What did Donald Trump do today?

He forgot that selling American citizenship to the highest bidder was his idea in the first place.

The Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution establishes the principle of birthright citizenship: a person born in the United States (or subject to its laws) is a citizen, full stop. That's not just one interpretation: it's been the unchallenged precedent in case law since U.S. vs. Wong Kim Ark, the 1898 case in which the Supreme Court ruled that it applied to any person born in the United States (with a few very technical exceptions for agents of foreign governments). Wong Kim Ark was born in San Francisco at a time when his Chinese parents could not legally become citizens, but this ruling upheld his claim to citizenship.

The text of the amendment is even clearer than the rulings enforcing it:

All person born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. 

Trump's personal opinion, expressed in a social media post yesterday is that this "long ago legislation" (meaning the Constitution of the United States) only applies to the "BABIES of SLAVES" and that the judges who have been following this 128-year-old Wong Kim Ark precedent are "STUPID."

Trump's theory of the case will be tested by the Supreme Court tomorrow, where it is not likely to prevail, even as he's made noises about sitting in the courtroom itself—the better to stare down the justices he appointed. (Trump generally speaks of those three justices as being his personal functionaries on the court, and has reacted emotionally when they've ruled against him.) 

In another social media post today, Trump tried to make a different argument: that birthright citizenship was a scam for the benefit of "Chinese Billionaires who have 56 kids," which is a direct quote. It's not actually clear if there's even a single such person among the roughly 4 million Americans of all ages and races whose citizenship derives from being born in the United States rather than a parent's citizenship, but  "birth tourism" in the United States is rare for a reason: it doesn't offer much in the way of tangible benefits to foreign parents, other than the opportunity for their child to pay taxes in a country they don't yet live in. So-called "chain migration," where citizen children sponsor their own parents for immigration, is extremely difficult in practice, unless you are a naturalized citizen married to Donald Trump.

Of course, there's a particular irony to Trump railing against foreign "billionaires" buying a ticket into citizenship for their children: he's selling it himself for much cheaper, via the "Trump Gold Card" that is an actual fee-for-visa program he introduced just a few months ago. For $1 million (plus a nonrefundable $15,000 "processing fee") foreigners can purchase the functional equivalent of a permanent residency with an enhanced path to citizenship, and for $5 million they can buy a "platinum" version that brings tax breaks as well. (That provision alone will likely mean that the program costs the federal government more than it can bring in, since extremely wealthy foreigners subject to U.S. taxation would have a financial reason to sign up, but no personal loyalty to a country they wouldn't even necessarily reside in.)

 

This is from an actual U.S. government website, trumpcard.gov.

Four of Trump's five children are from mothers who violated immigration law to stay in the United States long enough to marry Trump and obtain citizenship that way.
 

Why does this matter?

• Donald Trump doesn't get to ignore the Constitution just because it's even older than him. 

• If a president doesn't like the idea of people buying citizenship he should stop selling it.