When Donny’s pissed at you, it may not end well, particularly if you value your citizenship.
Remember when Elon and Donny got into it a few weeks back when Elon started to get all lip about Trump’s BBB — Big Beautiful Bill — that had just passed Congress. Apparently, after taking a chainsaw to government operations as part of his leadership of DOGE — Department of Government Efficiencies — Musk was bent a bit out of shape by the fact that Trump’s bill actually added trillions of dollars to the national debt, something Elon felt was a bit counter-productive to his own efforts at DOGE.
He said some things. He called The Donald some names. He mentioned something about Jeffrey Epstein’s list, the most talked-about and speculated-about list in modern times.
President Trump took it all in stride. He said some very powerful and beautiful things in response, the most beautiful response, sociologists far and wide raving at how beautiful his response was. They’d never seen such a beautiful response before. How does Trump do it?
Part of that BBR — Big Beautiful Response — was something about Trump stripping Musk of his American citizenship, which I’m not too sure he can do but perhaps Musk being born in South Africa and educated a bit in Canada might give the ICE shock troops all they would need to bundle the billionaire into the back off an unmarked SUV with a potato sack for a blindfold.
All of this for a guy that donated $250 million in campaign donations that were critical to Trump’s re-election. Like, imagine if he really didn’t like you?
This brings me to Rosie O’Donnell.
Full disclosure is appropriate here, as I’m no fan of Rosie’s myself. There’s just something about her, something that strikes me as obnoxious, and I just can’t give it a pass. Maybe it’s the Irish in her, which would be really weird because I’m of Irish heritage myself. You’d think that I’d recognize that Irish-ness and celebrate it, identify with it, and give Rosie the benefit of the doubt when it came to anything. But no, it’s not working out that way. The Lucky Charms aren’t all that charming, it seems.
And then I found out that Donald Trump hated her.
Actually, I knew of the enmity existing between the two Big Personalities, or two Big Egos, but that story had fallen off the radar several years ago. But it’s come up again, this time as a result of Trumpian threats to have o’Donnell removed from her citizenship.
O’Donnell was born in the United States, but now resides in, you guessed it, Ireland.
All this despite a decades-old Supreme Court ruling saying that a president has no such right. But we know the value of existing constitutional rules and norms when they come up against someone as disrespectful of convention as Trump and his acolytes.
Apparently, in a recent burst of social media commentary, O’Donnell heavily criticized the same BBB that Musk did. To Trump, this is treason, and he asserts in his own social media that O’Donnell is not “great” for “this Great Country,” and that he might just have to take action against her citizenship and force her to remain a permanent resident of Ireland “if they’ll have her.”
It’s hard to say if this is just more of that famous Trump bluster, the kind of stuff he throws out there to intimidate people, perhaps having no intention of acting on those threats in any event. There is, after all, that pesky Fourteenth Amendment that says that a revocation of citizenship must be voluntary and cannot be mandated. In short, a person can renounce their citizenship, but they can’t have it taken from them by the state. And we all know how the Americans like to cling to their constitutional amendments. So Rosie’s citizenship should be safe from Trump, because she’s a naturalized citizen, meaning she was born there. Again, that differentiates her from Musk, a foreign national with an obtained American citizenship. But it may not matter because Musk has turtled in the face of Trump’s threats and has shut his trap, at least as far as it was yipping and yapping against The Donald.
It’s kind of scary to think how easily a guy like Trump whipped a guy like Musk back into shape, even when the latter gifted the former with a quarter-billion dollar campaign boost. The point is, if Trump can rag-doll the richest person in the world so easily, what might he be able to do with lesser mortals who get on his bad side, even if only briefly?
For me, when I see people like this bickering and fighting one another, I call it a good morning. We’re all familiar with that whole “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” thing, but this is more of a “the enemy of my enemy is my enemy too,” so go ahead and have at it. I just want to sit back and cheer everyone as they land their blows without having to worry about the defeat of any of them, hoping for the defeat of all of them.
The most profound hope would be they damage each other so much that they all just go away. But that’s just pure, unmitigated fantasy at work, and way too much to hope for. I can be as naive as the next guy, but hoping that these clowns all cancel each other out is going a bit far in the hope department.
NEWSMAGRENFREW 