The history behind Trump’s dangerous attacks on birthright citizenship.
Donald Trump, who propelled his political career with the lie that Barack Obama wasn’t born in the United States, is again spreading baseless claims about who is and isn’t legally qualified to serve as president. And it’s revealing his vision for what he thinks American democracy should look like.
Just as in 2016, when Trump claimed that his primary opponent Texas senator Ted Cruz was potentially ineligible to be president, Trump is now casting doubt on yet another Republican rival’s citizenship. This time, it’s Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor who is seeking to replace him as the GOP’s standard bearer. On his social media platform, Trump shared a post from the Gateway Pundit — a right-wing website that traffics in hoaxes and conspiracy theories — that falsely claimed she might not be legally eligible for the presidency because she’s somehow not a natural-born citizen.
For background, the US Constitution requires that presidents be natural-born citizens. While the founders didn’t offer a specific definition of “natural born,” the term has generally been understood to mean Americans who are citizens at birth, be it because they were born on US soil or because they were born to American parents.
In the past, Trump claimed that Obama and Cruz weren’t natural-born citizens because they were born outside the United States. But Obama is, in fact, a natural-born citizen because he was — contrary to what Trump claimed — born in Hawaii. And while Cruz was actually born abroad, in Canada, the general consensus among legal scholars was that he was also a citizen at birth because he was born to an American mother.
The latest conspiracy theory about Haley’s citizenship is slightly different. It doesn’t contest that she was born in the United States (she was, in a South Carolina hospital). It contends, wrongly, that Haley is not a natural-born citizen — and therefore disqualified from the presidency — because her parents, who immigrated from India, were not yet US citizens at the time of her birth.
Whatever Haley’s parents’ citizenship status was, the fact that she was born in a US state means that she is, undeniably, a natural-born citizen. It is her birthright, as enshrined in the 14th Amendment of the Constitution. Unsurprisingly, that didn’t stop Trump from sharing the conspiracy theory about her citizenship.
By promoting the falsehood that Haley isn’t a natural-born citizen despite the fact that she was born in South Carolina, Trump isn’t just casting doubt on her citizenship; he’s normalizing the dangerous idea that, on its own, being born in the United States is an insufficient claim to full and unconditional citizenship — 14th Amendment be damned.
There’s a common thread among those whom Trump has accused of not being natural-born citizens: Obama was the country’s first black president; Haley, an Indian-American, would be the country’s first South Asian president if she somehow finds a path to victory; and had he won in 2016, Cruz would’ve been the first Cuban-American president.
To say that racism is the driving force behind Trump’s attacks on their citizenship would be to state the obvious. But couple that with the fact that the jurisdictions Trump baselessly claimed were bastions of voter fraud in 2020 had large Black populations, and his ideas about who is and isn’t really American become even clearer.
