\n<\/p>\n
This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.<\/p>\n
Not that long ago, believe it or not, Donald Trump ran for president as the candidate who would defend the First Amendment.<\/p>\n
He warned that a \u201csinister group of Deep State bureaucrats, Silicon Valley tyrants, left-wing activists, and depraved corporate news media\u201d was \u201cconspiring to manipulate and silence the American people,\u201d and promised that \u201cby restoring free speech, we will begin to reclaim our democracy, and save our nation.\u201d On his first day back in office, Trump signed an executive order affirming the \u201cright of the American people to engage in constitutionally protected speech.\u201d<\/p>\n
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\u2014for no apparent reason other than that she regularly criticizes him.<\/p>\n
\u201cBecause of the fact that Rosie O\u2019Donnell 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,\u201d he posted on Truth Social.<\/p>\n
This must have been exhilarating to O\u2019Donnell, who received a brief new grant of relevance and told the Irish broadcaster RTE, \u201cI am very proud to be opposed to every single thing he says and does and represents.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
Writing off the threat to O\u2019Donnell as just another instance of Trumpian trolling\u2014or an attempt to distract from fatal flooding in Texas, dozens of incomplete trade deals, or intramural MAGA battles over Jeffrey Epstein\u2014is tempting. And the odds that Trump would actually successfully strip O\u2019Donnell of her passport seem slim. But that doesn\u2019t mean the threat is irrelevant.<\/p>\n
What in particular set Trump off here is unclear\u2014he and O\u2019Donnell have been feuding for years\u2014but 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\u2019Donnell generally cannot be stripped of their citizenship. (Citizens can, however, choose to relinquish their citizenship\u2014something 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\u2019t just decide that he wants to take it away.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s not to say even that was a legitimate standard; such accusations are also dangerous, and judges have dismissed them). With O\u2019Donnell, Trump isn\u2019t even pretending she has crossed some sort of criminal line. He\u2019s 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: \u201cWhen 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\u2019ll also shrug and wonder why he didn\u2019t do it sooner. After all, he\u2019s been promising to do it forever, right?\u201d I wish this argument had aged worse.<\/p>\n
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\u2014though, 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.<\/p>\n
Even if Trump doesn\u2019t normalize taking away citizenship, he is continuing to entrench the idea that the government\u2014or, really, just the president on his own\u2014can punish citizens who criticize it, or him. That\u2019s 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\u2019ll continue as long as he\u2019s successful.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf we don\u2019t have free speech, then we just don\u2019t have a free country,\u201d Trump said in a campaign video posted in 2022. \u201cIt\u2019s 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\u2019ll go down.\u201d<\/p>\n
Candidate Trump was as correct as he was disingenuous.<\/p>\n
Related:<\/p>\n
\nHere are three new stories from The Atlantic:<\/strong><\/p>\n Today\u2019s News<\/strong><\/p>\n Dispatches<\/strong><\/p>\n Explore all of our newsletters here.<\/em><\/p>\n Evening Read<\/strong><\/p>\n Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Getty.<\/p>\n The AI Mirage<\/p>\n By Ian Bogost<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m not going to respond to that,\u201d Siri responded. I had just cursed at it, and this was my passive-aggressive chastisement.<\/p>\n 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 \u201cdirections to Lowe\u2019s,\u201d hoping to get routed to the big-box hardware store without taking my eyes off the road. But apparently Siri didn\u2019t understand. \u201cWhich Lowe?\u201d it asked, before displaying a list of people with the surname Lowe in my address book \u2026<\/p>\n The latest version of Siri has \u201cbetter conversational context\u201d\u2014the sort of thing that should help the software know when I\u2019m asking to be guided to the home-improvement store rather than to a guy called Lowe. But my iPhone apparently isn\u2019t new enough for this update. I would need cutting-edge artificial intelligence to get directions to Lowe\u2019s.<\/p>\n Read the full article.<\/p>\n More From The Atlantic<\/em><\/p>\n Culture Break<\/p>\n Photo-illustration by Anna Kliewer. Source: Mike Coppola \/ MG25 \/ Getty \/ Vogue.<\/p>\n Read. Alert the incels! The rest of us love Pamela Anderson, and we will always love her, Caitlin Flanagan writes.<\/p>\n Let go. And let your kid climb that tree, Henry Abbott writes. It could actually make them safer.<\/p>\n Play our daily crossword.<\/p>\n Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.<\/p>\n When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting <\/em>The Atlantic.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. Not that long ago, believe it or not, Donald Trump ran for president as the candidate who would defend<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":10853,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[1671,4010,2436],"class_list":{"0":"post-10852","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-social-issues","8":"tag-atlantic","9":"tag-censorship","10":"tag-citizenship"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10852","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10852"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10852\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/10853"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10852"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10852"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10852"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n