Can Trump "deport" Rosie O'Donnell

His Mental Midgitness, the Orange Oaf, and the Joke of Citizenship

Editorial Note: This was published this morning at Borderless Living. I believe it’s worth publishing here as well since it touches on the issues surrounding politics and the law, not just citizenship and sovereignty. Increasingly, it is politics and economic policies that drive the desire of individuals to leave the United States. While I doubt “Rosie” will be stripped of her citizenship, it’s also not something that can be ignored. Every “trial balloon” that the Orange Oaf floats winds up as U.S. policy, often in violation of U.S. law. I have zero expectation that somehow this topic will be the exception to that pattern and practice of the Trump Regime.

That the Republic now finds itself perched on the quivering edge of autocracy would come as no surprise to anyone acquainted with the habits of the average American voter—a bipedal barnacle who, given the choice between liberty and a carnival barker with a Bible in one hand and a Big Mac in the other, will choose indigestion and delusion every time.

Which brings us, inevitably, to His Mental Midgitness, the Orange Oaf—formerly a real estate huckster, now an unindicted god-emperor to a class of peasants who cheerfully surrender their birthright in exchange for grievance cosplay and grievance cable.

His latest proclamation—bellowed, one imagines, between bites of fried chicken and hiccups of ego—is this:

“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…”

A threat to humanity. Rosie O’Donnell. One might be forgiven for chuckling, were it not uttered by a man who possesses the nuclear codes. O’Donnell, whose chief sin is possessing both a sense of humor and a pancreas that offends the delicate sensibilities of the chronically online, has long been a target of the Orange One’s infantile rage. He called her a “fat pig.” She mocked his coiffure—a tragic topiary of self-regard and Aqua Net. And thus began their feud: the grunts of a bloated orangutan versus the cackles of a Broadway banshee.

But while a spat between clowns is harmless enough under the Big Top, it becomes considerably less amusing when one clown is at the helm of the world's most ungovernable empire, and the other a lawful citizen no longer residing in the U.S.

And so the man who cannot spell “honor” without a teleprompter now believes he may revoke citizenship like a maître d’ rescinding a dinner reservation.

Why?

Because the woman in question bruised his ego, that vast and trembling dirigible that floats forever untethered above the ruins of his intellect?

Let us be clear: the law is not on his side. Not today. Not tomorrow. Not unless the Constitution of the United States were to change, and the United States were to formally withdraw from half a dozen treaties it has executed as its laws for over a century.

But since when has that mattered?

This is a nation whose populace worships not the Constitution but the man who promises to wipe his ass with it. A Congress of geldings and grifters nods solemnly while he defecates on precedent. A Supreme Court—led by Chief Justice Roberts, who clutches his pearls with such frequency one suspects he may be smuggling oysters—does little more than clear its throat while the rule of law is gang-pressed into a MAGA loyalty oath.

What’s worse, the mob loves it. These red-hatted serfs, bellies full of entitlement and brains full of seditious talk radio, would gladly trade habeas corpus for another performative jab to “own the libs.” They are not citizens in any meaningful sense—they are vassals, mouthing the ancient rites of fealty:

“I will to him be true and faithful, and love all which he loves, and shun all which he shuns…”

And so the question arises: Can he do that? Strip citizenship from a natural-born citizen by diktat?

In a sane republic, the answer is no.

But we do not inhabit such a place. We inhabit a theater of the absurd, where men in robes mumble Latin while democracy dies beneath a pile of shrugs.

Rosie O’Donnell, born on American soil, and American by blood as well as by geography, cannot be lawfully exiled without tearing the Fourteenth Amendment, federal statute, and binding treaty law into one long strand of state-issued toilet paper. But if it happens—if the state indulges this whim, and the courts giggle and faint, and Congress lines up for another sniff of the Emperor’s ass—then let us dispense with the pretense:

We are no longer a nation of laws. We are a nation of men. One man, in fact.

Authoritarianism is not looming.

It is not brewing.

It is not hypothetical.

It is here.

And the trial balloon floated on the winds of absurdity bears the shape of Rosie O’Donnell.

So let us now take up the matter of citizenship—what it means, where it comes from, how it can be lost—and why His Madness and his fellowship of the foam-fingered are not merely mistaken, but catastrophically ignorant of the very nation they claim to adore.

Why the 14th Amendment Exists

(A Brief History for the Chronically Gullible)

The Fourteenth Amendment was not written to solve a legal puzzle. It was written to shove a moral spear through the thick skull of a nation that had, for nearly a century, fattened itself on bondage while preening about liberty.

In 1865, the United States had just staggered out of a war it started with itself—half the country determined to remain a slave-owning oligarchy, the other half slightly less enthusiastic about it. The war had ended, but the real terror had only just begun: What do you do with four million people who were, until five minutes ago, legally livestock?

The answer, if left to the usual statesmen and claptrap artists, would have been something poetic, toothless, and useless. Fortunately, there were still a few men in Congress with enough moral clarity and political spite to recognize that unless citizenship was nailed into the Constitution with iron bolts, the Southern states would do what they always do: cheat, stall, and lynch.

So the 14th Amendment was drafted, and its opening salvo is not subtle:

“All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States…”

Let’s translate for the intellectually infirm:

Yes, that includes Black people.
No, the states don’t get a vote.
Yes, even if your cousin Jeb thinks the Constitution is a sacred white man’s document written by God and powdered wigs.

The purpose was clear: end the debate. End it for the former slave. End it for the freedwoman. End it for the child born in Georgia or Maine or Mississippi whose skin offended Confederate sensibilities. Citizenship was not to be earned by race, lineage, or the approval of your local warlord governor. It came by birthplace—plain, brutal, final.

But like all things American, this clarity would not last.

Fast forward to 1898, and we find ourselves in the company of Wong Kim Ark, a man born in San Francisco to Chinese immigrants barred by law from naturalization. He left the country briefly, and upon return was denied reentry. Why? Because some bureaucrat decided that while he may have been born on U.S. soil, he was born of the wrong blood.

Sound familiar?

“They let—I think the real number is 15, 16 million people into our country. When they do that, we got a lot of work to do. They’re poisoning the blood of our country.”¹

The case—United States v. Wong Kim Ark—went to the Supreme Court. And in a moment of inexplicable clarity (or perhaps accidental sanity), the Court affirmed what the 14th Amendment’s authors had made explicit:

Citizenship is not a matter of racial lineage. It is a matter of geography and jurisdiction.

The United States, unlike most of Europe, does not require ancestral purity as a condition of belonging. You don’t need to descend from George Washington’s loins or recite your grandfather’s war record in Normandy. You simply need to be born here, or be naturalized legally, and not be actively engaged in burning down the courthouse while doing it.

But still, the midwits fidget.

They insist that “jurisdiction” means something mystical, as if the authors of the 14th were winking at a secret blood-right fraternity. They claim jus soli is a modern distortion, forgetting that the framers of the 14th knew exactly what they were doing: ensuring that no future plantation of legislators could gerrymander the meaning of citizenship the way they once gerrymandered the value of a man’s life.

And now, in the Year of Our Pageantry of Decline, 2025, we return to the same stinking latrine of nativist mendacity. The grunts are louder. The hats are redder. But the tune is the same:

“Citizenship should be for the right kind of people.”

Which, in translation, means:

“White people. People like me. People who love America no matter what. People who love Trump no matter what. Not anyone else.”

The vanguard of this constitutional demolition derby, unsurprisingly, begins with Trump himself—who, in 2018, announced that he could end birthright citizenship by executive order.² That’s right: not a constitutional amendment, not legislation, but the imperial stroke of a Sharpie, waved around like a wand by a man who thinks the Constitution is a menu he can ignore until dessert.

It was not a policy. It was not even a legal theory. It was a primal belch from a man-child who understands power only as spectacle.

And so it came, on his first day, among his first flurries of orders.

The proposal wasn’t merely illegal. It was inhuman. A declaration that a child, born here, under the jurisdiction of U.S. law, could be deemed stateless—cast out like garbage—simply because their mother didn’t have the proper form of paperwork when her water broke.

It is, in every way, the spiritual heir to the slave codes.

To give this absurdity a veneer of legitimacy, the Trump regime has trotted out its loyal stable of court jesters and legal necromancers before courts and Congress. Chief among them: John Eastman³, a disbarred constitutional law professor, proclaiming himself an expert, in the same way that an astrologer might claim to be a NASA scientist.

Eastman—best known for attempting to overthrow a presidential election using forged electors and kindergarten logic—claimed that the 14th Amendment had been misunderstood for over 150 years. (Yeah, that Supreme Court boy, they really screwed that up, according to Eastman.)

In his reading, “subject to the jurisdiction” excluded the children of undocumented immigrants. It was a revival of the same antebellum logic used in Dred Scott—that some people, by virtue of birth, could never be citizens. That citizenship was not a right derived from law, but a privilege granted by those holding the whip.

Make no mistake: Eastman’s theory was not original. It was recycled garbage, long rejected by courts, historians, and anyone with a passing familiarity with the 14th Amendment’s legislative history. The framers explicitly debated whether the children of Chinese immigrants and Gypsies (their words) were included.

They said yes, without hesitation.

The law was never in doubt. Only the character of those interpreting it.

But law, of course, is no match for cowardice. And here Congress, as always, proves equal to its reputation.

Faced with such constitutional vandalism, the United States Congress has not defended the 14th Amendment—it has tiptoed around it. Today’s GOP views citizenship not as a birthright, but as a bargaining chip. A purity test. A loyalty oath to a man, not a Constitution. And the Democrats? They mostly shuffle papers and sigh into microphones, like mourners at a funeral for a body they’re too afraid to identify.

The effect is the same: constitutional collapse by inaction.

And so we stand again on the brink—this time not because we don’t know what the law is, but because we no longer care.

The Fourteenth Amendment was written for slaves, emancipated by the Thirteenth, and for freedom, purchased in blood—including that of Lincoln himself. It was affirmed by Wong Kim Ark, made clear again and again in law, precedent, and common sense.

And yet today it is threatened—by the same species of dull, dangerous men who once believed that liberty was a private reserve for whites and property.

The nattering nabobs never change.

But the Constitution, at its best, was written to outlive them.

Unless, of course, we let them set it on fire.

Of Treaties and Toilet Paper

(What the U.S. Signed Before It Forgot How to Read")

Now before we dive in, let us remind the reader—particularly the ones who treat the Constitution like a semi-divine Waffle House menu—that under Article VI, Clause 2 of the U.S. Constitution (also known as the Supremacy Clause), treaties signed by the United States are the “supreme Law of the Land.” That’s right, folks—international law doesn’t just sit in a dusty corner of the UN. Once ratified, it sits right next to your precious Second Amendment. You can shoot at it, but legally speaking, it's bulletproof.

So what binding commitments has the U.S. made—willingly, eyes open, pen in hand—that explicitly tie its hands on the matter of citizenship?

1. The 1961 Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness

Let’s start with the big one. This treaty, adopted by the United Nations, was designed to prevent governments from manufacturing stateless people like defective toasters. It requires that any child born on a country’s territory, who would otherwise be stateless, must be granted citizenship.

Now, the U.S.—ever the obstinate cousin at the family reunion—signed this treaty but never ratified it. Why? Because doing so would require the Senate to admit that other countries exist and that brown babies might be people.

Still, the United States has repeatedly affirmed its commitment to the principles of the Convention through State Department policy and international declarations. It also operates as if it’s bound by this norm in its immigration adjudications—until, of course, someone like Trump gets indigestion and wants to scribble over a century of legal history with an executive crayon.

In short: we’re not legally bound like a hostage, but we’ve made all the noises and gestures of a country that pretends to believe in it—right up until it's politically useful not to.⁴

2. The 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR)

Yes, that hoary old chestnut. The UDHR isn’t technically a treaty—it’s a declaration—but it forms the bedrock of modern international human rights law, and the U.S. not only voted for it in the aftermath of World War II, but helped draft it.

Article 15 says:

“Everyone has the right to a nationality. No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his nationality nor denied the right to change his nationality.”

This is not a complicated sentence. It’s shorter than most Trump tweets, and with far less punctuation abuse. And yet, the idea that you cannot arbitrarily strip someone’s citizenship—especially not because you don’t like their politics, their parents, or their passport stamps—is apparently a concept beyond the comprehension of half the U.S. Congress and every member of Truth Social.⁵

3. The 1966 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR)

This one is a treaty. The U.S. ratified it in 1992. It’s binding. It’s law. It is, for the legally literate, not optional.

Article 24(3) says:

“Every child has the right to acquire a nationality.”

And Article 12(4):

“No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of the right to enter his own country.”

These are not vague sentiments. They’re not international haikus. They are legal obligations. The U.S. is bound by them. And yet, the Trump crowd treats them like IKEA instructions: ignorable, unless something breaks or catches fire.⁶

4. The 1951 Refugee Convention and the 1967 Protocol

While these aren’t about birthright citizenship per se, they do prohibit rendering people stateless and emphasize the duty of signatory nations not to strip protections from individuals based on whim, politics, or convenience. Guess what? The U.S. signed and ratified these too. We've turned them into “binding law” and then proceeded to ignore them like a rich man’s fourth wife.⁷⁸

The Summary, for the Unwashed and the Elected

If the U.S. were to start stripping citizenship from natural-born persons—Rosie O’Donnell or otherwise—it would not only be gutting the 14th Amendment, it would be:

• Violating binding international law,

• Breaking every post-WWII human rights norm it once pretended to champion,

• Pissing on treaties its diplomats helped write,

• And converting its global posture from “beacon of democracy” to “petulant banana republic with nukes.”

It would mean that the United States, having once paid in blood to establish citizenship by law, now tears it apart with bile, cowardice, and a Sharpie.

Treaties be damned.
Law be damned.
The Constitution? Just another napkin to wipe down the podium after the next rally.

That’s where this road ends: not just with tyranny, but with international pariah status—and deservedly so.

Because when you spit on your own Constitution, it doesn’t matter how many treaties you’ve signed.

The world already knows what you are.

What Stripping Rosie Really Means

Let us not be distracted by the pantomime.

This is not about Rosie O’Donnell. It never was. She is merely the test balloon, the straw dummy lashed to the catapult. An aging comedian, loud, left-leaning, and politically expendable. If they can strip her citizenship—someone famous, wealthy, and born in Commack, New York—they can strip yours, and no one will come running.

This is how it begins: not with jackboots at midnight, but with a tweet in all caps and a smirk from a man who spells “unconstitutional” with finger paint.

And it is no accident that Rosie is who they chose.

She is female.
She is queer.
She is opinionated.
She is politically offensive to the permanently offended.

To His Midgitness and his mob, she is not an American. She is an aberration. A punchline.

But that’s the point.

Because if the government can strip an American citizen of her status based on who she is, what she believes, and what she says, then the very idea of citizenship as a right becomes a joke.

It becomes conditional.
Conditional on obedience.
Conditional on worship.
Conditional on submission.

And that, dear reader, is not citizenship. That is fealty.

That is monarchy in drag, cosplay Caesarism. The passport becomes not a birthright, but a favor granted by a sovereign whose mood swings with the polling average. Say the wrong thing, support the wrong cause, mock the wrong monarch—and suddenly the document in your drawer means nothing. Your rights are no longer yours. They are rented, at will, from a man who confuses loyalty with love and power with permanence.

It tells us something darker still: that the state is preparing for exclusion.

It is testing, openly, how far it can go before the courts flinch or the public yawns. Rosie is the stress test. The absurd trial run. A Constitution dragged into the street and mugged for sport, just to see who cares.

If they succeed with her, they will not stop with her.

Because that’s what this is about. Not jokes. Not hair. Not show business.

It’s about a government—ours—asking aloud:

“What if citizenship isn’t forever? What if it can be taken away?”

And from there, it’s a short walk to asking:

“What if it can be taken away from you?”

(But) The Law Will Not Save You

Let us now dispense with the final polite fiction: that “the law” will save us.

It will not.

Although I am always dubbed “Mr. Happy Fun Guy,” and perhaps heir to H.L. Mencken’s wit and jaded personality when it comes to his brand of political analysis, our belief in the law is what is indeed at stake with denaturalizing the natural born citizenship of Rosie O’Donnell.

I have defended the founders, the framers, and our history. Although America is a land of many defects, it has also lifted humanity up in ways that no other civilization has in our history. That is a fact. The framers were men of honor. Integrity. Although the issue of slavery would not be addressed until it was done so in blood, no framer was indifferent to the claims and plight of bondage in 1789. The laws of this land were magnificent. There is no other description for what was accomplished.

The Constitution, beautiful as it may be, is not a spell book. It cannot levitate the dead, nor can it restrain the living if they no longer believe in it. This is perhaps the lie we told ourselves all this time, and until his emmience the Orange Ass deceded upon the body politic like an opportunistic infection, it was in fact the real reason why America worked as it did for as long as it did. But now that the infection has manifested itself? The Constitution appears as parchment and precedent—nothing more. And parchment burns easily when held too close to power.

The courts? They are as limp as they are robed. The Supreme Court—led by a man who clutches his institutional dignity the way a Victorian widow clutches her pearls—has proven itself perfectly capable of watching the house burn while whispering, “Well, technically, arson isn’t unconstitutional if done slowly.”

And I have heard this opinion voiced from federal judges. And I have read this opinion in the decisions of the appellate judges. And I have read this opinion in the edicts and dicta of the majority of the Supreme Court. We cannot continue this fiction that the judiciary is the guardian of the rule of law. If it is, then it is a poor one; if it is not, then it is truly lost.

And Congress? Congress is a two-chambered bordello of whores and cowardice. The Senate is a retirement home for ambition, greed, and sloth. The House a daycare for the criminally unserious but financially motivated to rapaciously extort the public. Faced with fascism wrapped in ochre, they shuffle paper, issue sternly worded letters, and vote to rename post offices and strip millions of health insurance. When the moment came to act, they held hearings—televised ones—and then went to lunch.

And the Justice Department? It moves with the speed of a glacial ooze and the force of a wet napkin with perfidy at its core. Pam Bondi has achieved what few can: becoming less impressive the more visible she becomes. She is the instrument of criminality for the syndicate: perfidy & contempt abound, and all the while smiling while pledging allegiance to the man she owes ultimate fealty.

The system we were taught to trust is not malfunctioning.

It is functioning as designed—for those in power.

It is not broken. It is rigged. Rigged to delay. Rigged to defer. Rigged to give every advantage to the man who would burn it all down and none to the citizen trying to escape the flames.

The law can write rules.

It cannot grow a spine.

It cannot show restraint.

It cannot show mercy unless its actors agree to do so.

And so here we are. The emperor-in-waiting desperately commanding the bureaucracy to revoke the citizenship of its citizens. The legal scholars frown. The justices nap. The Congress checks its fundraising numbers. And the people—those who still believe in ballots, borders, and the Bill of Rights—are told to “wait and see.”

Wait for what?

For the Republic to finish rotting?
For the next EO to declare disloyalty a deportable offense?
For the courts to discover a pulse after democracy is already dead?

No. The law will not save us.

It may describe the crime. It may document the collapse. But it will not prevent it.

Because the institutions are not neutral.

They are hostages.

The Borderless Condition

Now let us be clear for the benefit of the dazed, the willfully dumb, and the permanently Foxified:

This isn’t about Rosie O’Donnell.

It never was.

Rosie is merely the test case—fat, loud, queer, and easy to mock. She is the low-hanging fruit of authoritarian appetites. If they can denationalize her, with cameras rolling and MAGA grunting approval from the bleachers, they can denationalize anyone. You. Me. Your kids. And the only thing standing between you and bureaucratic nonexistence is a document whose meaning now depends on the mood swings of a game show host in legal peril.

And that, dear reader, is why people are leaving.

Not because they hate America, but because America, in its current and degenerated form, has made it abundantly clear that it might one day hate them.

This week alone, I’ve heard from men and women who have served in uniform, paid more in taxes than Trump has in his life, and built lives out of nothing but grit—and they are in mourning. They are watching the land of their birth transform into a stage set for bad theater, directed by lunatics and funded by oligarchs who believe citizenship is a prize to be awarded for applause.

They are not leaving because they want to.
They are leaving because the fire alarm is ringing, and the smoke is real.

It is not cowardice to step away from a building that is clearly on fire.
It is cowardice to stay and pretend the flames are patriotic.

And so they go—to Portugal, to Ireland, to Canada, to anywhere that still treats citizenship as a matter of law rather than mood. And the peanut gallery shrieks: traitor, deserter, coward!

But let’s be honest.

What kind of citizen are you, if your rights can be erased by decree?
What kind of nation is this, if birthright is now a game of favorites?

Borderless isn’t a flight from responsibility. It’s an escape from delusion. It is the recognition that the Republic, as it once was, no longer exists in any meaningful form. It is the decision to take your sovereignty seriously—because the government clearly doesn’t.

Those who leave now will be mocked—until they are envied.

Because what “stripping Rosie” really means is this: that the Constitution is no longer fixed. That the 14th Amendment is now a speed bump on the road to dictatorship. That citizenship, like everything else in Trump’s America, is for sale—or cancellation.

When the state starts revoking passports like they’re Twitter accounts, it is not the exile who is faithless.

It is the regime.

So leave, if you must. Stay, if you dare. But do not be deceived.
This is not your grandfather’s America. It may not even be yours.

And the longer you wait for someone to save it, the more likely you’ll be standing at the gate, holding a canceled passport, wondering how it all slipped away.

---

Build Your Exit While You Still Can

🛂 What happens when your passport stops protecting you?

Borderless Living is for those who understand that Plan A is collapsing, and Plan B needs to be built now. We cover second citizenship, relocation, offshore structuring, and how to maintain your sovereignty in a country that no longer guarantees it.

If you're ready to think like a sovereign instead of a subject, this is where we begin.

Because when the regime decides you don’t belong, it’s already too late to start Googling Portugal.

1. https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-election/trump-says-immigrants-are-poisoning-blood-country-biden-campaign-liken-rcna130141

2. Trump, Donald J. (2018). Axios on HBO interview, October 30, 2018. “It was always told to me that you needed a constitutional amendment. Guess what? You don’t... You can definitely do it with an Act of Congress. But now they’re saying I can do it just with an executive order.”

3. John Eastman’s Birthright Citizenship Memo (2018)
In various articles, op-eds, and legal memos, Eastman argued for a radical reinterpretation of the 14th Amendment, falsely asserting that undocumented immigrants and their children were not subject to U.S. jurisdiction.
→ See: Eastman, John. “Born in the USA?”, Claremont Review of Books, 2015
→ Washington Post Fact Check on Eastman’s Memo

4. Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness (1961)
The U.S. signed the 1961 Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness on December 30, 1970, but has never ratified it. However, U.S. policy and international practice generally align with many of its principles, and the U.S. is party to overlapping human rights treaties that reinforce these norms.

5. Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948)
Adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on December 10, 1948. The United States voted in favor. Though not a treaty, the UDHR forms the backbone of customary international law and has been cited by U.S. courts and State Department policy.
→ Article 15 affirms that “No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his nationality.”

6. International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR, 1966)
The U.S. signed the ICCPR in 1977 and ratified it in 1992, with several reservations. The treaty is legally binding.
→ Article 24(3): “Every child has the right to acquire a nationality.”
→ Article 12(4): “No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of the right to enter his own country.”

7. 1951 Refugee Convention & 1967 Protocol
The United States is not party to the 1951 Convention but did ratify the 1967 Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees on November 1, 1968. The Protocol incorporates Articles 2 through 34 of the original 1951 Convention, which prohibit rendering people stateless and reaffirm principles of non-discrimination and non-refoulement.

8. 1951 Refugee Convention & 1967 Protocol
The United States is not party to the 1951 Convention but did ratify the 1967 Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees on November 1, 1968. The Protocol incorporates Articles 2 through 34 of the original 1951 Convention, which prohibit rendering people stateless and reaffirm principles of non-discrimination and non-refoulement.