Ann Coulter Mocked for Anti-Immigrant Post About Becoming President — Which Unwittingly Jabbed Trump

Photo by Evan Agostini/Invision/AP

Ann Coulter is no stranger to taking extremist anti-immigrant positions, but a tweet she posted Tuesday night arguing in favor of restricting the presidency to those who had been U.S. citizens for multiple generations drew spirited mockery as it was quickly realized her rule would end up barring GOP presidents like Donald Trump and Ronald Reagan.

Trump delivered his State of the Union speech Tuesday evening, and as befitting our politically divided times, reviews for his performance diverged along partisan lines, with his critics panning the speech and denouncing him for ‘hours‘ of ‘lies‘, and his supporters applauding him.

Coulter’s latest came in the aftermath of the speech, with her take falling firmly in the positive column — but it was a suggestion that she added to her review that drew a lot of attention.

“That beautiful ending to Trump’s SOTU address reminds me why we can’t have a second-, third-, or fourth- generation immigrant as president,” she wrote. “Love for our country has to be in your genes.”

Coulter has bragged for years about her maternal lineage dating back to colonial times, and reporters have traced her paternal family back to her great-great grandparents’ generation immigrating to America from Ireland and Germany.

Some swift genealogical math reveals that this would make Coulter a fifth-generation American on her father’s side; unsurprisingly, she set her rule for who should qualify to be president so she’d be in. (Never mind that Americans who arrived in the era of her mother’s ancestors would have displayed similarly nativist attitudes about the newer arrivals among her father’s side — especially the Irish fleeing the Famine.)

Commentators soon swarmed to point out that not only was Coulter’s post in contravention to the Constitution, implementing such a rule would have excluded Trump, whose paternal grandparents were born in Germany and mother was born in Scotland, making him only a second-generation American. Many of Trump’s children would also fail her test, as two out of Trump’s three wives were born in Eastern European countries, Ivana Zelníčková Trump in what is now the Czech Republic, and Melania Knauss Trump in Slovenia.

Other notable conservatives Coulter has oft idolized would fail her test as well, including Reagan, whose family line included two grandparents born in Ireland and one born in England.

Coulter’s tweet ended up with a Community Note attached to it (“President Trump is a second generation immigrant through his Scottish-born mother and a third generation immigrant through his German-born paternal grandparents.”) along with a link to the Wikipedia page for the Trump family.

A collection of reactions is below.

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