Ann Coulter, author of Adios, America, joined SiriusXM hosts Rebecca Mansour and Joel Pollak on Breitbart News Sunday to talk about President Trump’s apparent retreat from the positions he took on illegal immigration and border security during his campaign.
Mansour said that just as Adios, America articulated the frustrations of the American electorate on the issue of immigration and helped propel Donald Trump to victory in 2016, Coulter’s social media posts during the past week have captured the frustration of Trump voters with the president’s apparent retreat from his tough stance on immigration reform.
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“I was just reading an article by my friend John Phillips about how the California parole board is looking at releasing one of the Charles Manson killers, and people are arguing against it. I thought, ‘This is what the Trump administration is like every day.’ We have to be on red alert. We have to be drinking espresso coffee all day to make sure our leaders don’t do completely insane things,” Coulter said.
“What is more central to the Trump campaign than ‘build a wall?’” she asked.
“I can’t really watch the news anymore; it’s too depressing,” she confessed. “I think it’s time to go the route of what I’d planned to do if Hillary had won, and just decide the country is over and wash my hands of it. But I did watch Fox News Sunday, and a really great senator, Sen. Roy Blunt – I mean, he’s normally pretty good – his proposal is that what we need first, before DACA, is a declaration from the president that the border is secure.”
“Are you kidding?” Mansour exclaimed, earning praise from Coulter for having exactly the right reaction to Blunt’s idea.
“You may have seen my Twitter indignation over this saying, ‘No, no, no, Sen. Blunt. This is not what the Trump voters are waiting for. We’re waiting for – what’s it called? What’s it called again? – oh, I know! A wall!” Coulter said.
She asked in exasperation, “Why is it so hard for them to say, ‘A wall’? It’s kind of a primitive technology. It’s been around for about 10,000 years. We want a wall. Trump ran on it. Why are we still fighting for this?”
“And then later, the beating heart of the Trump movement, Guy Benson, said, ‘No, the Trump voters, they’re going to be fine if there’s no wall and a DACA amnesty,” Coulter continued sarcastically. “I just thought, ‘How do you find guests who have been in a coma for three years?’”
Coulter and Mansour mocked the current obsession of the political class with debating the exact meaning of “wall,” much as former President Bill Clinton famously challenged the meaning of the word “is,” in a bid to find something short of building an actual wall that might placate voters.
“I mean, I knew the swamp was going to dig in, and every media outlet – well, except Breitbart News and the Daily Caller and about three talk radio hosts; we knew this was going to happen. These are the columns I was writing soon after Trump was elected – and by the way, all the Trump diehards were denouncing me for them – warning Trump why I was a little nervous when he wasn’t making Kris Kobach his Homeland Security director,” Coulter said.
Instead, she said Trump made such lamentable appointments as naming mass-immigration defender Marc Short to his White House staff.
“Marc Short not only was heavily lobbying the Koch Brothers into making an eight-figure investment into stopping the Trump Train, but Marc Short leapt on the Rubio campaign, which I could end the sentence there, and it would be bad enough,” Coulter charged. “When did he jump on the Rubio campaign? After Chris Christie batted him around like a rag doll at that New Hampshire debate!”
“Now, it’s all NeverTrumpers working there, and personnel is policy, particularly for someone like Donald Trump,” she said of the Trump White House. “I don’t understand it because his instincts have been so good. This was not a quick affectation he adopted for the campaign. He was tweeting against amnesty years before he announced, or at least back when they were pushing the Gang of Eight amnesty.”
“All of his instincts, he was attacked relentlessly, he didn’t back down during the campaign – and then he gets elected president, and suddenly Goldman Sachs and Rubio staffers are running everything, and that bimbo Nikki Haley at the U.N. How can we fight this?” she exclaimed.
Pollak asked if the White House strategy could be seen as an example of Bill Clinton’s fabled “triangulation” strategy, which essentially amounted to staking out a “centrist” position partway between the demands of the political left and right.
“No, I think it’s lazy stupidity,” Coulter replied. “For one thing, just a historical note, when did Bill Clinton triangulate, and on what sorts of things? It was after, thanks to his impressive leadership of the country for the first two years of his administration, the Democrats lost control of Congress for the first time in half a century. The pushback was pretty strong. Here we have exactly the opposite, despite running this candidate who was taking the popular issues.”
“You know, Trump came with a lot of baggage,” she reflected. “Nobody was voting for the Access Hollywood tape. I don’t know how much clearer the voters can make it: we don’t care. Just build a wall, and stop dumping the Third World on us.”
“Which they’ve been trying to communicate in various ways incessantly – blocking three amnesties in a little more than the last decade, throwing Eric Cantor out, and now we’ve put this utterly implausible candidate in the White House. Why? Because of his positions,” she added.
Coulter argued that Trump’s campaign could be seen as a form of “triangulation,” since he was not guided by either party’s dominant ideology.
“He did not take the standard Republican positions. He did not take the standard Democrat positions. What he did was look around and say, ‘Hey, I think I’ll take the popular side of every issue,’” she explained.
“Thus, for example, he didn’t want to cut entitlements. He did not run on tax-cutting. But what do we get? We’re getting all of the Paul Ryan agenda, going straight to tax cuts for the rich. Don’t get me wrong: I love tax cuts, but that’s not why Trump won. People don’t care about taxes if they don’t have jobs,” she said.
“He ran on, well, immigration, immigration, immigration, trade, and not starting any more wars. And we basically have Bush/Clinton out of this guy – because who’s he hiring? People who want to go to war constantly. What was that idiotic bombing in Syria about? At least we got him to back away from starting yet another pointless war. The human meat grinder in Afghanistan. Why do we even have troops in South Korea? He’s not doing the reaching out to Russia. And immigration is a bipartisan issue. Who does it hurt most of all? African Americans,” she argued.
Pollak amplified Coulter’s point by noting that the basic deal currently contemplated by President Trump – amnesty now in exchange for border security later, or even promises to address both issues simultaneously – has been consistently rejected by voters for more than a decade.
“Yes, and Americans aren’t stupid. You’re absolutely right. It makes zero sense to ever be talking about amnesty, or anything else about what you’re going to do with the illegals already here, until you have a wall,” Coulter told Pollak.
“First, there’s a wall. Then we’ll talk about what happens to illegals already here. I’d say deport them, but we can’t even have the discussion until you don’t have more coming, and that is what has happened after every amnesty,” she noted. “I mean, there was a big one in ’86, and there have been small ones since then. DACA led to that enormous border surge that you guys covered heroically while the mainstream media was covering it up, with all the Central Americans crashing the gates and dying in the process.”
“Number one, it has to be border security. Why Trump is doing this, I can’t imagine. Why he didn’t put Kris Kobach as Homeland Security director, why he hired the top leadership of Goldman Sachs and moved them into the White House – I don’t know, but this is not what he ran on. He’s off the Trump Train! Come back!” she cried.
Coulter agreed it was a matter of grave concern that some of the amnesty proposals currently floating around Washington would explode the federal debt by making former illegal aliens eligible for various benefit programs, including Obamacare subsidies, but ultimately, the details matter less than the principles at stake.
“It makes it a million times worse, yes. Don’t get me wrong,” she stressed.
“But Congress could pass an amnesty for one single illegal alien who has just discovered a cure for cancer, and immediately, the ACLU’s migrant rights project, La Raza, one million other organizations – of course, Catholic charities, Lutheran charities – would be bringing lawsuits. It would end up before a Hawaiian judge. He’d say, ‘Oh, no, this isn’t fair. It discriminates on, you know, ability to find cures for cancer. That’s unconstitutional.’ Then it would go to the Ninth Circuit, and suddenly, it’s amnesty for every illegal alien not only here, but all who come in the next 20 years,” she predicted.
“There is no possible way to limit an amnesty, as we found out from the 1986 amnesty. The Ninth Circuit was still accepting hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants under the 1986 amnesty in 2006, 20 years later. Their argument was, ‘It isn’t fair we missed out on the first amnesty just because we weren’t here,’” she noted.
Coulter warned that an amnesty deal could trigger a “chain migration” flood of millions even “before the Ninth Circuit gets ahold of it” because extended family members would quickly be swept into the program along with the much-heralded “Dreamers.”
“They all get to come, and they get to bring all of their extended relatives,” she said. “What else do we have to do to say, ‘No, stop; no more? We put Donald Trump in the White House.’”
Asked what strategy she advised opponents of DACA amnesty to pursue, Coulter chuckled, “I really enjoyed the burning of the MAGA hats.”
“What Breitbart is doing: interviews with the Angel Moms,” she continued. “Long-term, it’s for Trump to have a total housecleaning at the White House and have more than one person any place in the Trump administration who agrees with his entire campaign, as opposed to all the ones who opposed it and lost, or would have lost.”
“That’s short-term, we need a White House housecleaning,” she corrected herself. “Longer term, I think we may have to look at a third party. These are the popular ideas. Trump may not follow his own campaign strategy, but there it is, for any politician willing to take up the cause.”
“As I pointed out recently, even that crazy little fellow Ross Perot, he was ahead in the polls until he started talking about crazy stuff, and that was 20 years ago,” she recalled. “Things have gotten so much worse with immigration. I think the idea of a third party would be absolutely viable now.”
“You don’t have to call it the Trump Party, but it would be the Trump Party because the issues Donald Trump won on – I think it’s a fantastic idea to not have to take the suicidal positions of the Republican Party or the suicidal identity politics of the Democratic Party, and just say, ‘I’m going to run on the popular side of every issue. Does anybody else want to take this issues from me?’ because apparently, neither party does, nor does Trump himself,” Coulter said.
Breitbart News Sunday airs on SiriusXM Patriot Channel 125 on Sunday evenings from 7-10:00 pm Eastern.