This article was originally published on Ann Coulter’s Substack, which you can sign up to receive here.
As much as I’m enjoying the January 6 Committee’s careful assembly of evidence proving former president Trump is a douchebag, I wasn’t seeing much in the way of a criminal offense until this week’s underreported story about how Trump used his “STOP THE STEAL” fundraising appeals to grift his supporters out of $250 million, none of which was, in fact, used to fight election fraud.
It didn’t even go to the poor saps who got themselves arrested at the Capitol on Jan. 6. Instead, the $250 million seems to have been funneled exclusively to Trump businesses, family and friends.
And let’s not forget Steve Bannon’s “We Build the Wall” swindle; Trump sending out a fundraising appeal to raise funds for his new private plane; and a Trump-affiliated organization paying Kimberly Guilfoyle $60,000 to give a two-minute speech on Jan. 6 (introducing her fiancé, Don Jr.). Every time you think you have your arms fully around Trump’s con, you realize it’s unfathomably more cynical and far-reaching than you could have imagined.
Is there anyone in Trump World who isn’t trying fleece to the Deplorables? Haven’t they suffered enough?
Which brings me to Dinesh D’Souza’s movie 2,000 Mules. The movie tells Trump diehards (a dwindling crowd) that their man probably DID win the 2020 election!
Using cellphone tracking data obtained by “True the Vote” (which sounds like a group named by Melania Trump — “BE BEST!”) D’Souza claims to have proof that 2,000 people delivered multiple ballots to election drop boxes in the five crucial battleground states that Trump lost.
There are two problems with this.
First, the movie doesn’t show what it says it shows:
- Cellphone tracking isn’t precise enough to distinguish between liberal activists stuffing drop boxes, and store owners, police officers, delivery men and others who have perfectly legitimate reasons to be within a few yards of the same drop box every day
- In all five battleground states D’Souza considers, it is perfectly legal for third parties to drop off ballots for others, with varying degrees of lenience. Pennsylvania, for example, allows a grandparent, grandchild, uncle, aunt, niece, nephew, in-law, household member, caregiver or jailer to drop off someone else’s ballot
- Even if every cellphone dot represented a left-wing organizer illegally dropping off another person’s ballot, that still wouldn’t make the ballot invalid. A legal ballot can be illegally delivered, although the guy who delivered it might be in trouble
These flaws have already been well aired elsewhere.
The second problem — my problem with the movie — is the idea that Trump’s 2020 loss cries out for an explanation. We know for a fact that Trump was wildly popular, sailing to a landslide election on the love of a grateful nation. Only something nefarious could explain his defeat!
Hello? Trump lost only one demographic in 2020 compared to 2016. What was that demographic?
Answer: WHITE MEN!
How did liberal activists pull off that?
In the five states where D’Souza deploys his hocus-pocus cellphone data — Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — Trump lost 8 percent of white voters compared to 2016. He lost 12 percent of white men.
That’s according to Trump’s own pollster, the highly respected Tony Fabrizio, as well as everyone else who’s looked at the 2020 election data. It was also predicted by anyone who supported Trump in 2016 — and then watched him piss away his presidency for four years by betraying his base.
True, lots of Deplorables clung to Trump as their last hope in a country that has betrayed them over and over again. But some of them noticed.
See if you can detect the subtle shift as Trump dumped ordinary Americans and adopted the prejudices of our ruling class:
During the 2016 campaign, Trump said of “Dreamers” (as illegal aliens call themselves): “I want ‘Dreamers’ to come from the United States. I want the people in the United States that have children, I want them to have dreams also. We’re always talking about ‘Dreamers’ for other people.”
One month in office, Trump said of the “Dreamers”: “We are gonna deal with them with heart … You have these incredible kids… some absolutely incredible kids.”
So much for getting illegals “out of here so fast, your head will spin.”
During the campaign, Trump sided with rural Americans, who like guns — and don’t live in opulent, lily-white redoubts where guns aren’t needed. He emphatically opposed “gun-free zones,” bans on “assault weapons” and expanded background checks, saying an armed citizenry prevents mass shootings.
One year into his presidency, Trump said: “I like taking the guns early. Take the guns first, go through due process second… Some of you are petrified of the NRA… They have great power over you people … they have less power over me. What do I need?”
What do you need? You needed Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, you cretinous moron. Anybody in those states care about guns?
Most stunningly, Trump blew off the signature promise of his campaign: the wall. While he was busy sucking up to Wall Street, Kim Kardashian, RINOs, Silicon Valley, the gun-grabbers and illegal aliens, not one mile of wall got built.
He finally got around to the wall his last year in office. Total new wall across a 2,000 mile border completed during the entire Trump presidency: forty-seven miles.
Yeah, it’s a total baffler how a president who spent four years ignoring his base could have lost.
Imagine if Ronald Reagan, after running in 1980 on winning the Cold War and slashing taxes, had gotten into office and started bleating about our “inordinate fear of communism,” instead of opposing the Soviets at every turn and driving the New York Times to fits of apoplexy? What if he’d left the top tax rate at 70 percent and suddenly started releasing criminals recommended by Kim Kardashian? And, for the cherry on top, suppose he’d turned his presidency over to his bimbo daughter and nimrod son-in-law?
Instead of a forty-nine-state landslide and two decades of peace and prosperity, we’d have gotten a D’Souza conspiracy movie about how the Democrats cheated.
This article was originally published on Ann Coulter’s Substack, which you can sign up to receive here.