Three days after Sept. 11, Ann Coulter proposed that America “invade their [Muslim] countries, kill their leaders, and convert them to Christianity.” A week later, she mused that, “Congress could pass a law tomorrow requiring that all aliens from Arabic countries leave.” To its credit, National Review, which had published Coulter’s column, said it would no longer do so.
But Coulter kept appearing on TV. And she remained just as bigoted as ever. Asked in 2003, whether airlines should offer “Muslim-free air travel?” Coulter responded that, “I’m way ahead of you. I think airlines ought to start advertising: ‘We have the most civil-rights lawsuits brought against us by Arabs.’’’ Asked how Muslims would then travel, she responded: “They could use flying carpets.” When a student from the University of Western Ontario told Coulter in 2010 that she didn’t own a magic carpet, Coulter replied: “Use your camel.”
It gets worse. In 2006, Coulter said, “our motto should be post-9/11, ‘raghead talks tough, raghead faces consequences.’” On another occasion she said, “our motto should be after 9/11: Jihad monkey talks tough; jihad monkey takes the consequences. Sorry, I realize that’s offensive. How about ‘camel jockey’?”
Coulter is not a marginal figure. Since 9/11, according to the liberal group Media Matters, she’s appeared at least 192 times on CNN and MSNBC and a whopping 450 times on Fox. In that time, according to BookScan, she’s sold 2.3 million books, more than four times many as David Brooks. A few years ago, a sympathetic profiler called her “the Rush Limbaugh of the printed word … the most successful conservative writer working today. … No 21st century conservative writer—male or female—comes even close.”
In her exploitation of bigotry, Coulter is not only one of Trump’s forerunners, she is one of his inspirations. Trump has called Coulter’s latest book, Adios, America! The Left’s Plan to Turn Our Country into a Third World Hellhole, a “great read.” She’s warmed up for him at rallies. And she’s claimed credit for some of Trump’s most notorious lines. “Where do you think all that spicy stuff about Mexican rape culture came from?” she tweeted this summer. “@realDonaldTrump got an advance copy.” Coulter has been ahead of Trump on Muslims, too. This January, after the attacks on Charlie Hebdo in Paris, she suggested that “maybe you take a little pause in Muslim immigration for a while.”
Like Trump, Coulter gets away with it, in part, because she’s considered an entertainer: “Bold, brash, provocative, talented, fearless, witty, and outrageous,” in National Review’s words. But her massive success—fueled by massive media exposure—has shown other conservatives that bigotry sells.
