Ann Coulter calls Trump abjectly stupid after once supporting him

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Author and conservative opinion columnist Ann Coulter said she did not know how “abjectly stupid” former president Donald Trump was when she endorsed him in 2016.

The former attorney and Senate Judiciary Committee staffer’s 2016 book — In Trump We Trust, E Pluribus Awesome! — made the case for Mr Trump’s candidacy based on his promises to halt immigration into the US and build a wall along the US-Mexico border.

But five years later, Mr Trump’s wall remains largely unbuilt, and Coulter has gone from one of his biggest boosters to an unlikely critic, citing his many unfulfilled campaign promises.

Speaking with former New Republic editor Andrew Sullivan on his Dishcast weekly podcast, Coulter said she was quite aware of Mr Trump’s character flaws when she endorsed him but did not realise that the character flaws were accompanied by other deficits.

“I was well familiar with what a narcissistic, ridiculous, tacky, vulgar, arriviste this guy was,” she told Sullivan. “That I knew about. The one thing I underestimated, in fact, did not see at all is, I had no idea how abjectly stupid the man is.”

Continuing, she told Sullivan that Trump had not kept his promises, and had “directly” betrayed his political base of “Americans waiting their whole lives for someone to care about them”.

Criticising the former president she once endorsed is nothing new for Coulter, who in 2020 called Mr Trump  “the most disloyal actual retard that has ever set foot in the Oval Office” after he endorsed former college football coach (now senator) Tommy Tuberville for the seat once held by Attorney General Jeff Sessions.