Signed on his first day back in office, Donald Trump’s executive order attempting to unilaterally dissolve the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of automatic citizenship to virtually every child born on American soil perfectly exemplifies the core obsessions of his era’s politics. It was flatly unconstitutional. Yet even before the Supreme Court narrowly upheld over 150 years of precedent in a 6-3 decision that blocked the bedrock of MAGA’s nativist project on statutory grounds, many in right-wing media cried foul. Only a 5-4 majority found the doctrine to be constitutional.. To anyone operating within the bounds of reality, the Court’s ruling was a troublingly close baseline affirmation of American law. But within the echo chamber of right-wing media, it was treated as an existential apocalypse.
While the right of birthright citizenship today is the same as it was yesterday — and the same as it has been for generations — conservative media is, ironically, reframing the preservation of the status quo as a catastrophic loss. By soundly rejecting Trump’s imperial decree, the Court did not end the assault on birthright citizenship. Instead, it handed right-wing media exactly what it wanted and so desperately needed: a permanent grievance engine. For 50 years, the conservative movement used Roe v. Wade to raise billions of dollars, discipline lawmakers and whip its base into a frenzy of perpetual victimization over abortion rights. Tuesday’s ruling gives them a new Roe.
