Grenade-chucker

Ann Coulter, doyenne of the deplorables

The right’s provocateur of the moment loves Donald Trump but worries about the 'amnesty' bunch around him.

By Glenn Thrush

Ann Coulter delights in alienating a substantial swath of the American public – Hispanics, Muslims, Jews (in one ill-advised tweet), leftists, fact-checkers, me (until I actually hung out with her) – but she hasn’t pissed off Donald Trump, and that’s all that really matters right now.

The conservative grenade-chucker is in a unique position for someone who claims to give not damn about influencing Great Events. “I don't care about power. I don't care about credit,” she told me last week for POLITICO’s “Off Message” podcast. But Coulter has a healthy chunk of it in 2016, thanks to her self-appointed role as the guardian of Trump’s soul on immigration, intent on keeping the GOP nominee to his old build-a-wall, kick-‘em-out credo.

“I worship him like the North Koreans worship the ‘Dear Leader’ -- yes, I would die for him,” Coulter said, tongue in vague vicinity of cheek.

Half-joking aside, Coulter sees something of a kindred spirit in Trump. “I didn't get the gene that makes me care about what other people think,” she says. “I'm much like Trump that way. I don't really care. They're just words.”

But it’s his immigration rhetoric that really moves her, and vice versa. Last December, the Atlantic’s David Frum declared, "Perhaps no single writer has had such an immediate impact on a presidential election since Harriet Beecher Stowe,” referring to the author of the 1852 book “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” which inspired the Lincoln generation of abolitionists. It was hyperbole, but Frum had a point.

Last month, when a pivoting Trump suggested that there might be a “softening” of his career-defining immigration plan, the polemicist, author and cable news stalwart responded with a Twitter rebuke. And that, according to people in Trump’s orbit, helped convince the candidate that he couldn’t flip-flop without losing his base.

“I think it was Kellyanne,” who prodded him to attempt the move to the middle, Coulter told me last Friday -- referring to Trump’s new campaign manager Kellyanne Conway, who has succeeded in sanding some of the rougher edges off the candidate.

And that’s Coulter’s biggest concern these days as her man mounts his underdog challenge against Hillary Clinton: All those incipient amnesty squishes surrounding Trump (Conway, Sean Hannity, Chris Christie, Rudy Giuliani, and even Jeff Sessions) will keep trying to pull him toward “comprehensive immigration reform,” which she views as the GOP’s road to spiritual ruin, irrelevance and electoral doom.

Late last year, when Trump was tearing through the Republican field with his immigration message, Coulter kept up a lively correspondence with Conway’s predecessor Corey Lewandowski to offer criticism (she hated Trump’s sneering comments about women’s appearances, especially his slap at Ted Cruz’s wife Heidi, which caused her to call him “mental”) – and to make sure he wouldn’t sell out.

“I was worried, the first few weeks after he announced, and -- I haven't told the other people this -- I would email in a point or two now and then, and whatever. Whenever I would email Corey, whatever, ‘Stop re-tweeting ugly photos of opponents' wives,’ or whatever it was, what the final point was [was] always, ‘Don't let him back down on immigration,’” she said.

“And Corey was getting a little exasperated with me and kept saying, ‘He's not backing down,’” she added. “Then he came out for the Muslim ban on my birthday, Dec. 8, my best birthday gift ever. I finally emailed Corey and said, OK, I think he's not backing down.’”

It’s talk like this that has made the 54-year-old lawyer the Doyenne of the Deplorables, who believes – and this reflects the feelings of many Trump supporters -- that unchecked Southern-border immigration poses an existential threat to the country’s essence. The emerging brown-hued majority, she thinks, would turn a basically munificent majority white, English-speaking America into a “Tower of Babel” peopled by mostly miscreant Muslims and Mexicans.

“Different cultures have different predilections for different kinds of crime,” she said, sitting in an Upper East Side hotel room with a panoramic view of Manhattan, a beehive of diversity and bastion of liberalism. “We are used to our own criminals. For example, our criminals tend to be stupid. They leave their DNA all over the crime scene. Now we're getting people where -- or cultures where criminality is a way of life. It's every -- even the smart people are criminals, and you have these massive Medicare frauds, massive Medicaid frauds.”

Slow down. All of the Medicaid cheats I grew up with in Brooklyn were Russians, I tell her. And Bernie Madoff, who was born here, ripped off more cash than a million Mexicans. Oh, and I note out the window the black track of Second Avenue, uncoiling into the misty recesses of Lower Manhattan, to point out that in the old days native Protestant New Yorkers used to say the same nasty things about those grubby, throat-cutting Irishmen, Sicilians, Chinese and Jews.

The pushback delights Coulter, an ingratiating presence and attentive listener who nonetheless loves, loves, loves to get a rise out of her audience. Then she does this exuberant, pre-teen thing: a slight recoil of her bony shoulders every time she says something controversial, like a kid bracing for the firecracker to go pop – and you are supposed to enjoy it even if it leaves your ears ringing.

“I have huge fans. Gays love me,” says Coulter who, of course, opposed same-sex marriage. “One time, I was out with a friend, who is a total pussy, by the way, and he was worried being downtown with me. I was with a group of people, and we're walking along. And a black gay came running. He was running for like four blocks because he was my biggest fan, and my friend talks about that to this day… A huge, enormous, sissy girl, she-male friend of mine -- he just stood there like dumbstruck and still talks about it to this day.”

Coulter grew up in cossetted suburban Connecticut (her father was a Joe McCarthy-loving lawyer) but she tilted toward New York, and she’s most comfortable around liberals. When I ask Coulter how she first became addicted to infuriating the left, she summons a tale from kindergarten in which she convinces her teacher to remove her black, anti-Vietnam armband by arguing, “No one would ever trust America's word again if we don't defend the South Vietnamese here.”

She honed her iconoclastic skills at Cornell University, where she poked at the administration for its affirmative action policies – and she still loves the rush of campus protest, for or against her, but especially against her. To be un-hated is to be unnoticed. “I was sad when I'd show up at some college campus and there would be, like, one lonely protester,” she said of one uneventful book tour. “I'd say to the organizer, ‘What? Have they not read my recent stuff?’”

Coulter spends most of her time in California, but her silky blondeness belies her love of grimy old New York. I ask her if she takes a lot of grief walking around the East 80s after, for instance, calling Democratic convention speaker Khizr Khan, who lost a son in Afghanistan, “an angry Muslim with a thick accent.”

She waves it off. “I must say mostly New Yorkers are lovely,” Coulter said. “Even if they disagree with me, they'll send me a glass of wine or something.”

I don’t know, and I couldn’t quite tell after our hour together, if Coulter believes all of the stuff she says or just loves the theatrical, Archie Bunker rhetorical ruckus.

But why not take her at her word? Coulter wrote a book called “Adios America” (her new one is “In Trump We Trust”) and she embraces an old road to an ostensibly new American future – a Henry Ford stewpot of ethnic assimilation though the restriction of immigration and the indoctrination of newcomers in American ideals. What others view as white nationalism, Coulter sees as apple-pie levelheadedness.

Take Compton, the L.A. neighborhood made famous by the all-black rap group NWA, which she says is now overrun by unwanted outsiders. “Compton is all Hispanic now. And how did that happen?” she says. “Illegal aliens moving into neighborhoods -- they just move in and say, ‘OK, we want the brothers out," and they will go and attack the houses, scream racist epithets, shoot, gang warfare.”

But she can fluidly change tack, shifting from ethnic appeals to seemingly practical ones. “I'm saying I'd love to deport our own criminals, but we can't,” she laments. “We're stuck with our own criminals. Why would we bring in other countries' criminals?”

Only Trump – who in Coulter’s telling speaks the language of economic, not racial or ethnic grievance – can be a unifying force, she argues. “I love Trump's policy of not appealing to groups, other than African Americans -- and that's a special case -- as groups,” she says. “He appeals to the entire working class.”

This is not so much supported by the numbers, at least not yet. White working-class people are flocking to Trump, but blacks and Hispanics in the same economic stratum are opposing him in record numbers, and most of them think he is a racist and a xenophobe. A lot of people, at least Democrats, think the same thing about Coulter, as illustrated by a recent brutal Comedy Central roast where she was savaged for her ideology and personal appearance with equal vehemence.

She first met Trump years ago (she can’t quite remember when) and wasn’t especially impressed. “We had had lunch once, and I probably thought of him -- until that magnificent Mexican rapist speech -- in the way a lot of the Never-Trumpers do,” Coulter said. “He seemed like a -- I don't know, boorish vulgarian. I never really thought about him. I've never seen The Apprentice. I don't get up early enough to listen to Howard Stern. So, you know, I'd see the headlines. I knew that Marla Maples thought it was the best sex she had ever had.”

But all that changed for Coulter when Trump made immigration the centerpiece of his campaign: “And, you know, now, wow, was I wrong.”

Which brings us back to the election. She is very confident Trump will win. And when he wins, she said, he will build the wall and crack down on undocumented immigrants, and damn all that talk of moderating his position. “I'm getting to the point that I'm not sure I trust Jeff Sessions,” she said of the deeply conservative Alabama Republican senator who has suggested, ever so gingerly, that Trump might have to modify his stance to garner greater popular support.

No, Coulter said, Trump doesn’t need those weak people. Unlike many Republicans – who have carped about President Obama’s monarchical abuse of executive power to press his immigration plan – she believes President Trump should raise a big, beautiful middle finger to Capitol Hill if they don’t bankroll his ambitions.

Trump will “build a wall, he's the commander in chief,” she told me. “I'm sorry. That is part of the defense of America. He has full authority to do that. He does not need a penny from Congress, but I think they're going to give it to him if he wins… Renegotiating trade deals, putting a big crimp in Muslim immigration, totally within the authority of the president, solely, exclusively. It's so clever. The things he talks about often are negotiations. They often are things that are 100 percent up to the Executive Branch.”

What if he doesn’t? What if he really is the scam artist Democrats say he is?

“Then I am quite confident that I will spend much of the next eight years denouncing him,” she says with a big smile.