Image via AP

Throughout the 2016 election, Ann Coulter was one of candidate Donald Trump’s most ardent supporters, especially when it came to immigration.




Now, as it turns out, Coulter’s support for the president’s vile anti-immigrant stance was more than just an ideological dovetailing of two dyed in the wool nativists. As writer Joshua Green reported in New York, Coulter actually helped writer Trump’s first, and arguably most bigoted, anti-immigrant policy paper:

When Trump came under fire because his campaign hadn’t produced a single policy paper, [campaign advisor Steve] Bannon arranged for [Sam] Nunberg and Ann Coulter, the conservative pundit, to quickly write a white paper on Trump’s immigration policies. When the campaign released it, Coulter, without disclosing her role, tweeted that it was “the greatest political document since the Magna Carta.”


Yes, a woman who mused about what would have happened if only people “with at least 4 grandparents born in America” could have voted, and once defended actual Nazis, actually helped craft U.S. immigration policy.

I have reached out to Coulter for comment on Green’s reporting, and will update this story if I get a response.

Imaginatively titled “Immigration Reform That Will Make America Great Again,” the allegedly Coulter-authored paper offered what has essentially become the core of Donald Trump’s hardline immigration stance. It included recommendations such as: Making Mexico pay for a proposed wall along the U.S. southern border; dramatically increasing Immigration and Customs Enforcement actions against immigrants; automatic deportation for large swaths of the undocumented community; and ending birthright citizenship—a constitutionally guaranteed right.

Coulter then went on to publicly praise her own (anonymous) handiwork:


Given her role in crafting the administration’s immigration policy, Coulter’s subsequent freak-out when Trump vacillated on his hardline stance makes more and more sense in retrospect. It was personal.