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No wonder we feel dizzy. We live in a roller-coaster world, up one day, down the next. Or often up and down several times in the same day. Like this week, April 1 – no April Fools’ joke! – where we experienced both the best of America and the worst.

The best of America was Artemis II, the most powerful rocket ever launched, blasting four astronauts on an historic mission around the far side of the moon and back to earth: a distance of 248,000 miles at a speed of 25,000 mph.

The first lunar mission in 53 years, Artemis II is not only a triumph of American engineering, it also reflects who we are as Americans. The Artemis crew includes the first woman, the first person of color and the first non-American citizen to soar beyond earth’s low orbit. It is, in other words, a “DEI” event we can all be proud of – but which somehow escaped Donald Trump’s attention. Otherwise, he would have canceled the whole mission.

That same day, the worst of America was on display when Donald Trump showed up at the Supreme Court to support his plan to end birthright citizenship. He’s the first president to do so because no other president would do something so blatant or stupid.

Trump decided to attend the court’s oral arguments on birthright citizenship for one reason only: to intimate members of the court, especially the three justices he’d appointed to the bench. What a gigantic, delusional ego! He actually believed that if he showed up in person, conservative justices wouldn’t dare vote against him. In fact, his presence may have the exact opposite effect: justices voting to uphold birthright citizenship if only to prove their independence from Trump.

Although one must always be careful about reading too much into oral arguments, from questions raised by even the most conservative justices, it doesn’t look like the court will uphold Trump’s Executive Order to eliminate birthright citizenship. Nor should they.

Some legal arguments are so complex you need a constitutional scholar to decipher them. But, as CNN’s Jeff Tobin told my podcast, you don’t need a degree from Harvard Law to understand the issue of birthright citizenship. You just need to know how to read.

Section 1 of the 14th Amendment of the Constitution was adopted in 1868 to ratify the results of the Civil War by affirming that children born of slaves were legal residents of the United States. It only takes one sentence: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” And no sentence could be more clear: If you were born on American soil, you’re an American citizen. Period.

On the first day of his second term, Donald Trump signed an Executive Order ending birthright citizenship because, he said, it was designed for slave children only – and not for sons and daughters of immigrants today. Now it’s up to the Supreme Court to decide whether a president can single-handedly rewrite or negate parts of the Constitution. For Trump, prospects don’t look good. When Solicitor General D. John Sauer argued that we couldn’t still follow the wording of the 14th Amendment because the world had changed, Chief Justice John Roberts fired back: “It’s a new world. It’s the same Constitution.”

It's unlikely, but were the court to side with Trump, the results could be disastrous. According to the Pew Research Center, there are 1.2 million U.S. citizens who were born to unauthorized immigrant parents. Without the 14th Amendment, all of them could be rounded up and deported, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio, whose Cuban parents were not American citizens when he was born in Miami.

Unfortunately, we saw more of the worst of America that evening when Trump addressed the nation from the White House, speaking as usual from both sides of his mouth. His war against Iran is over, but we’re going to bomb them for another two to three weeks. They must open the Strait of Hormuz, but we don’t care because we don’t need their oil. We don’t want regime change, but we killed all their leaders, anyway and we’re going to kill even more.

It makes you jealous of the Artemis II astronauts. For the next 10 days, we’ll still be stuck on this ridiculous Donald Trump roller coaster, but lucky them. They’ll be 248,000 miles away!

(Bill Press is host of The BillPressPod, and author of 10 books, including: “From the Left: My Life in the Crossfire.” His email address is: bill@billpress.com. Readers may also follow him on Twitter @billpresspod and on BlueSky @BillPress.bsky.social.)

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