President Donald Trump rekindled a long-standing feud with comedian Rosie O’Donnell on Saturday, using his Truth Social platform to announce that he was contemplating revoking her citizenship.
“Given that Rosie O’Donnell does not serve the best interests of our Great Country, I am seriously considering revoking her Citizenship,” Trump stated. “She poses a Threat to Humanity and should stay in the beautiful Country of Ireland, if they accept her. GOD BLESS AMERICA!”
Steve Vladeck, CNN Supreme Court analyst and professor at Georgetown Law, commented on Saturday that Trump’s threat of “coercive expatriation” was “patently unconstitutional.”
“For good reasons, it is difficult to denaturalize a U.S. citizen and even harder to expatriate one,” Vladeck wrote in April. “Congress has provided for only a handful of circumstances in which the executive branch is empowered to pursue such a move; and the Supreme Court has recognized meaningful constitutional limits (and an entitlement to meaningful judicial review) even in those cases.”
CNN has reached out to the White House about what prompted the president’s threat – but O’Donnell drew attention last weekend after she posted a video to TikTok slamming the Trump administration’s response to the Texas floods, claiming the president “gut[ted] all of the early warning systems and the weatheringforecast abilities of the government,” stymying the federal response.
O’Donell moved to Ireland shortly before Trump’s inauguration in January, telling CNN in April that Trump’s reelection prompted the move.
“I knew after reading Project 2025 that if Trump got in, it was time for me and my nonbinary child to leave the country,” she told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer and Pamela Brown. “I have no regrets. Not a day has gone by that I thought it was the wrong decision. I was welcomed with open arms.”
Responding to the president’s post Saturday, O’Donnell wrote on Instagram, “you want to revoke my citizenship? go ahead and try, king joffrey with a tangerine spray tan. i’m not yours to silence. i never was.”
Presenter Rosie O’Donnell speaks at the 30th annual GLAAD Media Awards, May 4, 2019, in New York.
Photo by Evan Agostini/Invision/AP, File
Trump and O’Donnell have clashed since at least 2006, after O’Donell – then a co-host of “The View” – called Trump a “snake-oil salesman on Little House On The Prairie,” and said he went bankrupt, which Trump denied.
For his part, Trump has called O’Donnell “a real loser,” “crude, rude, obnoxious, and dumb,” and “a pig” over the years.
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