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.  

What did Donald Trump do today?

He threatened New York City voters.

 

Election Day in New York City is tomorrow, featuring a three-way race for mayor between Democratic nominee Zohran Mamdani, Republican nominee Curtis Sliwa, and disgraced former Gov. Andrew Cuomo running as an independent after losing in a huge upset to Mamdani in the Democratic primary. Mamdani is generally regarded as the favorite, but both he and Cuomo are campaigning hard in the closing days, and the result is far from certain.

 

Trump has tried several times to interject himself into the race, mostly by calling Mamdani a "communist" (which is a lie) and with threats to blockade New York City from government services if the Democratic nominee won. He's also threatened to arrest Mamdani and strip him of his citizenship. He repeated those charges again today, in the form of an endorsement of Cuomo.

 

There are two aspects that bear mention here: one legal, and one political.

Legally, this is an empty threat from Trump—as long as Trump bothers to obey the law. Relatively little in the way of federal funds earmarked for NYC or the surrounding region are discretionary. Of course, Trump could—and has—illegally impounded funds for much of his second term, but even then it's not clear how he could really do more to hurt New Yorkers for voting in a mayor he doesn't like than he already is. Just recently, he declared that he was ending a massive $16 billion tunnel project linking the city with New Jersey, something he has no legal authority to do, and apparently for no real reason other than that NY Sen. Chuck Schumer had backed it. (For that matter, it's not even clear within the Trump White House that it even has been shut down: there are already conflicting reports.) 

Politically, Trump endorsing Cuomo is bizarre at best: they loathe one another. Trump was furious when Cuomo rejected his offer of a corrupt quid pro quo where New York would drop its various criminal investigations into Trump and his businesses in exchange for Trump targeting bureaucratic punishments against New York specifically. Even though Cuomo didn't have much direct authority over what state and local prosecutors do, Trump blamed him for the successful prosecution of the Trump Organization for tax fraud and the successful seizure and shutdown of Trump's phony charity. Cuomo was one of several state governors Trump tried to extort praise from in exchange for emergency aid in the early weeks of the COVID-19 shutdown.

The two men do have one thing in common: an extremely long list of credible allegations of sexual harassment and assault.

Until recently Trump, a convicted felon, could have put his vote where his mouth is: New York allows felons to vote after they've served any prison sentence, and Trump couldn't be sentenced to incarceration at all because of his re-election. But his official residency for voting purposes, and the place where he spends nearly as much time as the White House proper, is at his resort in West Palm Beach, Florida.

Why does this matter?

• Donald Trump doesn't get to tell people how to vote in any election.

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.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He once again called for his political enemies to be jailed or deported for being his political enemies. 

Trump visited a hastily built internment camp in the Florida Everglades today, and used the opportunity to threaten to jail or deport at least three of his imagined political enemies by name—all of whom are American citizens.

Zohran Mamdani. The Democratic nominee for Mayor of New York City was born in Uganda and became an American citizen in 2018, though he has lived in the United States since he was seven. His shocking come-from-behind victory in the primary over Andrew Cuomo has rattled Trump and other Republicans, who were hoping for a contest between the scandal-plagued Cuomo and Eric Adams, the incumbent. Adams is running as an independent after Trump tried to use Biden-era corruption charges against him as blackmail, and succeeded in getting Adams to align with his immigration policies.

Asked about Mamdani, Trump called him a "communist" and then blurted out, "We'll have to arrest him," adding that "many people" were saying he was not really a citizen. (That accusation may sound slightly familiar coming from Trump, who routinely got confused on the campaign trail in 2024 as to whether it was Joe Biden or Barack Obama who was president at the time.)

Mamdani released a statement later in the day:

 

Alejandro Mayorkas. During his appearances today, Trump took questions exclusively from media outlets within his political comfort zone. Even so, he appeared unsure and unready when a reporter from the right-wing website Blaze asked about Alejandro Mayorkas, the Secretary of Homeland Security under President Biden. The Blaze staffer, Julio Rosas, had to guide Trump to an understanding of who he was talking about. Even then, Trump interrupted himself for hints from his own staff sitting nearby, and could only speak in general terms about how Mayorkas was "bad." Reminded that Mayorkas had been impeached, he called it "fake."

Mayorkas' 2024 impeachment was not "fake" in the sense that it happened, but even the Republican-controlled House that eventually mustered up the votes for it seemed embarrassed by it. The Senate dismissed the impeachment without a trial. Notably, the "charge" was dereliction of duty over a supposed crisis in immigration, but the Biden administration oversaw more removals in 2024 than Trump is on pace to in 2025. (Trump has not called for his own Homeland Security's impeachment, yet.)

Elon Musk. Friendly media also goaded Trump to attack his political patron, Elon Musk, who has come out strongly against Trump's budget bill. A grinning Trump did recognize Musk's name and said he'd "have to take a look" at whether Musk could keep his citizenship. He proceeded to muse out loud that Musk might somehow fall victim to the same government apparatus he'd helped to create to root out Trump's other enemies.

Unlike Mayorkas and Mamdani, there actually would—technically—be a basis in existing American law to denaturalize and deport Musk. As his own brother Kimbal has publicly acknowledged, both Musk siblings worked illegally in the United States after overstaying their student visas, then presumably lied about it during the naturalization process.

This denaturalization process is virtually never used. Musk is one of a number of people in Trump's inner circle who would technically be at risk. Others include both of Trump's foreign-born wives. Melania Trump worked illegally as a model before being naturalized, and then used her own citizenship to sponsor her parents, who—as elderly and unemployed dependents—Trump had to use his authority as President to cheat the rules for anyway. (In other circumstances, Trump and other nativists refer to this as "chain migration.") The late Ivana Trump broke Czechoslovakian law by entering into a sham marriage with her first husband in order to gain entry into the United States, which would also have made her citizenship theoretically revocable.

Trump, a convicted felon 34 times over himself, is himself the descendant of people who dodged and cheated immigration laws, but his own citizenship is secure by virtue of being born on American soil, unless he gets his way and changes that.

Why does this matter?

• Making your political enemies "unpersons" is what happens in dictatorships, not democracies. 

• No matter how much he wants it to be, it's not a crime to be someone Donald Trump doesn't like.  

• Presidents who don't want to be too closely associated with Nazis shouldn't talk about stripping citizens of their rights while touring a brand new concentration camp.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He said he would ignore the Constitution to deport American citizens.

In an interview with NBC's Meet The Press, Trump said this morning that he would "have no choice" but to deport children who were American citizens along with undocumented family members.

In reality, and under the actual laws of the United States, no President has the "choice" to expel American citizens from the country at all, under any circumstances.

Trump also said that he would use executive orders to change the definition of an American citizen to exclude those born in the United States to undocumented parents. 

Again, the Fourteenth Amendment defines who is a citizen, not Donald Trump, and neither a presidential memo nor even a law can change that. The first sentence of it reads "All persons 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."

During his first term, Trump made a point of advertising cruelty to migrant children, separating them from their families during processing and keeping them in what amounted to open-air prisons. But he's not completely opposed to bending the rules on immigration: both his first and third wives violated immigration law before marrying him and obtaining citizenship that way—Ivana Trump by engaging in a sham marriage that let her enter the U.S., and Melania Trump by working illegally on a tourist visa. Melania Trump then sponsored her own elderly parents' citizenship application, which Trump rushed through in spite of condemning "chain migration" when other families do it. 

The four of Trump's five children born to those wives would still retain their citizenship under his proposed policy, since he was a citizen. But the late Ivana Trump and Melania Trump could have their citizenship revoked for illegally working in the United States—as could, among others, Trump's benefactor Elon Musk.

Why does this matter?

• The Constitution is the supreme law of the land, not what a president feels like it should be. 

• It's bad when the very rich and very powerful don't have to obey the law.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He took at least seven different positions on an agreement he made with Democrats last night on the subject of a legislative replacement for DACA.

Last night, after a dinner meeting, Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and House minority leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) announced that they had reached an agreement with Trump to enshrine DACA protections into law--without agreeing to fund the border wall that Trump promised at every rally during the campaign. "We agreed to enshrine the protections of DACA into law quickly, and to work out a package of border security, excluding the wall, that’s acceptable to both sides," Schumer and Pelosi said in a joint statement.

What followed this morning takes some explaining.

1. Within minutes, Sarah Huckabee Sanders downgraded the "agreement" to a "discussion" and explicitly denied that the border wall had been taken out of the picture.
   
   This morning at 6:11, Trump more or less confirmed Sanders' tweet, saying that there was no deal yet and that "massive border security" would have to be a part of any deal.
   
2. Then at 6:20, Trump suggested that "The WALL" really meant any border construction, including routine maintenance and rebuilding.
   
3. Then at 6:33, Trump called for something that sounds almost exactly like DACA: "Does anybody really want to throw out good, educated and accomplished young people who have jobs, some serving in the military? Really!....." (Trump apparently meant this rhetorically, and was not intending to call attention to the fact that he had just ordered exactly that.)
   
4. On the plane to Florida, Trump corrected a reporter who asked if he favored "amnesty." He replied, "The word is 'DACA.'" (Previously, Trump had called DACA an "illegal amnesty.")
   
5. On landing, Trump stressed the absolute centrality of "the wall" to any negotiation: "Very important is the wall. We have to be sure the wall isn’t obstructed. Very important is the wall. We have to be sure the wall isn’t obstructed because without the wall I wouldn’t do anything."
   
6. Then in the following sentence, he stressed that "the wall" was not relevant to this particular negotiation: "It doesn’t have to be here, but they can’t obstruct the wall if it’s in a budget or anything else.” (Trump does not control what goes into budget legislation.)
   
7. Then he walked back his apparent offer of amnesty: "We’re not looking at citizenship. We’re not looking at amnesty."

To summarize, Trump made an agreement that was not a deal but a discussion. It hinged on the construction of "massive" new physical sections of wall, or the renovation of existing border fences, or on nothing to do whatsoever with walls. Trump is against DACA, which he regards as an illegal amnesty, but is for keeping DACA recipients around in a status exactly like DACA, which he regards as a synonym for amnesty, which he's opposed to. Instead, he wants a special work-permitted, non-citizen, non-deportable status, which is exactly what DACA was, which he ended last week.

So what?

• A president who knows (or cares) what his position is on a subject doesn't get this visibly confused about it.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He decided to put off signing a new executive order on immigration for publicity purposes.

When a series of federal court decisions stayed the implementation of Trump's wide-ranging ban on immigration from certain countries and refugees, he ominously predicted that even the slightest delay could allow terrorists to infiltrate the country. In fact, Trump's central argument was that the threat posed by refugees and other legal immigrants was so urgent a matter of national security that courts had no right to review it. 

Meanwhile, his administration has worked to produce a new, more narrowly targeted order more likely to pass constitutional muster. The new order was to have been signed today, but after his relatively restrained speech to a joint session of Congress on Tuesday generated a rare positive news cycle for Trump, his political advisers convinced him to wait until tomorrow at the earliest to sign it. 

A senior administration official openly admitted that this was a political calculation designed to allow the new order "to have its own 'moment'" and, by implication, to prevent any new controversy from overshadowing coverage of the Tuesday speech.

Who cares?

• It's bad if a president deliberately chooses flattering press coverage over something he thinks is a matter of urgent national security.

• It's just as bad if a president claims drastic emergency measures are necessary but does not actually believe it.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He confirmed, through a spokesperson, that his ban on entry by "aliens" from seven countries would include people with permanent residency ("green card") status.

Trump's order banning entry in to the United States from certain Middle Eastern countries referred to "aliens," a category which includes legal permanent residents of the United States. Today the Department of Homeland Security confirmed that green card holders would be prohibited under the ban. Even this statement was quickly amended to say that there might be exceptions on a "case by case" basis, though no information was available on how that decision would be made, or by whom.

Permanent residency is commonly granted to spouses and adopted children of American citizens, or certain classes of skilled workers, like translators employed by the Defense Department.  It is part of the lawful path to gaining United States citizenship.

It remains unclear if keeping Americans' spouses and children from re-entering the United States was intentional. The order may be illegal, but is being enforced for the moment. 

So what's so bad about this?

• Policy changes that seem like they were done hastily and carelessly, probably were.

• "Radical Islamic terrorism" thrives on the perception that the United States government hates Muslims.

• Policies that hurt the families of Americans hurt Americans.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He suggested stripping Americans of their citizenship as punishment for certain (legal) forms of protest.

Under the Constitution, no natural-born citizen of the United States can ever be stripped of citizenship. Naturalized citizens can only have their citizenships revoked for certain crimes related to the citizenship process, like lying on an application. Trump was talking about flag-burning, which the Supreme Court has upheld as protected speech under the First Amendment. 

How is this a bad thing?

• Making protest a crime and exiling the leader's political opponents is what happens in dictatorships.