During an appearance on NBC's "Meet the Press," President-elect Donald Trump on Sunday reaffirmed his longstanding determination to do away with birthright citizenship — the timeless principle that anyone born on US soil is a US citizen, regardless of the race or citizenship of their parents.

"We have to end it," he told his interviewer. "It's ridiculous." Trump has pledged to issue an executive order on his first day in office blocking federal agencies from treating infants born in the United States as citizens if their parents are undocumented migrants.

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JAVIER MILEI, who this week marks his first anniversary as Argentina's president, has a few things in common with Donald Trump.

Both are brash, flamboyant, and unrestrained by traditional notions of presidential gravitas. Both campaigned for office on a platform of dramatic changes that would make their respective countries great again. Each professes admiration for the other — Trump calls Milei his "favorite president" and Milei has praised Trump, even embracing him in a bear hug when they met for the first time in February. And both are detested on the left.

But in other, more important ways, Milei is anything but the "mini-Trump" his critics decry.

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IF THERE were a First Amendment Hall of Shame, one notorious inductee would be the West Virginia Board of Education, which expelled the daughters of Walter Barnette from their public school for refusing, on religious grounds, to salute the flag and recite the Pledge of Allegiance. In an impassioned 1943 ruling, the Supreme Court reproached the state for suppressing the girls' freedom of expression.

"If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation," the court declared, "it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein."

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_{(A version of this column appeared in 2003.)}

GRATITUDE TO the Almighty is the theme of Thanksgiving and has been ever since the Pilgrims of Plymouth brought in their first harvest. "Instead of famine, now God gave them plenty," their leader, Governor William Bradford, would later write in "Of Plymouth Plantation," his celebrated history of the colony's first decades, "and the face of things was changed to the rejoicing of the hearts of many, for which they blessed God."

The annual presidential Thanksgiving proclamations always invoke God, and they frequently itemize the favors for which we owe Him thanks.

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