Trump Threatens to Denaturalize Longtime Critic Rosie O'Donnell, a Native-Born U.S. Citizen

Jul 14, 2025

One of the rules of a free society is that citizens decide who their leaders are; the leaders do not arbitrarily decide based on whim who is or isn’t a citizen. But Trump is seeking to reverse this. He has already threatened to denaturalize New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani. Now he is threatening a native-born citizen critic of his: Rosie O’Donnell.

CNN reports:

President Donald Trump reignited a decades-long feud with comedian Rosie O’Donnell Saturday, taking to his Truth Social platform to write he was considering revoking her citizenship.
“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,” Trump wrote. “She is a Threat to Humanity, and should remain in the wonderful Country of Ireland, if they want her. GOD BLESS AMERICA!”
Steve Vladeck, CNN Supreme Court analyst and professor at Georgetown Law, said 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.

Trump makes many unrealistic threats, but none of them should be taken lightly. The threat against Mamdani, for example, was followed by a new emphasis on denaturalization. Even if he ultimately doesn’t succeed, just the attempt would make O’Donnell, or any other critic’s, life a living hell.

The Executive Watch is a project of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, and its flagship publication The UnPopulist, to track in an ongoing way the abuses of the power of the American presidency. It sorts these abuses into five categories: Personal Grift, Political Corruption, Presidential Retribution, Power Consolidation, and Policy Illegality. Click the category of interest to get an overview of all the abuses under it.

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