So much for “In Trump We Trust.”
“I’m ticked off at the Emperor God,” said right-wing firebrand Ann Coulter, who last year authored a book with that worshipful title (subtitle: “E Pluribus Awesome”), as she processed Friday’s firing of chief White House strategist Stephen K. Bannon.
Increasingly disgusted and disheartened by the president’s inability, or unwillingness, to fulfill the anti-immigration, anti-Wall Street, anti-globalist promises for which Coulter had been one of his more impassioned supporters, she now refers to Trump sarcastically as a deity/monarch in his own megalomaniacal mind.
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“If Trump wants to prove that he didn’t get the good ideas from Bannon, then it better be pedal-to-the-metal on deportations, the Wall, that tax hike on people who make more than $5 million a year, which I understand was Bannon’s idea but perhaps I was wrong. If that was Trump’s idea, then let’s have it!... Did you hear that on Wall Street, they were cheering today?”
In a conversation that amounted to a primal scream, Coulter repeatedly attacked her former hero for betraying his constituency, belittled White House aides such as Kellyanne Conway and Stephen Miller, accused the president of kowtowing to the same news media he professes to loathe, and otherwise raged at the dying of the wall along with any number of other populist policy prescriptions that Trump touted to beat the Republican establishment and Hillary Clinton.
“The millions of people who haven’t voted for 30 years and came out to vote for Trump, thinking ‘finally, here’s somebody who cares about us’—Nope!” Coulter declared. “Republicans, Democrats—doesn’t matter! Jeb exclamation point, Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton—doesn’t matter. Goldman Sachs is running the country!”
As for Stephen Miller, the former Jeff Sessions aide who briefly became the architect of the president’s anti-Muslim ban and occasionally jousts in the White House press room, “he’s just a speechwriter for the White House staff,” Coulter said. For a good part of the 2016 presidential campaign, Coulter insisted, Conway was a diehard Ted Cruz supporter.
“As late as the summer [of 2016], Kellyanne was saying that Trump built his business on the backs of the little guy,” Coulter continued. “You know I love the Emperor God, but he does have flaws. And one of them is his vast, yawning narcissism. He just seems to be obsessed with the fact that people give Bannon credit. And we all know that [Jared] Kushner is the one who won the White House for him.”
Coulter claimed it’s interim communications director Hope Hicks and former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski—whom Kushner pushed out of the campaign—who really deserve the credit for Trump’s political success. Coulter added that it was Kushner, along with former Goldman Sachs executive Gary Cohn and national security adviser Gen. H.R. McMaster, who finally got Bannon’s scalp and are probably targeting Conway and Miller as well.
Coulter added: “The Time magazine cover [a big-headed portrait of the man headlined as “President Bannon”] and the Saturday Night Live sketch [in which “Bannon,” wearing the black shroud of Death and carrying a scythe, sat at the Oval Office’s Resolute Desk while “Trump”/Alec Baldwin was vanquished to a tiny kindergarten desk]—every time he’s asked about Bannon, the Emperor God goes, ‘He didn’t win it for me! He only came in August! I already wrapped up the nomination!’ You don’t have to be a very sensitive person capable of reading body language to understand that Trump is obsessed by that. It’s driven him crazy.
“So did Kellyanne [arrive late to Trump’s campaign] and Trump gives her credit.”
With Bannon, however, “his little tiny ego explodes,” Coulter went on. “All you have to do with whatever White House staffer the media would like to get fired—just put him on the cover of a magazine and call him ‘President Whatever the Guy’s Last Name Is.’ It’s not good to show the media that you are so easily manipulable… The media is running the staffing at the White House now.”
