Ann Coulter was among those are the far right who pushed President Donald Trump to force a government shutdown over funding for a border wall at the end of December that extended for five weeks and concluded in humiliating defeat for the entire GOP.
And now, with nothing to show for the reckless and futile gambit, Coulter is angry — and threatening to back a right-wing challenger to man for whom she once wrote a book titled, “In Trump We Trust.”
“We put this lunatic in the White House for one reason,” she told Yahoo News’ podcast “Skullduggery.” She suggested Rep. Mo Brooks (R-AL), a far-right member of Congress. He recently claimed that Trump already has the authority to direct U.S. military personnel to build a wall on the Mexican border.
Coulter backed this idea on the podcast, saying, “He doesn’t need to declare an emergency” to get the wall built, as Trump has threatened to do.
But as Yahoo News notes, legal scholar Laurence Tribe vehemently disagreed.
“No!” he said on Twitter. “Inherent presidential power as C-in-Chief dsn’t give Trump the power of the purse. 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 w/out Congress’ authorization.”
In addition to the threat to bolster an even more right-wing alternative to Trump in 2020, Coulter’s suggestion that she believes Trump is a lunatic is particularly telling and galling. The usual story the media tells about Trump supporters is that they’re so enamored of his style and priorities in politics that they don’t see his obvious flaws. But to admit that you see Trump as a “lunatic” but still fought passionately for his election, solely because of his views on immigration, is stupefying. No reasonable and non-bigoted assessment of immigration should see it as anything like the threat Coulter imagines it to be, but even if you thought immigration was very bad, how could it possibly be worse than putting a “lunatic” in charge of the American nuclear arsenal and military?
Shares