Man, she really wants to vote for a Democrat next year, doesn’t she?

To think, after all that garbage about a Flight 93 election in 2016, it turns out that electing Hillary would have been the “storm the cockpit” option at the border.

She’s overstating her case in the clip below to get under Trump’s and his fans’ skin but a few realities are undeniable:

1. Trump will lie and lie about progress at the border (and everything else) and his more cultish fans will believe anything he says. A Democrat “couldn’t just tweet something out and have everybody say ‘yay,'” an annoyed Coulter notes at one point in the video. For months she’s tweeted sarcastically to counter Trump’s border reassurances. “NUMBER OF MILES OF WALL BUILT ON OUR SOUTHERN BORDER SINCE TRUMP HAS BEEN PRESIDENT: ZERO,” she wrote in a column last month titled “Trump By The Numbers.” There’s not a shred of doubt that a Democratic president presiding over the crush of phony asylum seekers Trump is coping with right now would be rhetorically shredded by border hawks every day, just as there’s no doubt that obstruction allegations about a Democrat like the ones Mueller laid out in his report yesterday would have Republicans demanding impeachment. A Democrat would need to show progress on the border, not merely claim it.

2. The partisan flip side of the argument in point one is that rank-and-file Democrats would have been muted in their criticism of tougher border enforcement measures implemented by a Democratic president. That’s not to say President Hillary would have tried to separate families, for instance; Trump has clearly gone further in some ways that even a centrist liberal would. But Obama famously put unaccompanied minors in “cages” during the last border crisis in 2014. New tent cities and chicken-wire detention facilities built by a Democrat to cope with the current crush would have passed practically without comment from his/her party. It would have been fascinating to see how outspoken in favor of open borders Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or other radical freshmen Dems would have been if President Hillary were managing a border crackdown. Although, given the likelihood of a GOP midterm victory, maybe there’d be no AOC or Ilhan Omar in Congress under President Clinton. Or, if there was, they’d be part of a rump minority caucus whom no one needed to pay attention to.

3. It’s possible that Trump’s tough talk about the border without commensurately tough action is actually making the border stampede worse. Various news reports about migrants traveling north from Central America have noted how coyotes and other traffickers have tried to take advantage of Trump’s policies, warning would-be immigrants back home that the border is closing soon so they’d better act now. Trump’s recent “threat” to dump illegals on sanctuary cities might also be backfiring:

In fact, Suro said, the Trump threat to send Central American immigrants to sanctuary cities isn’t a threat at all and could very well be a dream come true for many fleeing the violence in their home countries. This is especially true if they are sent to big cities such as Los Angeles, Chicago and New York, where most of the immigration courts and judges are located, facilitating efficient adjudication, he said.

These cities also have substantial legal resources and immigrant rights organizations to help new arrivals navigate the legal process and resettle. And most importantly, Suro said, they have large well-established communities of Latino immigrants, including many from the Northern Triangle nations of El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala, as well as relatives of asylum seekers who can help them find housing, jobs and services.

“If you were to design the plan for resettlement of these immigrants that was meant to be orderly and cost effective to the immigrants, you would do this,” Suro said. “This is really good policy design. … It’s what a great many of these migrants would want.”

Obviously Trump’s not as insulated from political pressure as Coulter suggests. He demanded a shutdown in December in a sort of blind hope that it would force Democrats to cough up money for the wall, fearing that his base expected some sort of action on that before 2020. Although you know what she’d say to that: If he cared about actually building the wall, he would have leaned on Republicans to do it when they had total control of Congress. A shutdown on the eve of Pelosi taking power is more like kabuki, aimed at creating the illusion of action. He fought with the Dems on a big stage, knowing that even if he lost his base would (a) respect him for trying and (b) blame Pelosi for any ensuing crisis on the border.

Margaret Hoover asks a fair question in the clip. What *exactly* would a Democratic president do differently than what Trump’s doing now? What would be the Democratic solution to asylum laws that entitle illegals subject to expedited removal to remain in the U.S., often under catch-and-release, while awaiting their appeal? What would Obama or Clinton do to streamline the asylum consideration process so that rejected applicants can be removed quickly? In theory a Dem president could have brokered a compromise with Congress, as either a Democratic or Republican House would have been willing to work on border enforcement at the behest of a president from the left. But probably the open-borders nuts in Pelosi’s caucus would have demanded some sort of amnesty concession before agreeing to that, which Republicans wouldn’t agree to, thus forcing the president to take executive action of some sort which both sides would have grudgingly tolerated — the GOP because it would mean more enforcement and Dems out of pure partisan loyalty.

.@AnnCoulter says the crisis at the border is worse under Trump than “it would ever be under any Democrat,” including “Hillary.” pic.twitter.com/w2hLEOJ7To

— Firing Line with Margaret Hoover (@FiringLineShow) April 18, 2019