In a freewheeling interview with NBC News Sunday, President-elect Donald Trump offered a head-scratching explanation for his plan to wage an attack on birthright citizenship. 

“Did you know, if somebody sets a foot — just a foot, one foot, you don’t need two — on our land, congratulations, you are now a citizen of the United States of America,” Trump said, when discussing birthright citizenship.

“Yes, we’re going to end that, because it’s ridiculous,” he added. 

Trump appeared to describe a hypothetical scenario in which a woman would give birth to an infant who — either capable of walking at birth or helped along by someone eager to win a bet — would set one foot on American soil and the other in either Mexico or Canada.

It is also possible Trump was imagining an infant hopping or standing on one leg. Neither scenario is plausible. 

Trump also repeatedly asked whether the interviewer, Kristen Welker of Meet the Press, knew that the United States was the only country that conferred citizenship by birthright. 

“We’re the only country that has it, you know,” Trump said. “You know we’re the only country that has it.” 

Birthright citizenship is commonly recognised in the Americas, including in Canada and Mexico. Also known by its Latin legal term as “jus soli,” it is the concept of conferring citizenship by birth in a given country. Most countries instead recognise “jus sanguinis,” which instead confers citizenship based on the nationality of a person’s parents.

Welker did not challenge Trump’s utterly wrong description of how birthright citizenship works or that the United States is not alone in recognising it. But she asked whether Trump intended to enact his proposed change through executive action. 

“Well, if we can, through executive action,” Trump said. “I was going to do it through executive action, but then we had to fix Covid first, to be honest with you.” 

Birthright citizenship is protected by the 14th Amendment to the Constitution. The president cannot use executive action to overturn a constitutional amendment, though legal experts expect the Trump administration to challenge the long-settled legal interpretation through the courts. 

Trump has spent significant time in southern Florida, which is home to a large Cuban-American community. 

He likely came up with this weird description of birthright citizenship by free-associating the issue with the now-defunct policy of allowing Cuban migrants to stay within the United States and pursue citizenship upon touching American soil. The policy was known as “wet-foot, dry-foot.” 

During this year’s presidential campaign, Trump repeatedly described immigrants as coming from jails and mental institutions. He was likely resurrecting assertions he heard during the era of the Mariel boatlift four decades ago.