A $5 million gold card. A reality show for migrants. A birthright under assault.
Let us be very clear: the Trump Administration does not want citizenship to be a right. They want it to be a reward for the loyal, the rich, or the compliant.
To this end, President Trump’s bid to unilaterally end birthright citizenship for children born in the United States to undocumented immigrants is a modern-day Trojan horse masquerading as a concern for national security.
This is not about protecting America, but redefining America from the top down.
That redefinition is already underway.
The Trump Administration’s plans to sell $5 million “gold cards” to wealthy investors as a path to citizenship and consideration of a pitch for a reality show that would “pit immigrants against each other for a chance at a fast-tracked path to citizenship” are not just absurd—they’re obscene.
They reveal a government willing to reduce constitutional rights to commodities, auctioned off to the highest bidder or trivialized for ratings.
This governing by performance turns a constitutional guarantee into a privilege for sale or spectacle. It’s part of a calculated effort to recast citizenship as conditional, transactional, and exclusionary. Whether by wealth, loyalty, or ideology, this emerging framework decides who is “deserving” of rights—and who is not.
It is fear-based nationalism that disguises a deeper threat: the normalization of government power to decide who is entitled to rights and who is not.
We see this in action with the Trump Administration’s stance on childbirth and citizenship.
It’s a contradiction: while the Trump Administration decries falling birthrates and offers financial incentives for childbirth, it demonizes birthright citizenship for the very communities that are actually having children and contributing significantly to the economy without any guarantee of anything in return.
Yet this brazenly hypocritical double standard is just a distraction, part of the political theater designed to pit Americans against each other while the power brokers rewrite the rules behind closed doors.
The real power play rests in the Trump Administration’s efforts to gut the Fourteenth Amendment, sidestep the courts, and redefine who qualifies as American—all by executive fiat.
Redefining citizenship by executive order is not governance. It is a bloodless coup—one that overthrows a constitutional republic founded on the rule of law—to reconfigure the face of the nation in the image of the unelected Deep State and its machinery of control.
Enacted in the wake of the Civil War, the Fourteenth Amendment was designed to ensure that all persons born on U.S. soil would be recognized as full citizens—a direct rebuke to the Supreme Court’s infamous Dred Scott decision, which held that Black Americans could not be citizens. Its language is unambiguous: all persons born or naturalized in the U.S., and subject to its jurisdiction, are citizens.
This principle was upheld by the Supreme Court in United States v. Wong Kim Ark (1898), which affirmed that children born in the U.S. to foreign nationals are entitled to citizenship under the Fourteenth Amendment.
That precedent still stands.
Yet that legacy—of constitutional protections prevailing over prejudice—is now at risk.
Some have recently argued—including the Trump Administration in legal filings—that the Fourteenth Amendment was intended solely to grant citizenship to the children of former slaves after the Civil War, and thus no longer applies to children born to undocumented immigrants. But if that logic is taken seriously, it undermines the citizenship of everyone born in America.
After all, if the government—not the Constitution—gets to decide who qualifies as a citizen, then no one’s status is secure.
If your citizenship depends on government approval, your rights aren’t inalienable—they’re transitory privileges.
That’s not just bad law. It’s tyranny in the making.
Despite Trump’s attempts to rule by fiat and executive order, presidents cannot pick and choose which parts of the Constitution they will honor.
Yet perhaps even more concerning than Trump’s war on birthright citizenship itself is the administration’s underlying legal strategy to test the limits of judicial authority—specifically, to restrict the power of federal district courts to issue nationwide injunctions against unconstitutional actions.
You see, this is not just an immigration battle, nor is it only a challenge to the Fourteenth Amendment.
It is a calculated attempt to strip the judiciary of its ability to check executive abuse and a full-frontal assault on the judiciary’s role as a co-equal branch of government entrusted with interpreting the law and defending individual rights against majoritarian overreach.
If successful, it would mark a seismic shift in the balance of powers, subordinating the courts to the whims of the executive branch.
As James Madison wrote, the accumulation of all powers in the same hands may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.
The same unchecked power used to deny citizenship to the children of immigrants today could just as easily be turned against you to strip you of your citizenship, based on your political beliefs, religious views, or failure to toe the party line.
This is the danger the Founders warned against: a government that grants rights only to the loyal, the favored, or the compliant.
And make no mistake: what we’re witnessing is another point along the slippery slope of the effort to recast birthright citizenship—not as a right—but as a privilege, subject to political approval and ideological purity tests.
In this emerging framework, being born in America is no longer enough—you must also prove your worth, allegiance, and compliance.
Worse still, this would set a precedent that constitutional rights can be rewritten by executive whim, paving the way for even greater erosions of liberty.
If we do not hold the line here, this erosion of liberty will only accelerate.
Birthright citizenship is more than a legal technicality. It is a cornerstone of American democracy and equality. The attempt to destroy it through executive power is a direct threat to the rule of law, the independence of the judiciary, and the future of liberty in America.
As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, if the government can erase one constitutional right today, it can erase another tomorrow.
This is exactly why the Founders drafted a Constitution that limits power and protects individuals, not just the popular or the powerful.
Once we allow the government to decide who is “deserving” of rights, we’ve already surrendered the rule of law. What remains is not a constitutional republic, but an empire of arbitrary rule.