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Not that long ago, believe it or not, Donald Trump ran for president as the candidate who would defend the First Amendment.
He warned that a “sinister group of Deep State bureaucrats, Silicon Valley tyrants, left-wing activists, and depraved corporate news media” was “conspiring to manipulate and silence the American people,” and promised that “by restoring free speech, we will begin to reclaim our democracy, and save our nation.” On his first day back in office, Trump signed an executive order affirming the “right of the American people to engage in constitutionally protected speech.”
If anyone believed him at the time, they should be disabused by now. One of his most brazen attacks on freedom of speech thus far came this past weekend, when the president said that he was thinking about stripping a comedian of her citizenship—for no apparent reason other than that she regularly criticizes him.
“Because of the fact that Rosie O’Donnell is not in the best interests of our Great Country, I am giving serious consideration to taking away her Citizenship. She is a Threat to Humanity, and should remain in the wonderful Country of Ireland, if they want her,” he posted on Truth Social.
This must have been exhilarating to O’Donnell, who received a brief new grant of relevance and told the Irish broadcaster RTE, “I am very proud to be opposed to every single thing he says and does and represents.” But once the exhilaration subsides, the fundamental idea is very disturbing: Trump appears to view both free speech and U.S. citizenship as conditional, things he can revoke based on his own whims.
Writing off the threat to O’Donnell as just another instance of Trumpian trolling—or an attempt to distract from fatal flooding in Texas, dozens of incomplete trade deals, or intramural MAGA battles over Jeffrey Epstein—is tempting. And the odds that Trump would actually successfully strip O’Donnell of her passport seem slim. But that doesn’t mean the threat is irrelevant.
What in particular set Trump off here is unclear—he and O’Donnell have been feuding for years—but by all indications, the answer is simply that she has exercised her freedom of speech to jab him. Perhaps this should go without saying, but native-born American citizens like O’Donnell generally cannot be stripped of their citizenship. (Citizens can, however, choose to relinquish their citizenship—something that has become a somewhat popular option for people wishing to avoid U.S. taxes, including former U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson, a New York native.) A president can’t just decide that he wants to take it away.
In other recent cases where the Trump administration has attempted to suppress speech, officials have at least claimed that they have evidence of criminality (though that’s not to say even that was a legitimate standard; such accusations are also dangerous, and judges have dismissed them). With O’Donnell, Trump isn’t even pretending she has crossed some sort of criminal line. He’s also not (yet) taking action, but Trump often uses initially brash and outlandish threats as a way to acclimate the populace to his overreaching, as I wrote in the January 2024 issue of The Atlantic: “When a second-term President Trump directs the Justice Department to lock up Democratic politicians or generals or reporters or activists on flimsy or no grounds at all, people will wring their hands, but they’ll also shrug and wonder why he didn’t do it sooner. After all, he’s been promising to do it forever, right?” I wish this argument had aged worse.
Trump has begun talking more frequently about revoking citizenship as a means of punishing political speech. He has mused about using the tool against political opponents, including the New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, alleging potential fraud, and his former buddy Elon Musk, who had the temerity to insult him. Both of these men are naturalized, which makes their citizenship marginally easier to remove—though, again, not for simple speech. The administration has also been pursuing denaturalizations of citizens whom it believes it can prove lied on their application, which is an established legal basis for stripping their legal status.
Even if Trump doesn’t normalize taking away citizenship, he is continuing to entrench the idea that the government—or, really, just the president on his own—can punish citizens who criticize it, or him. That’s been one of the most prominent themes of his term so far: He has banished the Associated Press from some White House spaces simply for refusing to adopt his preferred terminology, extorted law firms that employed lawyers involved in the criminal cases against him, and demanded huge payouts from news organizations. He’ll continue as long as he’s successful.
“If we don’t have free speech, then we just don’t have a free country,” Trump said in a campaign video posted in 2022. “It’s as simple as that. If this most fundamental right is allowed to perish, then the rest of our rights and liberties will topple just like dominos one by one. They’ll go down.”
Candidate Trump was as correct as he was disingenuous.
Related:
- The free-speech phonies
- He spent his life trying to prove that he was a loyal U.S. citizen. It wasn’t enough.
Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:
- The secret strategies that world leaders use to manage Trump
- The biggest myth about the YIMBY movement
- Trump’s brainwashing powers are finite, Jonathan Chait argues.
Today’s News
- President Donald Trump announced a new weapons-transfer plan for Ukraine and threatened to impose high tariffs on Russia if a peace deal is not reached in 50 days.
- The Supreme Court allowed the Trump administration to move forward with dismantling the Education Department and firing nearly 1,400 workers.
- Twenty-four states and the District of Columbia sued the Trump administration for withholding more than $6.8 billion in education funding, which helps pay for free or low-cost after-school programs and assistance for students learning English.
Dispatches
- The Wonder Reader: Isabel Fattal compiles stories on how to decide what to watch.
Explore all of our newsletters here.
Evening Read
The AI Mirage
By Ian Bogost
“I’m not going to respond to that,” Siri responded. I had just cursed at it, and this was my passive-aggressive chastisement.
The cursing was, in my view, warranted. I was in my car, running errands, and had found myself in an unfamiliar part of town. I requested “directions to Lowe’s,” hoping to get routed to the big-box hardware store without taking my eyes off the road. But apparently Siri didn’t understand. “Which Lowe?” it asked, before displaying a list of people with the surname Lowe in my address book …
The latest version of Siri has “better conversational context”—the sort of thing that should help the software know when I’m asking to be guided to the home-improvement store rather than to a guy called Lowe. But my iPhone apparently isn’t new enough for this update. I would need cutting-edge artificial intelligence to get directions to Lowe’s.
More From The Atlantic
- Sexting with Gemini
- Judges don’t know what AI’s book piracy means.
- Olga Khazan: We should, in fact, politicize the tragedy.
- Another moderate Republican opts out.
Culture Break
Read. Alert the incels! The rest of us love Pamela Anderson, and we will always love her, Caitlin Flanagan writes.
Let go. And let your kid climb that tree, Henry Abbott writes. It could actually make them safer.
Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.
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