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.








