If Trump somehow succeeds in getting his precious citizenship question inserted into the 2020 Census, I think consideration should be given to a massive refusal to answer the question. After all, while I THINK I'm a citizen, I can’t KNOW it for sure. My parents told me I was born in Champaign, Illinois in 1949, and I’ve got a birth certificate that appears to confirm that fact. I’ve got a passport that says I’m a citizen, but that was issued on the basis of the potentially fake birth certificate, so maybe the passport agency was just too gullible.
The fact is that I don’t (and really CAN’T) KNOW that’s where and when I was born. I can’t remember it, after all. And perhaps I was actually born in … oh, I don’t know … maybe Kenya. and my parents smuggled me into the country and got a fake birth certificate issued in my name. As Donald Trump would have to acknowledge, that kind of thing isn’t beyond the realm of possibility. While my parents always TOLD me when and where I was born, maybe they were lying to me in an effort to spare me from the sordidness of being smuggled into the U.S. as a tiny baby.
What I KNOW is that I was never naturalized, at least not during the period of my life that I can remember. So if I was really born somewhere else and smuggled into the U.S. and issued a fake birth certificate, I’m not a citizen at all. How could I possibly certify that all of my answers to the Census questions were correct when I don’t positively KNOW that’s the case?