This week, the President stated on Truth Social that “As previously mentioned, we are giving serious thought to taking away Rosie O’Donnell’s Citizenship. She is not a Great American and is, in my opinion, incapable of being so!”
When I previously objected that such a move would be grossly unconstitutioal, supporters insisted that Trump was simply trolling opponents. However, the threat of an unconstitutional act only reinforces the narratives of O’Donnell, who has engaged in false claims and conspiracy theories on social media.
O’Donnell has trolled Trump after fleeing the country in protest to live in Ireland. Most recently, she was widely criticized for claiming that the shooter at the Minnesota Catholic church was “a white guy, Republican, MAGA person. White supremacist.” She later apologized, but added, “I assumed, like most shooters, they followed a standard MO and had standard, you know, feelings of… you know, NRA-loving kind of gun people.”
Spreading disinformation is not grounds for losing your citizenship and would create a dangerous precedent. Indeed, President Trump rightfully objected to Democrats trying to strip him from ballots in the last election. To now claim the right to strip political opponents of their actual citizenship only surrenders the high ground to his critics.
However, Trump has also threatened to rescind the citizenship of former White House adviser Elon Musk and even New York City Democratic mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani. Both Musk and Mamdani were born outside the country, but received U.S. citizenship through a legal process.
There are narrow circumstances under which a naturalized citizen can be stripped of citizenship, but those circumstances do not include their political views.
In 1967, the Supreme Court handed down Afroyim v. Rusk, declaring that U.S. citizens can only lose their citizenship by voluntarily relinquishing it, or where citizenship was gained by fraud.
Beys Afroyim was born in Poland and the U.S. government sought to strip him of citizenship after learning that he had cast a vote in an Israeli election. The Supreme Court ruled that his status remained protected under the Citizenship Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution.
Likewise, in Trop v. Dulles in 1958, the Court ruled that the government could not strip Albert Trop of his citizenship after he escaped from an Army stockade in Casablanca, Morocco. While he turned himself in the next day, the government argued that (since the country was engaged in a war and Trop was dishonorably discharged), it could revoke his status despite being a natural-born citizen.
Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote that such punishment ran afoul of the Eighth Amendment and constituted “a form of punishment more primitive than torture” since it amounts to the “total destruction of the individual’s status in organized society.”
Trump may wish to challenge Trop, but there is no indication that the Supreme Court would seriously consider such a departure from the long-standing precedent. That is even less likely where the effort is based on retaliation for political criticism of the President.