This is not legal, but you knew that:

My Q&A with a reporter

1. What are your thoughts about President Donald Trump suggesting on his Truth Social Platform that he's considering revoking Rosie O'Donnell's citizenship? What is most concerning about that? 

This is part and parcel of Trump’s general behavior toward American citizenship. He seems to view it not as an inalienable right but as a status that he can grant and take away at will, a meaningless instrument of his personal public policy. We can see that in, among other things: 

• His patently unconstitutional executive order to try to take away citizenship from U.S.-born children of undocumented immigrants and temporary visitors;

• His floating of the idea of sending so-called “home growns” to CECOT in El Salvador; and

• His DOJ’s forming of task forces for denaturalization for people who allegedly ;committed fraud in the naturalization process (but where “fraud” is highly subject to interpretation, and might be, for example, punishing people who support Palestine in the Gaza conflict for lying about their nonsupport for terrorism).

2. Rosie O'Donnell was born in the United States. What do you think Trump's threat to O'Donnell reveals about the way he is/hoping to lead this country?  

Attacks on citizenship are a familiar practice of authoritarians, and for good reason: as Hannah Arendt explained in the context of deliberating on Nazi Germany, citizenship is really the “right to have rights.”  Noncitizens traditionally have much weaker rights than citizens, and, of course, noncitizens have the greatest vulnerability of all, namely the fact that there are many, many, reasons (sometimes just including variations on a theme of raw sovereign will) that they might be forcibly removed from the country, whereas citizens are never subject to that.  

By attacking citizenship in the many ways he has done, Donald Trump is making it clear that he wants the power to kick people out of the country for angering him. It’s unadulterated dictator behavior, and it’s terrifying.

3. Is what Trump is suggesting, that he is considering revoking O'Donnell's citizenship, constitutional? 

Not even remotely.  Birthright citizenship is defined in the Constitution. The 14^th Amendment doesn’t say “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 **unless they annoy the President.”  It’s a constitutional right.

Not even Congress can pass a law taking away a person’s citizenship---Afroyim v. Rusk, a Supreme Court case from 1967, struck down a law divesting Americans of citizenship for voting in a foreign election. The Court made clear that the only way an American citizen can lose their citizenship is if they voluntarily renounce it.  This is 100% clear---nobody on earth, probably including Trump himself, seriously believes that the President has the power to arbitrarily take away someone’s citizenship.

Moreover, even if he did have the power (he doesn’t), it certainly couldn’t legally be exercised because of O’Donnell’s political opposition to him.  The most clearly established rule for applying the First Amendment is that the government cannot engage in “viewpoint discrimination”---in choosing whether or not to punish people based on the views they express.

4. What message do you have to people living in the U.S. following Trump's threat to Rosie O'Donnell — is it important that we don't normalize these attacks/threats coming from the president? Should people in America be concerned/vigilant about the Trump administration following his remarks to O'Donnell? If so, why? 

This is yet another Trump administration five-alarm fire. He’s not going to succeed at taking away O’Donnell’s citizenship: there isn’t a single court in the country that would agree with him. It’s a frivolous, absurd, empty mad king style threat, on the order of the story about King Xerxes commanding that the sea be whipped for sending a storm that frustrated his fleet. But we’ve known literally for almost all of recorded history---Plato wrote about it first---that leaders can have a tyrannical character, and leaders with that character are fatal to a polity. The fact that the staggering powers of the presidency are, for the first time in American history, in the hands of a guy who thinks that he ought to be able to roam the streets pointing at people and saying “you’re not a citizen anymore, get out” as an exercise of his unadulterated will means that he is also using the powers that he actually has in a way that is self-centered, arbitrary, and utterly faithless to his duty of loyalty to the U.S. Constitution and the American people. The only remedy for this is impeachment and removal.

Addendum: Plato on Trump

(From the Shorey translation linked above, lightly edited)

“[I]s not this the character of such men in private life and before they rule the state: to begin with they associate with flatterers, who are ready to do anything to serve them or, if they themselves want something, they themselves fawn and shrink from no contortion or abasement in protest of their friendship, though, once the object gained, they sing another tune … “Throughout their lives, then, they never know what it is to be the friends of anybody. They are always either masters or slaves, but the tyrannical nature never tastes freedom or true friendship… May we not rightly call such men faithless? … Yes, and unjust to the last degree”