Ann Coulter talks to Yahoo News about Trump, Roger Ailes, and blowing up the GOP establishment
Conservative commentator Ann Coulter sat down with Michael Isikoff of Yahoo News at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland Tuesday to talk about Donald Trump, Roger Ailes and her dream of blowing up the Republican establishment.
Mike Pence: the “stupid choice”
A vocal Trump supporter, Coulter has made no effort to hide her disappointment in the Republican presidential nominee’s choice of Indiana Gov. Mike Pence as his running mate.
Asked to envision a scenario in which Trump is elected and then somehow rendered incapacitated, causing Mike Pence to become president, Coulter said, “That’s not good.”
“We would’ve been so close to saving America and because of this stupid choice … it will all be lost.”
Roger Ailes “never sexually harassed me”
Perhaps the biggest story emerging outside the Quicken Loans Arena this week is the imminent departure of longtime Fox News head Roger Ailes amid allegations of sexual harassment.
As a longtime Fox News commentator, Isikoff asked Coulter, “Does is bother you that the head of Fox News may have been a serial sexual harasser of women on his network?”
Coulter replied that she doesn’t know whether the allegations are true, “so I guess that kind of makes a difference.”
Regardless, she said, “I have no inside information on what’s happening,” adding that she never actually worked for Fox News, “contrary to popular belief.”
“I ran into Roger Ailes at Rush Limbaugh’s house, at Geraldo’s wedding,” she said. “He never sexually harassed me.”
How do you solve a problem like Paul Manafort?
Mike Pence isn’t the only member of Team Trump who rubs Coulter the wrong way. Her dissatisfaction with campaign director Paul Manafort has also been well documented on Twitter.
What, Isikoff asked, is Coulter’s problem with Manafort?
“He’s a political consultant,” she replied. “They don’t care about the country, they care about making money.”
Her problem, she explained, is less about Manafort and more about political consultants in general, whom, she worries, will “ruin” Donald Trump “the same way they ruined [Marco] Rubio” and others.
“For Pete’s sake, it’s not like we looked around the country and thought, ‘I want a reality TV star to run for president,’” Coulter said. Trump “was the only one who wasn’t being controlled by consultants.”
Now, she argues, he too is being advised by “the exact class of people who have destroyed my party.”
The solution? “I want to blow up the political consultants, the pollsters, the entire Republican establishment,” she said — even if “Al Sharpton had to become president to do that.”
The Coulter effect
Donald Trump’s road to the Republican National Convention is paved with border wall promises and attacks on immigrants.
But Isikoff believes it was Coulter who actually influenced Trump’s views on the issue that would become the cornerstone of his campaign.
Sure, Trump had made comments about his opposition to immigration reform and the need to build a wall. But, Isikoff pointed out, it wasn’t until after reading Coulter’s book, “Adios America: The Left’s Plan to Turn Our Country Into a Third World Hellhole” — that Trump really starting to ramp up the rhetoric.
Coulter happily embraced this theory, claiming that she’d sent the book to several other conservative leaders — including three of Trump’s Republican primary rivals — with no results.
Then, “the week before ‘Adios America’ came out, I did that interview with Jorge Ramos,” she said, referring to her heated exchange with the renowned Univision anchor in which Coulter argued that Mexican immigrants were more of a threat to the U.S. than ISIS.
The interview promptly went viral, and soon, Coulter claims, she received an email from Donald Trump requesting an advance copy of her book.
“And then, the Mexican rapist speech,” Coulter said, giddily recalling Trump’s now-infamous campaign announcement, in which he described Mexican immigrants as criminals and rapists. “My work was done.”
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