Rosie O’Donnell. Photo credit: Jason Chatting, via wikipedia commons
In a move that left legal experts scratching their heads and many observers rolling their eyes, the long-running, often petty feud between President Donald Trump and Rosie O’Donnell has spiraled into an entirely new realm of the absurd.
Trump, in a Saturday missive on his Truth Social platform, publicly mused about the utterly impossible: revoking O’Donnell’s American citizenship.
Trump, seemingly unburdened by constitutional law or basic civics, declared he was “giving serious consideration to taking away her Citizenship” because O’Donnell is allegedly “not in the best interests of our Great Country.”
He went on to decree, with characteristic bombast, that she is “a Threat to Humanity, and should remain in the wonderful Country of Ireland, if they want her. GOD BLESS AMERICA!” — a peculiar benediction following a call to banish a native-born American.
This eyebrow-raising pronouncement came hot on the heels of O’Donnell, who recently relocated to Ireland, daring to criticize the administration’s handling of the Texas floods. Her suggestion that budget cuts might play a role in meteorological preparedness clearly struck a nerve.
O’Donnell, a born-and-bred New Yorker, wasted no time in unleashing her own blistering retort on social media, dismissing the President as “a disgrace to all our beautiful country stands for – he is a danger to the nation – a mentally ill, untreated criminal.”
She then defiantly challenged his fantastical threat: “You want to revoke my citizenship? Go ahead and try. I’m not yours to silence. I never was.”
Legal scholars were quick to point out the glaringly obvious: a 1967 Supreme Court ruling, Afroyim v. Rusk, unequivocally established that the U.S. government possesses no power to revoke the citizenship of a native-born American. The Fourteenth Amendment, it turns out, is quite specific on this point.
This latest, legally illiterate broadside is just the newest chapter in a rivalry so prolonged and personal it predates Trump’s political career. The two have traded barbs for years, a spectacle that has unfolded across television screens, social media feeds, and even, memorably, presidential debates.
O’Donnell’s move to Ireland earlier this year, ostensibly for a “safer” life, appears to have only fueled the President’s ire.
While the President has recently floated equally dubious ideas about expanding deportations and even targeting the citizenship of naturalized critics like Elon Musk, the legal consensus remains unshaken: snatching the citizenship of a U.S.-born individual like Rosie O’Donnell is, quite simply, unconstitutional and a non-starter.
