for my TV gig.’ That’s not who we are. We’re not in this for the territorial Republican Party, or for out polling firm, or consulting firm. It’s about preserving the United States of America.”
Listen to Coulter on Breitbart News Daily on SiriusXM:
“And the fact that Trump is out there alone – well, it’s him and the people,” Coulter said. “I know sometimes, some people think that perhaps it’s not ‘presidential,’ some of the Tweets he sends, but look at how he is running his whole campaign. It is with these incessant 10, 20, 30-thousand-person rallies. It’s between him, and the people, and his Twitter feed. We have this direct, unfiltered vision into the man I hope will be President.”
“It is a rebellion of the people against all of Washington,” she declared, noting ruefully that even conservatives in Washington she used to trust have rallied to defend that “one-party town” from Trump’s populist onslaught.
“It is not about the country, it’s about their jobs at think tanks, and lobbying firms, and ‘what can we do for you, Chamber of Commerce?’” Coulter said contemptuously.
Marlow pointed to an exclusive excerpt from Coulter’s book, published by Breitbart News on Monday, in which she proclaimed the beginning of a “Trump era.” Responding to the popularity of the Breitbart News post, Coulter declared, “You have the best readers in the business!”
In that book excerpt, Coulter made it clear that her support for Trump is based more on the issues than his outspoken and defiant personal style. She told Marlow that one of her goals in writing In Trump We Trust was to give supporters of the Republican candidate “some ammunition and to explain things they’ve been lied to about by the media,” including Trump’s stand on the issues.
“It is an attack on the media, and an attack on my old party, not the new Trumpian Republican Party,” she said of her book. “But some of it was written with the NeverTrumpers in mind. I’m pleased to say I don’t know many of them – and, just a sidebar here, I know there’s this big thing about how the only people who support Trump are uneducated white men. I love uneducated white men. I’m with Trump – I love the uneducated. They’re probably better off not having taken a gender-studies class.”
Having said that, she noted that her acquaintances are “mostly in New York and L.A., lawyers, doctors, investment bankers, a lot of Hollywood producers, and comedy writers,” and they were “all fanatical Trump supporters, but one” in New York, with a strong pro-Trump contingent in Los Angeles as well.
She is nevertheless well aware of the NeverTrump contingent among conservative intellectuals and said part of her book was pitched at them because she can’t “understand what they’re so angry about.”
“What is this visceral dislike for him?” Coulter asked. “Until that Mexican rapist speech that won my heart forever, I probably would have thought of Trump about the same way some of the NeverTrumpers do – which is to say, I never really thought about him that much. I don’t think I was as bitchy as they are, but I would have thought, oh, come on, give me a break, you can’t be serious. It’s his issues that won us over. No one is looking at Trump and saying, ‘Well, I don’t really care about the issues, I just want a man like that in the White House.’ No, it’s not that. We are the ones who are being substantive and looking at the issues.”
“They’re the ones who are being superficial snobs, including one of my former favorites, Charles Murray,” she contended. “He can’t get past the superficial stuff – the trophy wives, and oh, Trump misstated something about the funding imperatives of Common Core. Look, Charles Murray has spent all these years writing crucially important books about the forgotten working class in America. We finally have a presidential candidate who’s going to come along and do something about it, something I thought my party was in favor of: helping the American people, the working class, the middle class.”
“And what do the intellectuals say? What do the consultants, and the lobbyists, and the Chamber of Commerce say? ‘No, I’m sorry, we can’t help the working class,’” Coulter said angrily.
Marlow noted that the Washington political establishment considers it offensive to address those working-class voters with sympathy and champion their issues.
“They just want to please the Business Roundtable because their interest in politics is purely mercantile: how can they make money off of this?” Coulter agreed. “In one way, I sort of feel sorry for the long-suffering plutocrats who have been ripped off by these grifters, all this time – ‘No, no, no, trust me, we just need money, we’re going to make Jeb president.’ And they manage to get credulous billionaires to give them millions of dollars. Jeb had, what, $140 million and ends up with four delegates? Trump spent a few million dollars and got more votes than any Republican in the history of the Republican primaries.”
“It shows that Americans are smarter and more intellectual than either party thought. More than the party apparatuses themselves are,” she said.
Marlow posited that Trump doesn’t get enough credit for his leadership skills, having shaped the conversation on issues ranging from immigration to national security despite the media establishment’s portrayal of him as universally unpopular beyond his dedicated base.
“Without Trump in the race, we have some idea of what the debates would have looked like, what the election would have looked like,” Coulter agreed, noting that a chapter of her book is devoted to exploring that very subject. “I go through the questions he was asked in his very first interview on Bill O’Reilly on Fox News. Guess, close your eyes, guess, guess, guess. Was it about immigration? Was it about trade, about endless wars in the Middle East? ISIS, what will you do about ISIS? And the rest of the interview was about Iran, Syria, Ukraine. No mention of immigration, no mention of trade deals.”
“We know what the media would have done. It would be all global warming, talking snowmen, and trans-gender bathrooms. Republicans would take turns seeing who could denounce abortion with the most vigor,” she envisioned. “No, Trump looks around the country, sees what the problems are, talks about those problems – and suddenly that’s all anybody’s talking about. They may not talk about it in any detail when they’re attacking Trump. It tends to never get much further than, ‘he’s a buffoon!’ But man, did he turn the entire political discussion around, by talking about trade, immigration, and endless, pointless wars.”
Marlow praised Coulter’s ability to reach younger people with her work and asked her advice on fighting the “infection” of political correctness running rampant through the millennial generation. She said one reason she does so well with younger audiences is that she’s been “banned from television,” so she has been working extensively in online media – a better venue for reaching young people.
“The interesting thing is, no one under fifty watches TV,” Coulter laughed. “So my big interviews are on the Internet, are on Vice. I have a big review and an interview on Vice coming up again for this book.”
She said her experiences with younger audiences has been “great,” praising them as “bright and rebellious enough to even end up talking to me or becoming my friends.” However, she said that in a “broader view, it does seem like there’s a little bit of a problem, and it does come from 13 years of Chinese-style brainwashing through the public schools, through the colleges.”
“I just find it hard to believe that any sentient being could go through this – I mean, the crazy P.C. culture of colleges. Whoa, have the Left swept our institutions! Cultural Marxism has so completely triumphed at the universities,” she judged. “But like I say, I can’t see a sentient being, whether they speak out about it or not, not resenting it, and it making them angry. Which is why at least some of the millennials I know – including millennials who came from very left-wing institutions, and I mean, you know, their voluntary places of work, that I won’t name for fear of outing some of them – total Trumpsters.”
Marlow asked Coulter if she has ever wavered in her convictions, due to the enormous amount of hatred thrown her way.
“Well, I think, like Trump, I wasn’t born with that gene that makes you worry about what other people think,” she replied. “It’s a very useful way to be. But you know, I care about the country more, and luckily, so do a lot of Americans. I may be wrong from time to time – but I don’t think so! – but I’m always telling you what I believe. I’m not telling you something because I think this is gonna get me on TV.”
Coulter told Marlow there two major factors driving the harshest Republican and conservative critics of Trump:
One is, the ‘Uniparty,’ as you call it – I do sort of hate the phrase ‘Washington establishment’ because it’s been so misused in the past, but it’s hard to come up with a better phrase – the Republican Brain Trust, the Washington Establishment, the Insiders, and the people to whom I’m referring are 100% of the lobbyists, the consultants, the think tanks, the pollsters… this is existential for them. If they can’t shake down billionaires, to run loser candidates like Marco Rubio and Jeb Bush, and feed them all their little talking points, ‘Here, we’ll tell you how it’s done’ – these poor billionaires, they’ve been fooled all this time by the consultants. They thought they must be good, because they were expensive. That’s how many people value things: ‘Oh, that cost a lot of money, he must be good at what he does. Well, wow, Trump sure showed they are not good at what they do.
And the other thing is, there’s always resentments toward the person who wupped your butt. For example, I remember this from 2012, is each Republican dropped out as Romney – and I was a huge Romney supporter because he was the best on immigration we had had until the dawn of Trump – as each Republican dropped out, Rick Perry, Herman Cain, Newt Gingrich, they would endorse anyone but Romney. They went out throwing bombs over their shoulders at Romney on the way out. So there’s always bitterness toward the guy who just beat you. That, I understand.
But the bitterness, the sour grapes coming from Ted Cruz and John Kasich, it’s being encouraged by a media culture that will reward them – that will suddenly discover how much respect the New York Times has for Mormons and for all the people who led us into the Iraq War. Suddenly they’re respected foreign policy advisers. I mean, I write about this in my second book, Slander, actually in several of my books, all of the media rewards that are waiting for any Republican who turns on a fellow Republican.
Well, any Republican who turns on Trump – I mean, it’s hilarious. I don’t really watch that much cable news anymore because it’s unwatchable, it’s nothing but slander. I mean, if they give me a good argument on the other side, I like to hate-watch TV, but it’s just non-stop bilge coming from these people.
But I have noticed, before I stopped watching at least the news, all these people you never heard of before, who don’t exactly have square-jawed good looks, like Rick Wilson? Have you ever heard of him? Charlie Sykes? Suddenly, you want a career in TV, you announce yourself a Republican who is a NeverTrumper.
“They’re the ones who used to accuse conservatives of principle, like us, of being the sore losers, and ‘Oh, they’ll take their ball and go home,’” Coulter said of the NeverTrumpers.
“Well, no, their hatred for Donald Trump cannot compare to my hatred for Mr. Amnesty, John McCain,” She added. “I did try to oppose him as hard as I could and try to make it Romney – this is back in 2008, at the very end of the primaries. But then, when that was it, and it was Obama vs. McCain – I mean frankly, among the three of them, Hillary, Obama, McCain, I would have taken Hillary over McCain because we knew we were getting amnesty with McCain. In any event, I just shut my yap about McCain. I talked about Palin, I talked about the House races, I talked about the Senate races. In fact, I think I very gallantly started a website titled GetDrunkandVoteforMcCain.com.”
“Why can’t they do this?” she asked. “Okay, you don’t like Trump. Work on the Senate and the House races, but don’t go out and waste your precious TV time attacking our nominee for President.”
Marlow suggested some of the NeverTrump cohort is engaged in “virtue-signalling,” adopting a political stance designed to advertise their own virtue to the dominant media culture. Coulter countered that what they were doing is “un-virtuous.”
“The essay portion of the exam is over,” she said. “It is a multiple-choice, either Hillary or Donald Trump. And if it’s Hillary, that’s it. You talk about 2020 now – I mean, I’m sorry that you have a career in politics being cut off so short, but the whole country becomes California. Hillary and Tim Kaine, her vice president, have promised to grant illegals amnesty. We know there’s not going to be any resistance from Speaker of the House Paul Ryan. Democrats overnight get 30 million new voters, in addition to all the Muslim immigrants and refugees Hillary plans to bring in. It. Is. Over.”
“It’s not even going to be the Chuck Schumer Democratic Party against the Nancy Pelosi Democratic Party,” she warned. “As you know from California, in multicultural societies, people don’t vote parties. They vote their ethnicity. It will be, as in California, the Asian Democrats against the Hispanic Democrats against the Muslim Democrats, but nobody’s gonna come to the game anymore, when we haven’t won anything for 20 years – and Republicans will not be able to win anything, if Hillary is elected. Nothing, ever. There will be no point to Fox News, there will be no point to Breitbart, there will be no point to what I do. I’m retiring and writing mysteries. The country will be finished.”
Coulter applauded Trump’s outreach to the black community, as exemplified in the speech he gave in Milwaukee last week. “It’s beautiful, it’s perfect,” she said. “One of the things I’ve liked about Trump is that he doesn’t speak to Latinos qua Latinos. He doesn’t go and speak to Muslim groups and tell you what – he rejects the identity politics of the Left, which is fantastic. He speaks to them as Americans. And as Americans, he promises to bring jobs back, and get wages up, to end these job-killing trade deals, and that is extremely appealing. You’re never gonna outbid the Democrats on identity politics.”
Coulter said she made an exception for “African-Americans, who have gotten the short end of the stick in this country – first with slavery, then with the Democrats’ policies of Jim Crow, then with the Democrats’ policy of just soul-crippling welfare programs.”
“I do think we owe something more to people who have been in this country for centuries, compared to an immigrant who ran across the border last week,” she said. “And with the Democrats, he’s absolutely right. The Democrats just see blacks and Hispanics as voters, that’s it, just bring them in. And the Democrats are about to dump African-Americans and move on to the far more numerous Hispanics.”
“I think it’s really outrageous,” Coulter declared. “I just keep looking back and thinking, what if instead of dumping 30 million poverty-stricken Third Worlders on the country, starting in 1970, America had turned its attention to really helping black people. We had ended the disastrous Great Society programs, we really focused on that, I don’t think we’d be having these Fergusons and Baltimores and Milwaukee riots today.”
Coulter thanked Marlow for his praise that she’s one of the “best researchers in the business,” describing herself as “a little fanatical” about it, although she made a joke out of refusing to footnote a sea of nearly identical quotes at the beginning of her book attributing Trump’s rise to generic “anger” instead of voter concern about issues like immigration.
She credited her attention to research and footnotes to her legal background, noting that her longtime editor Doug Pepper chastised her for offering too many specific footnoted examples to prove her points, as though she were writing a legal brief.
Coulter went on to fault the mainstream media for not doing enough research and footnoting.
“There are all these cliches the media comes up with to attack Trump that don’t make any sense, and one of the ones I used to hear, every time I turned the TV on, was, ‘Well, he’s just, he won’t give us any policy specifics, he says he’ll build a wall but no policy specifics, he’s going to re-negotiate trade deals but no policy specifics.’ He’s introduced policy-laden policy papers throughout this period he’s been attacked for having no facts, no policy specifics. People say that on TV because they don’t have an answer to what his policy specifics are,” she said.
“We didn’t need to know, from FDR, how to refuel a landing craft vehicle,” she noted. “We didn’t need that level of policy specifics. We want to know what his plan is, and as I go through describing the debates, he was the only one, in either party, giving us policy specifics. He will build a wall. He will ban, or certainly significantly curtail, immigration from Muslim countries. He will deport illegals, he’ll let ICE do its job. He’ll re-negotiate trade deals. He won’t be constantly looking for wars to get involved in. What were the other candidates’ positions on these things? I mean, Hillary had to lie about her positions.”
Asked to list a few highlights from In Trump We Trust, Coulter professed herself bad at offering such quick summaries, but began by saying “the entire price of the book is worth the ‘geniuses appendix,’ which is nothing but quotes from six months of people saying, laughing at Trump, and saying he’s not gonna make it through New Hampshire, he’s not making it through Iowa.”
“A prediction is a prediction, I don’t expect you to be right,” she clarified, saying it was the smug arrogance of these confident, inaccurate predictions that “used to drive me crazy,” while people like Marlow who accurately predicted Trump would become the nominee were banished from television.
“If you were correct, if you were one of these lonely voices in the wilderness, you were completely banned from TV – and then they had the audacity, six months later, to sit around these same Meet the Press tables and say, ‘Welp, we all got that wrong.’ Well, no, you wouldn’t invite those of us who were getting it right on television!” she exclaimed.
“I also go through some of – and this I couldn’t do in columns, I needed a little more expansive capacity – I go through a lot of the lies told about Trump,” Coulter continued. “The alleged attack on the disabled reporter – utter, complete nonsense. That was just to cover up the media doing P.R. for Islam since 9/11. The alleged attack on John McCain – that takes just a little bit longer than a column, but to read the full context, I get to, as I set it up and give the full quote, get to end and say, ‘Now, reading that, do you think the media told you the truth about that comment?’”
“So you get a lot of corrections on things like that,” she promised. “It’s an attack on the media, and I think to the surprise of my publisher, not a surprise to you, it’s just a blowtorch attack on my former party, the ex-Republican Party, before it became the Trumpian Republican Party.”
Addressing some brief listener questions, Coulter said she remained optimistic about Trump’s chances of winning in November and was concerned about the danger of election fraud.
“Any close election will be stolen by the Democrats, so don’t let it be close,” she advised.
Asked if she thought concerns about Hillary Clinton’s health were a “conspiracy theory,” Coulter laughed and said that was the all-purpose deflection liberals use against any question they don’t want to answer. “No, it’s a theory,” she retorted.
She said she liked Trump’s choice for running mate, Mike Pence, noting “I only attacked him when he wasn’t yet the choice of nominee,” and reiterated her desire to have Kris Kobach instead, both because he was experienced at battling voter fraud and because, like Trump, he has been “up there all alone, with the entire media leveling unprecedented attacks against him.”
“Pence is fine; he’s not doing any harm,” she judged.
Coulter said she didn’t consider Trump’s change of campaign tactics over the past week “reining it in,” instead describing it as “a slightly more presidential version” of “the same person, the same issues.”
“Those speeches are magnificent,” she said. “It’s not new. It’s more detailed, it’s less free-form and jazz improvisational, but it’s the same Trump. It’s the same issues. And yeah, I love his recent speeches, which is why you’ve got to go look them up yourself. The media will not let you see them.”
Breitbart News Daily airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 weekdays from 6:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m. Eastern.
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