What did Donald Trump do today?

He threatened to exile an American citizen for criticizing him.

Last Sunday, as she frequently does, the actor Rosie O'Donnell posted a video to TikTok. She mused about the weather in Ireland, where she currently lives, and about her upcoming projects, and TV shows she'd binged recently. She also said this: 

What a horror story in Texas. The flash floods in Texas, the Guadalupe River. Fifty-one dead, more missing. [The death toll currently stands at 129, with 160 more missing.] Children, at a camp. 

And you know, when the president guts all of the early warning systems and the weather forecasting abilities of the government, these are the results that we're going to start to see on a daily basis, because he's put this country in so much danger by his horrible, horrible decisions and this ridiculously immoral bill that he just signed into law, as Republicans cheered. People will die as a result and they've started already. Shame on him. Shame on every GOP sycophant who's listening and following the disastrous decisions of this mentally incapacitated POTUS. 

Hard to believe. Some people on this Tiktok and on Instagram, say "Well you moved, why do you care?" I moved so that I wouldn't have a nervous breakdown. I moved so that I could be away from it and have some type of shield from the intimacy of it, because I don't do well in world crises. I don't, starting with the Vietnam War, when I was a small child. I don't do well, I know myself enough to know, when he got re-elected, it was time to go. And all that you needed to propel your movement, was reading Project 2025, and sadly, not many Americans did that. And if they did, they didn't believe it. Why? Because the president was lying, saying he knew nothing about it, and he wasn't going to follow it. And he's followed every single thing that they said he was going to do. 

In response, Trump threatened to revoke her citizenship. This isn't something he has any legal power to do, but given the tactics that he has encouraged ICE to use against citizens and immigrants alike here in the United States, it still carries weight. 

He made a similar threat against Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee for Mayor of New York, and against native-born Americans whose parents were not citizens but whose own citizenship is guaranteed under the Fourteenth Amendment. (Four of Trump's five known children were born to mothers whose citizenship could be revoked under Trump's policies.) He's also enthusiastically mused about sending Americans to foreign prisons, something he also has no legal authority to do.

Why does this matter?

• The Constitution and the laws of the United States say who is a citizen, not Donald Trump. 

• It's only a crime to criticize the leader's failures in a dictatorship.