Donald Trump got his start in politics by demanding to see the president’s birth certificate. Now he wants to see all of ours.
In 2011, four years before he launched his own run for the White House, Trump latched onto the long-running “birther” conspiracy theory that President Barack Obama was not born in the United States, disputing the validity of his birth certificate. In response, Obama dug up his long-form certificate to show that he was, in fact, born in Hawaii. Trump eventually conceded that Obama was born here, though he later promoted similar theories about Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, and former Vice President Kamala Harris being ineligible to be president.
But now, Trump wants every American to produce a birth certificate to vote or just play high school sports, even as he seeks to undermine the document’s value as a status marker at the Supreme Court. His birtherism has metastasized to the entire country.
The president’s top domestic priority right now is pressuring Republicans to change Senate rules and pass the SAVE Act, which would require Americans to provide a certified birth certificate or other documentary proof of their U.S. citizenship in person at their local elections office to register to vote.
This would vastly complicate voter registration in the middle of an election year by throwing up new barriers to registering online or by mail, requiring even more documentation from women whose married names don’t match the names on their birth certificates and making registration vastly more difficult for older, lower-income and rural Americans who don’t have easy access to their birth certificates.
That’s a lot of people:
• At least half of all Americans who registered to vote before the 2024 election did so online, by mail, at a voter drive or automatically, according to the U.S. Election Assistance Commission.
• Almost 80% of women married to men took their husband’s last name, according to a 2023 survey by the Pew Research Center.
• More than 21 million Americans of voting age do not have ready access to a birth certificate, passport or other proof of citizenship, including nearly 4 million who do not have those documents at all, according to a 2024 survey by the polling firm SSRS.
Trump wants every American to produce a birth certificate to vote or just play high school sports.
When the bill appeared doomed in the Senate, Trump then added another demand in early March, posting on social media that the bill should be amended to ban almost all mail-in voting — and ban transgender athletes in women’s sports and gender-affirming care for transgender youth. Republicans dutifully put the anti-transgender amendment up for a vote, only for it to fail.
Most commentators assumed the transgender amendments were simply Trump’s typically ham-handed approach to political strategy, imagining that Democrats would fold if forced to vote on them.
But it’s worth noting as well that these kinds of restrictions typically depend on the idea that your gender as noted on your birth certificate is your “correct” one and that any attempts to play school sports, use the bathroom or receive appropriate medical care should only be allowed if it conforms to whichever box the on-duty nurse checked on a government form years ago. This is not what Progressive Era reformers envisioned when they first advocated for states to develop a document that could help keep track of infant mortality and enforce child labor laws in the early 1900s. Birth certificates are following the path of the driver’s license, which started as proof that you knew the rules of the road and is now required to enter a bar, pick up your prescription at the pharmacy, board an airplane or buy a house. But while Trump seems obsessed with birth certificates, he’s also seeking to undermine their most valuable role of proving citizenship. Next week, the administration’s legal team will challenge the long-standing application of birthright citizenship before the Supreme Court. Its arguments would upend legal precedents rooted in English Common Law, the citizenship clause of the 14th Amendment and the court’s own landmark 1898 ruling in United States v. Wong Kim Ark. Under Trump’s ahistorical view, only children born on U.S. soil with at least one parent who is already a citizen would be granted automatic citizenship. This would essentially undermine the use of a birth certificate to prove you are a U.S. citizen, since they typically don’t include information on the parents’ immigration status. In fact, it’s unclear how anyone could prove they are a citizen under this unworkable standard, since the only way many of us could prove our parents are citizens would be to show their birth certificates. Even a passport wouldn’t be much help, since you generally only get one because you can show a birth certificate in the first place. In short, Trump thinks you need to keep a certified copy of your birth certificate to prove you are a U.S. citizen to vote, serve as president or just play on the women’s soccer team, but at the same time, he thinks a birth certificate is basically worthless to establish citizenship unless it’s accompanied by even more documentation of your lineage or your marriage. But that just shows it was never about the birth certificate. Birtherism, at its core, was always about denying that someone like Obama could ever truly be American. Now Trump wants to turn that twisted logic against millions more of us.
Ryan Teague Beckwith is a newsletter editor for MS NOW. He has previously worked for such outlets as Time magazine and Bloomberg News. He teaches journalism at Georgetown University’s School of Continuing Studies and is the creator of Your First Byline. 
