Fox News can't hide their contempt for Trump's 'vile' plot: report

U.S. President Donald Trump gestures during a visit to Verst Logistics in Hebron, Kentucky, U.S., March 11, 2026. REUTERS Kevin Lamarque

The wider American voting public does not care for President Donald Trump's "vile" birthright citizenship arguments, and as New Republic noted in a new report, not even Fox News can hide their disdain.

Trump last week suffered a major loss before the Supreme Court, which struck down his attempt to rewrite the constitutional definition of birthright citizenship via executive order, albeit by a slim 5-4 vote. The president and his supporters have remained resolute in the face of that defeat, calling for Congress to make the changes via legislation instead, claiming that the court's decision had cleared the way to do so without a new amendment to the Constitution.

“Congress should start TODAY,” Trump implored on Truth Social. “No long and unwieldy Constitutional Amendment is necessary!”

“If there’s some legislative fix, we’ll advance that immediately,” House Speaker Mike Johnson said about the situation.

Writing about these remarks for the New Republic on Tuesday, Greg Sargent called the situation "alarming," and explained its roots in longstanding right-wing grievances about immigration.

"Birthright citizenship might require a mere 'legislative fix,' Johnson says, because under it, citizenship has been 'devalued' by 'birth tourism,'" Sargent wrote. "That last phrase has long been a noxious rallying cry on the anti-immigrant right. But in Johnson’s hands, it’s meant to portray the birthright citizenship “problem” as no biggie, as a trivial matter that just needs a little patching up."

He added later: "Theoretically, Johnson and Republicans could write legislation that, say, prohibits the grant of citizenship to any babies born to one or two parents who entered illegally and/or were undocumented at the time of the birth. Right now, such a bill would presumably be upheld as constitutional by 'only four Supreme Court justices: Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, and Neil Gorsuch voted to overturn birthright citizenship on constitutional grounds, and Brett Kavanaugh sided with the majority but only on a statutory basis, not a constitutional one. That’s alarming."

Whatever the GOP might try to do from this point, Sargent noted further that it would not be embraced by a majority of the voting public, noting that even a poll from the conservative Fox News showed that Trump's core demographics are mostly opposed to his arguments on birthright citizenship. Support for the principle is also on the rise.

"It would also be deeply, deeply unpopular," Sargent wrote "A recent Fox News poll found that 69 percent of Americans think a kid born to an 'illegal immigrant' (Fox’s language) should 'automatically become a U.S. citizen.' That includes 65 percent of noncollege white voters, 61 percent of rural whites, and even 57 percent of white evangelicals. As Fox quietly reported in March (how often do you hear this finding on the network?), relative to previous years, support for it is up."

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