As reports started rolling in that President Trump was gearing up to declare a national emergency over his imagined “crisis at the border,” pundits across social media slammed the idea as just another example of an abuse of power by an irrational president. One of those pundits happened to be one of Trump’s most vocal supporters, Ann Coulter.
Just before midnight this Thursday, Coulter retweeted a post from Conservative Review senior editor Daniel Horowitz who seemingly praised Trump’s strategy, saying that the goal of declaring a national emergency “is to end illegal immigration and cartel smuggling.”
In her retweet, Coulter took issue with Horowitz’s assessment.
“No, the goal of a national emergency is for Trump to scam the stupidest people in his base for 2 more years,” she tweeted.
No, the goal of a national emergency is for Trump to scam the stupidest people in his base for 2 more years. https://t.co/6DQSkqxV8h
— Ann Coulter (@AnnCoulter) February 15, 2019
Sure enough, Trump followed through with his plan this Friday morning and declared a national emergency to free up $8 billion in funding to build his long-promised wall along the US-Mexico border.
From VICE News:
Trump is also expected to sign a federal spending bill, which passed the House and Senate on Thursday after three weeks of negotiations, and avoid another government shutdown over border security. The language of the compromise, notably absent the word “wall,” includes just $1.37 billion in funding, far short of the $5.7 billion Trump had demanded from Democrats.
“I’m going to be signing a national emergency, and it’s been signed many times before. It’s been signed by other presidents,” Trump said Friday morning. “We’re talking about an invasion of our country, with drugs, with human traffickers, with all types of gangs.”
Trump sparred with a reporter who asked him about his immigration facts during a press conference announcing the president's declaration of a national emergency https://t.co/SNQCmp9quD pic.twitter.com/m6NKKh7aZo
— Reuters Top News (@Reuters) February 15, 2019
This isn’t the first time Coulter has accused Trump of ‘scamming’ his base. In December of last year, she told The Daily Caller that she won’t vote for Trump in 2020 if construction on the border wall isn’t underway by then, adding that most of his supporters would abandon him as well.
“They’re about to have a country where no Republican will ever be elected president again,” she said. “Trump will just have been a joke presidency who scammed the American people, amused the populists for a while, but he’ll have no legacy whatsoever.”
Featured image via screen grab/The New York Times
