Reprinted with permission from Shareblue.
The would-be dictator who occupies the Oval Office, despite receiving far fewer votes in the 2016 election, now says he’s going to unravel the Constitution by executive order.
“It was always told to me that you needed a constitutional amendment,” Trump said in an interview with Axios. “Guess what? You don’t.”
But actually, you do.
Trump has decided that he, rather than the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, should define U.S. citizenship. The 14th Amendment clearly states: “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.”
That’s not something Trump can undo with the wave of his pen.
The Constitution cannot be amended by executive order, or through the empty campaign promises of a racist president. That’s in the Constitution too.
The announcement is an obvious and transparent ploy to rally his racist base one week before the election. Trump has been hysterically tweeting and ranting for weeks that a “caravan” of immigrants fleeing violence and persecution in their own countries are heading toward the United States — as if refugees are to be feared rather than welcomed.
Trump’s baseless hysterics that refugees seeking asylum are somehow a threat to our country — they most certainly are not — have echoed through the fever swamp of the right-wing and directly into the ears of a man who murdered 11 Jews in their synagogue on Saturday.
He did it to protect “his” people from the non-existent “invasion” of immigrants Trump has been wailing about, brought to this country by the very Jews Trump and his fellow Republicans have been attacking — in speeches, on Twitter, and even in campaign ads.
But 11 slaughtered Jews is not enough to stop Trump and his angry, violence-inspiring rhetoric. It’s not enough to ensure that the people who go to his rallies and chant “CNN sucks!” and “Lock her up!” — the people like the alleged would-be bomber who sent bombs to a dozen of the very people Trump regularly attacks — will turn out to vote for Trump’s Republican Party.
So he’s going even further now, turning up the dial, the heat, the tone, the rhetoric, and the danger.
“We’re the only country in the world where a person comes in and has a baby, and the baby is essentially a citizen of the United States for 85 years with all of those benefits,” whined to Axios. “It’s ridiculous. It’s ridiculous. And it has to end.”
That’s also not true, of course. As the Washington Post notes, dozens of other countries grant citizenship to anyone born within their borders, just the United States Constitution does.
But facts matter to Trump as much as the Constitution itself does. That is, not at all. So now, in a disgusting and desperate last-minute appeal to racists, he’s making a promise he most certainly can’t keep: to strip Americans of their citizenship because he personally deems them unworthy.
Published with permission of The American Independent.
