[T]rump's eruption last week, in which he attacked (but did not name) Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ayanna Pressley, Ilhan Omar, and Rashida Tlaib, tweeting that they should "go back" to where they came from, and later accused them of hating America, could not be called unexpected. [...]

This most recent incident highlights a theme of Trump's pronouncements as they pertain to people of color. He presents the citizenship of black and brown Americans as a kind of probation that can be revoked for the most minor infractions of protocol. [...]

The idea of selective citizenship is not uncommon in American history. The nation's first immigration law, passed in 1790, allowed for the naturalization of white immigrants only. It took the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which was ratified in 1868, to establish that birthright citizenship also applies to blacks. As Jill Lepore notes, in her book "This America," another thirty years passed before the Supreme Court found, in United States v. Wong Kim Ark, that birthright citizenship applies to a person of Asian descent, and it was another quarter century before the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924 declared that all indigenous people born in the United States are citizens. Trump isn't just attacking four women of color; he is reanimating ideas whose prevalence wreaked havoc in the nation's past.