Entertainment

Ann Coulter Admits Delta Tantrum Was All About Legroom

EGO-TRIPPING

The conservative commentator cannot stop whining about Delta Air Lines switching her seat.

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Photo Illustration by The Daily Beast

Ann Coulter is still livid at Delta Air Lines.

Forty-eight hours after she sent the first of at least 50 tweets to her more than 1.6 million Twitter followers about her bad experience flying from New York’s La Guardia Airport to West Palm Beach, Florida, on Saturday, she continued her complaining in her first interview about her experience on CBS News’ digital streaming platform.

The conservative commentator took her usual trolling to the next level when she declared Delta “the worst airline in America” for moving her to a different, “less desirable” seat on the plane for the three-hour flight.

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Following Coulter’s tweetstorm, in which she attacked not just the airline and one of its flight attendants, but also posted a photo of the woman who she claims stole her “pre-booked” seat, Delta fired back with a statement that accused her of “unacceptable and unnecessary” behavior.

Initially, Coulter wrote in a tweet, “Not really worth spending all that money on planes when @Delta gate staff give your seat away,” leading some to believe that she had been kicked off the plane or not allowed to board in the first place, as other airlines have done to passengers in recent months. The confusion was bad enough that Coulter was forced to clarify it in a subsequent tweet that she was merely moved to a “less desirable” seat.

“It took about 10 minutes for the tweeting, contrary to what liberals seem to imagine, that both Donald Trump and I spend hour and hours,” Coulter said at the top of her interview Monday, though her tweets continued late into the night the day after the traumatizing incident.

“I carefully booked a very desirable seat for specific reasons,” she added. Asked what those reasons are, Coulter said, “What does that matter? I have my reasons, but I think that’s kind of irrelevant right now.” Apparently, she was demanding the same privacy that she ripped away from the woman who ended up in her original seat.

Pressed a little further, she acknowledged that, “Yes, it was an extra legroom seat, it had a lot more legroom than the seat I was moved to, and that I did not want.”

Coulter said she would have been “happy to move for a soldier, an old person, a sick person, an air marshal,” and “might even say, ‘Sure, I’ll move just because this woman wants to sit next to her husband,’” perhaps giving some hint about why her seat was switched. “But I’d like to be asked, and that didn’t happen.”

“It has nothing to do with my ego,” Coulter insisted of the story that has thrust her back into a spotlight she has been out of for some time now. “Have I said that this was because I was Ann Coulter?” she asked, claiming to be a loud voice on behalf of “some poor, single woman traveling alone, maltreated by Delta employees, [who] would not be able to publicize” in the same way she can.

Asked what was so “egregious” about Delta’s treatment of her, Coulter replied, “Why does it need to be egregious? I spent time picking out the seat.”

After all her complaining, Coulter may have achieved the exact opposite of her goal, pulling off the miraculous feat of making people feel sympathy for a major airline. Delta even refunded her the $30 she spent on the seat.

But of course, that was not enough for Coulter, who made the ridiculous claim that she spent $10,000 of her time working on booking the seat in the first place. While it’s somehow true that people are willing to pay Coulter up to $17,000 to deliver a speech, it’s hard to imagine anyone paying her that rate to book a flight.

As of Monday evening, Coulter, who helped write President Trump’s immigration plan, had moved on to tweeting out a series of “lies” that the hosts of The View told about her Delta debacle.