The woman who worships Trump

Ann Coulter has found her perfect man. The right-wing polemicist (pictured) has been arguing for years that the US needs to crack down on immigration, build a wall to keep Mexicans out, and stop pandering to politically correct liberals. And now Donald Trump is promising to turn her vision into reality. “I’ve been doing nothing but watching Trump on TV,” she told Will Pavia in The Times. “I wish there was a Trump channel where you could just watch him 24 hours a day. I’d never sleep. He’s like the alpha male doppelgänger of me.” She approves of all his ideas – even his threat not to honour America’s commitments to Nato. “Who cares?” she shrugs. “Maybe you guys are losing sleep over what happens to Ukraine, but I promise you out-of-work steel workers could not give two f***s.” She is confident, too, that he will build the wall she dreams of. “Absolutely. A big, beautiful wall with big, gold Ts on it.” You have to be tough to survive 60 years in Hollywood – but Ellen Burstyn has always had grit. The 83-year-old actress grew up in Depression-era Detroit with a single mother who was physically violent. “If it were now, I would have gone to a police station, but there were no laws then,” she told Tom Shone in The Daily Telegraph. “There was no such thing as child abuse. Parents owned their children. They could do whatever they wanted. All my life I have asked myself the question: who would I be if I had grown up in a loving home? I don’t know if I would be placid and satisfied; a happy, jolly, sedentary person. Did hardship stimulate me? I wanted out of there, and I got out on the day I was legally able to.” Burstyn jumped on a bus to New York, taking just two suitcases and $3, and built a career as an acclaimed character actress. She remains fascinated by the idea of being someone else – so much so that she once spent three days sleeping rough in New York, to see how it felt. “That was a big experience. I went up to a restaurant with outside tables where there were two women eating. I said: ‘Excuse me but I have to take a subway and I have no money, can you spare a dollar?’ One of them reached into her pocket and gave me a dollar. As I walked away I felt really proud that I had gotten that. I was like: ‘Hey, I begged! I got it!’ Yet I felt tears streaming down my face. Why was I crying? It was because she hadn’t looked at me.”