President Donald Trump is renewing his threat to revoke actor Rosie O'Donnell's citizenship.
"As previously mentioned, we are giving serious thought to taking away Rosie O'Donnell's citizenship," Trump wrote on Truth Social with a large, distorted photo of the actress's face.
"She is not a great American and is, in my opinion, incapable of being so!"
The White House X account shared the distorted photo and post Wednesday night, too, repeating the latter quote: "Incapable of being so!"
The Constitution's 14th Amendment protects citizenship for all individuals born on U.S. soil, meaning Trump has no legal authority to forcibly strip nationality from someone like O'Donnell, who was born in Commack, New York. Only citizens can relinquish the right.
"Once you have American citizenship, you have a constitutional entitlement to it," UCLA law professor Eugene Volokh told PolitiFact, a left-wing fact-checker that has frequently clashed with Trump for more than a decade.
"If you like your American citizenship, you can keep your American citizenship — and that's with the Supreme Court's guarantee."
Case law, including a 1967 Supreme Court ruling, reinforces that U.S.-born individuals cannot be divested of citizenship absent voluntary renunciation.
The image Trump posted and reshared by the White House — a distorted, unflattering close-up of O'Donnell — was not a historical photograph but appears to be digitally altered for ridicule, exaggerating her features and adding facial hair.
O'Donnell has been forced to apologize for calling the Minneapolis Catholic school shooter a "Republican, MAGA person, white supremacist," admitting she "did not do due diligence."
"I know a lot of you were very upset about the video I made before I went away for a few days," she said in a TikTok video shared Sunday. "You are right, and I did not do my due diligence before I made that emotional statement.
"I said things about the shooter that were incorrect. I assumed, like most shooters, they followed a standard MO and had standard feelings of you know, NRA-loving kind of gun people.
"The truth is, I messed up and when you mess up, you fess up. I'm sorry, this is my apology video, and I hope it's enough."
The false statement she apologized for claimed the shooter "was a white guy, Republican, MAGA person, what do you know? White supremacist."
Instead, the shooter was transgender – regrettably, according to the murder-suicide manifesto – and expressed anti-Israel and anti-religion views, along with a fixation on prior mass shooters, writing "Kill Donald Trump" on ammunition magazines.
Eric Mack ✉
Eric Mack has been a writer and editor at Newsmax since 2016. He is a 1998 Syracuse University journalism graduate and a New York Press Association award-winning writer.
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