A decade on, Coulter’s ¡Adios, America! looms less like provocation than blueprint—its warnings echoed in policy, politics, and the reshaping of the national debate on immigration.

It’s been just over ten years since Ann Coulter’s great book ¡Adios, America! The Left’s Plan To Turn Our Country Into A Third World Hellhole was published. We are still living—happily—in the world she made.

My Amazon account says that I bought it on Kindle on May 31, 2015. I was working for VDARE, and Ann had shown a great interest in the problems of immigration for years, attacking George W. Bush for his amnesty attempts, etc., but this was new, brilliant, and detailed.

Chapter headings included “The End of America Won’t Be Televised,” “Immigration as ‘Mystery Bargain Bin,’” “Immigrants and Crime: Why Do You Ask?” and a personal favorite: “Public Warned to Be on Lookout for ‘Man.’” These, along with “Why Do Hispanic Valedictorians Make the News, but Child Rapists Don’t?” highlight the media’s refusal to ever say an immigrant did anything bad, something I’ve described at length here.

There are four “Spot the Immigrant” chapters, which are not only about atrocities committed by immigrants; they also reveal the media’s refusal to admit to an immigrant angle in any of these stories.

• SPOT THE IMMIGRANT! Case No. 1: Fresno, California [A Hmong gang rape in California]
• SPOT THE IMMIGRANT! Case No. 2: Homecoming Dance [A Hispanic gang rape in the Bay Area]
• SPOT THE IMMIGRANT! Case No. 3: Death Sentence Champions [A Mexican gang rape and double murder in Texas]
• SPOT THE IMMIGRANT! Case No. 4: Indian Sex Slaves in Berkeley [An Indian businessman importing underage Indian girls for his own use]

It’s not just crime; the fact is that there are also immigrants coming from cultures that treat women like dirt. Speaking of dirt, there’s the astonishing amount of litter produced by immigrants.

Steve Sailer, reviewing ¡Adios, America! for TakiMag, said:

Coulter’s real literary achievement in ¡Adios, America! is less in the pointillist jokes than in her architectural structuring of a huge amount of information and observation to convey a deeply black comic effect.

The running joke of the book is that liberals don’t get that they’ve unleashed on America the opposite of the principles they claim to uphold and, more surprisingly, the tastes they prefer.

I’ll link to more reviews by John Derbyshire, Congressman Virgil Goode, and Nicholas Stix, but the most important good review was this one, by New York real estate entrepreneur and reality TV star Donald Trump:

That’s dated May 26, 2015, and on June 16, 2015, Trump came down the escalator at Trump Tower. In the process of announcing a run for president (spoiler: he won), he gave evidence of having actually read it. ThinkProgress called this part of the announcement going “full nativist.”

“When do we beat Mexico at the border?” Trump asked the crowd at his announcement at his namesake Trump Tower in New York City. “They are not our friend, believe me . . . The U.S. has become a dumping ground for everybody else’s problems . . . When Mexico sends its people, they are not sending their best. They are not sending you. They are sending people that have lots of problems, and they are bringing those problems to us. They are bringing drugs and they are bringing crime, and they’re rapists.”

“Some, I assume, are good people. But I speak to border guards, and they tell us what we are getting.”

All true (see links added by me), except for the rhetorical flourish about “good people” at the end.

Here’s a video of him giving ¡Adios, America! a shout-out on the campaign trail.

How important was this book? Well, when David Frum wrote about it in The Atlantic on December 11, 2015, he said:

What seems to have changed Trump’s mind is a book: Adios America by Ann Coulter. The phrase “political book of the year” is usually an empty compliment, but if the phrase ever described any book, Adios America is it. In its pages, Trump found the message that would convulse the Republican primary and upend the dynastic hopes of former front-runner Jeb Bush. Perhaps no single writer has had such immediate impact on a presidential election since Harriet Beecher Stowe.

There’s a story (it’s apocryphal) that when Abraham Lincoln met Stowe (who wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin), he said, “So you’re the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war!” That’s how big an event ¡Adios, America! was.

It was attacked by Peter Beinart during the campaign—also in The Atlantic:

When it comes to Latinos, Donald Trump has a muse: Ann Coulter. Last June, when Trump called Mexican immigrants “rapists” in his presidential campaign announcement, the comment took many journalists by surprise. But that’s because many journalists hadn’t read Coulter’s work. Her book Adios, America: The Left’s Plan to Turn Our Country Into a Third World Hellhole, which hit bookstores two weeks before Trump entered the race, is packed with statements about “Latin American rape culture” and “the gusto for gang rape, incest, and child rape of our main immigrant groups.” On page 191, Coulter writes, “The rape of little girls isn’t even considered a crime in Latino culture.” On page 173, she warns, “Another few years of our current immigration policies, and we’ll all have to move to Canada to escape the rapes.”

And none of the people who attacked the stuff about Mexicans being rapists thought to check to find out if this was actually true. Latin America does indeed have a rape culture (Latin American feminists are willing to say this); and as to “rape of little girls” not being “considered a crime in Latino culture,” you only need to know that sex with girls as young as 12 years old was legal in 31 of the 32 states of Mexico as of 2015.

Despite this kind of criticism, Trump, following Coulter’s lead on immigration, was a win for him in 2016 and 2024. Even if he did win the contested 2020 election, the fact that his margin was narrow enough to allow Democrats to manipulate the outcome and install Biden in the White House stemmed from his rejection of Coulter’s advice.

And when we see ICE grabbing and deporting illegals, refugees from “Third World Hellholes” being kept out, and white South African refugees let in, that’s the world Ann Coulter made.

Now, if I had to name my favorite part of ¡Adios, America!, it would be this part:

That’s immediately followed by this part:

Wouldn’t think of it, Ann, wouldn’t think of it.

[H/T American Greatness]