In an interview with the Los Angeles talk radio station KABC last week, Ann Coulter said she was bewildered as to how birther conspiracy theorists who think President Obama was born abroad and therefore is ineligible to be president of the United States could back Ted Cruz, who, unlike Obama, was actually born outside of the U.S. Cruz was born in Calgary, Canada, to an American mother and Cuban father.
In September, Public Policy Polling found that only 28 percent of Cruz supporters believed that Obama was born in the U.S., while 62 percent of them claimed Cruz was American-born.
As recently as 2013, Coulter insisted that Cruz was eligible to run for president, but has since changed her mind. (Mainstream legal experts agree that Cruz, because he was an American citizen at birth, is a “natural born citizen” eligible to be president under the Constitution.)
In the interview with KABC, Coulter faulted Obama birthers who support Cruz for their logical inconsistency.
“So in other words,” she said, “their position is that if in fact Obama had been born in Kenya, he’d be a natural born citizen, because nobody contests that his mother was an American citizen. Why didn’t they just come back and say that then, why didn’t they say, ‘So what, he’s still a natural born citizen’?”
“It’s because they want Ted Cruz in the White House and they didn’t want Obama in the White House, so they’re not applying the same logic to each one,” host John Phillips said. Coulter agreed: “I guess that’s right, but it never occurred to anyone to say, ‘Oh, no, sure, you can have only one American citizen parent and it can be your mother.’ Nobody, nobody, nobody contested whether Obama’s mother was an American citizen.”
