Ann Coulter On Trump: ‘We Put This Lunatic In For One Reason,’ Wants ‘Lazy Incompetent’ Trump Primaried By GOP
When Donald Trump declared his presidential candidacy in 2015, one of his earliest high-profile supporters was right-wing author and media pundit Ann Coulter — who was described by Vanity Fair as “The High Priestess of Trumpism.” In 2016, Coulter even published a book of praise for Trump, one titled In Trump We Trust: E Pluribus Awesome!, in which she calls Trump “exactly what we needed.”
But in recent weeks, as Trump has failed to fulfill Coulter’s most cherished policy goal — and Trump’s own often-repeated 2016 campaign promise — a border wall between the United States and Mexico, Coulter has sharply turned on Trump. It started in December when Coulter slammed Trump on Twitter as “gutless,” and as the Inquisitr reported, Trump promptly unfollowed her on the social media platform.
But on Friday, Coulter, 57, raised the stakes in her personal war with Trump once again. She stated in a Yahoo! News interview that if he cannot succeed in building the border wall, Trump should face a Republican primary challenger in the 2020 presidential election.
Coulter even has a candidate in mind to challenge Trump — Alabama congressional Rep Mo Brooks, who is rated by GovTrack as the 50th most conservative congressional representative out of the 438 members of the House of Representatives. But Brooks’ stance on immigration is what attracts Coulter.
In December, Brooks accused congressional Democrats of having “American blood” on their hands due to their opposition to the proposed border wall, according to the Washington Post.
Coulter lashed out at Trump in the Yahoo! News interview, hosted on the Yahoo! podcast Skullduggery, lambasting him as “lazy,” “incompetent,” and “a lunatic.”
The veteran pundit also said that she believed that Trump had the authority to simply order the United States military to construct the wall — without congressional approval, and without declaring a national emergency, according to the Daily Beast.
“We put this lunatic in the White House for one reason,” Coulter said in the interview, as quoted by Mediaite. “He doesn’t need to declare an emergency. I think Trump is gonna do that. I think he’s finally going to pull that pocket Constitution out of his lapel pocket and [say], ‘Oh my gosh, I’m the president. This is great.'”
But a prominent constitutional scholar, Harvard Law School Professor Laurence Tribe, immediately shot down Coulter’s claim on his Twitter account.
“No! Inherent presidential power as Commander-in-Chief doesn’t give Trump the power of the purse,” Tribe wrote. “We fought a revolution to end such royal power. And SCOTUS settled the issue in the Steel Seizure decision in 1952: Not even a war entitles POTUS to spend money without Congress’ authorization.”
