Trump Leveled A Baffling Threat At Rosie O'Donnell — Experts Explain Why It's Truly Terrifying
On Saturday, Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform that he was 'giving serious consideration to taking away' O'Donnell's citizenship because he said the comedian, who moved to Ireland in January, is 'not in the best interests of our Great Country.'
'She is a Threat to Humanity, and should remain in the wonderful Country of Ireland, if they want her. GOD BLESS AMERICA!' he wrote.
O'Donnell, a longtime Trump critic, had posted a video denouncing the president the day before, criticizing Trump's 'mental decline' and 'what has become of our country,' among other condemnations of the Trump administration and the 'Trump cult.'
She has since hit backat the president's citizenship threat in a series of social media posts.
'The president of the USA has always hated the fact that I see him for who he is — a criminal con man sexual abusing liar out to harm our nation to serve himself — this is why I moved to Ireland,' she wrote in one post.
O'Donnell and Trump's feud can be traced back nearly two decades. In 2006, O'Donnell — then a talk show host on 'The View' — memorably mocked Trump's response to a Miss USA scandal that unfolded that year. (Trump was then the co-owner of the Miss Universe, Miss USA and Miss Teen USA pageants.)
O'Donnell was born in the United States. Trump's threat to take away her citizenship is 'unadulterated dictator behavior, and it's terrifying,' said Paul A. Gowder, professor of law at Northwestern University's Pritzker School of Law.
'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,' Gowder told HuffPost.
Trump's attacks on citizenship are 'a familiar practice of authoritarians,' Gowder said elsewhere, citing political philosopher Hannah Arendt, who 'explained in the context of deliberating on Nazi Germany [that] 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,' he continued.
'The 14th 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,'' Gowder said. 'It's a constitutional right.'
'Not even Congress can pass a law taking away a person's citizenship,' he continued. '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,' he added, later calling Trump's post about McDonnell a 'frivolous, absurd, empty mad king-style threat.'
But Gowder said that Trump's remarks to O'Donnell are 'part and parcel' of his 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,' Gowder said, noting that this behavior can be seen in other examples of the administration'simmigrationagenda and policies.
Gowder said elsewhere that for the first time in American history, the presidency is '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.''
That means he will also use the powers he 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,' he said, adding, 'The only remedy for this is impeachment and removal.'
Jacob Neiheisel, associate professor of political science at the University at Buffalo College of Arts and Sciences, told HuffPost that he believes Trump's Truth Social post about O'Donnell was 'concerning on a number of levels.'
'It is disturbing that expressing disagreement or dissent is apparently reason enough in his mind to strip someone's citizenship,' he said, later noting that he thinks the threat said a lot about how Trump intends to govern.
'He appears ready and willing to use the apparatus of the state to settle old scores and pursue his own personal animosities,' he said. 'Lost in the mix is any sense of the public good. Even though Trump appears to have couched this suggestion in broader terms, saying that O'Donnell is not good for the nation, it is hard to read this move as anything other than an effort to limit dissent.'
Neiheisel later emphasized that it's 'important that these types of statements not become normalized in political discourse.'
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