Ann Coulter's 'Grandparents' Tweet Would Ban Donald Trump From Voting

Conservative political commentator and author Ann Coulter took to Twitter to vent her frustration with the country’s increasingly diverse electorate in the evening before Election Day while pushing for Donald Trump to be elected president.

“If only people with at least 4 grandparents born in America were voting, Trump would win in a 50-state landslide,” she tweeted Monday night.

Coulter’s tweet on Monday alluded to — whether inadvertently, it’s not clear — the use of Grandfather Clauses across the American south during the Reconstruction Era, a means of disenfranchising former slaves by allowing men to vote only if they had been able to vote or were descendants of voters several years before the passage of the 15^th Amendment.

If applied, Coulter’s wish would eliminate the voting rights of an enormous chunk of the electorate. According to the Pew Research Center, as of 2012, 234.7 million Americans identified as first, second or third generation citizens, meaning they, their parents or their grandparents came to the U.S. as immigrants. That’s about 72 percent of the country’s population.

It would also have some unintended consequences for Coulter’s political objectives: Trump, who is the grandson of a German-born American immigrant, as well as his wife Melania, who was born and raised in Slovenia, would not be permitted to vote under Coulter’s proposed rule.

Coulter's book “¡Adios, America!” may have been the inspiration for Trump’s labeling Mexican immigrants as “rapists.” She followed June 2015’s “¡Adios, America!” with the August 2016 read “In Trump We Trust: E Pluribus Awesome!” The books join a long list of right-wing essay compilations featuring her prominently on the cover in sultry dresses: from 2012’s “Mugged: Racial Demagoguery from the Seventies to Obama” to “How to Talk to a Liberal (If You Must)” in 2004.

The attorney, who got her start as a senate aide, rose to prominence in the late 1990s after writing a memoir of her help with former Arkansas state employee Paula Jones’ sexual harassment suit against then president Bill Clinton — and, by extension, the ultimately successful effort to impeach him. But anti-immigration arguments tinged with notions of white supremacy have kept her in the headlines more recently.

“We are bringing in cultures where child rape is the norm, where honor killings are the norm, where there’s no concept of litter — our national parks are being over-run,” she told prominent Latino journalist Jorge Ramos in a 2015 interview on his show “America with Jorge Ramos.” When Ramos tried to interject that she could not logically make such generalizations about an entire country’s population, she had a response ready: “There are cultures which are obviously deficient, and if they weren’t deficient, you wouldn’t be sitting in America interviewing me, I’d be sitting in Mexico.”

Coulter voiced her frustrations that she hasn’t been causing much outrage lately before making a high profile appearance on the Comedy Central roast of actor Rob Lowe, during which she fielded a series of cringe-worthy jokes from the comedians on set.

“Ann Coulter has written 11 books—12 if you count ‘Mein Kampf,’” comedian Nikki Glaser said, in reference to Adolph Hitler’s infamous manifesto. “Ann’s been called things like a racist, anti-Semitic, homophobic, a white supremacist… The only person you will ever make happy is the Mexican who digs your grave.”

Racially-charged as her tweet may have been, it wasn’t necessarily incorrect. As Pew noted, first and second generation immigrants tend to overwhelmingly lean Democratic.