Ann Coulter cranked up her battle with Donald Trump again Friday with another broadside about his border wall tactics. The conservative commentator declared that the “only national emergency is that our president is an idiot.”
Trump scrambled earlier Friday to distance himself from her and her vitriolic comments about him, claiming in a Rose Garden address Friday, to everyone’s surprise: “Ann Coulter, I don’t know her. I hardly know her. I haven’t spoken to her in way over a year.”
In the announcement of his national emergency declaration to divert funding for the wall, he added that Coulter had “gone off the reservation” in her increasingly harsh criticism of him.
“Thank God [Trump has] relieved me of any responsibility for what he’s been doing,” Coulter said on KABC-AM’s “Morning Drive” program in Los Angeles on Friday, just minutes after Trump’s comments. “That was the biggest favor anyone could do me today.”
The Mexican border wall was “the promise he made every single day at every single speech. Forget the fact that he’s digging his own grave,” she added. “The only national emergency is that our president is an idiot.”
Coulter, a onetime major Trump backer who wrote the book In Trump We Trust: E Pluribus Awesome, is convinced the president’s declaration of a national emergency is a “scam,” and that he’ll never build the cement wall he vowed to erect.
Trump also tried to distance himself from Fox News host Sean Hannity and from criticism that he is Trump’s shadow president. Hannity had been urging Trump to declare a national emergency to begin building the border wall.
“Sean Hannity has been a terrific, terrific supporter of what I do,” Trump said, but he insisted that right-wing pundits “don’t decide policy.”
As for Coulter’s apparently former influence, MSNBC host Stephanie Ruhle said just last month that Trump wouldn’t budge on his commitment to the border wall because right-wing pundits like Coulter would rile up his base.
He doesn’t want to be called a “fraud and a weenie” by Coulter, Ruhle declared.
