Your Profile Pic Better Be Patriotic

A surveillance circus with Trump selling backstage passes, America now demands your DMs, biometrics, and dignity; unless you’ve got a million dollars to buy your innocence.

Guest article by Michael Cohen. Remember to follow him on Substack for more by clicking here. Michael is now under 1,000 followers away from 500,000 on YouTube! Subscribe today for free here. Let’s do this!

Source: Gorodenkoff / Shutterstock.com

There’s a moment in every authoritarian slide when the government stops pretending it trusts its own people and starts demanding receipts. Not receipts of wrongdoing, of course; those would at least make sense. No, I’m talking about the new Trump-era requirement that foreign tourists cough up five years of social media posts just to spend a long weekend in New York buying knockoff handbags and getting fleeced by a Times Square costumed Labubu.

Five years. Of posts, comments, likes, DMs, burner accounts, exes, bad jokes, worse haircuts, questionable memes, photos of you drunk in a fountain at 22, and that one time you shared an article calling Trump “a fragile ego in a red tie.” Hope the trip to Disney World was worth it.

This is what happens when paranoia meets incompetence and calls it “policy.”

The Trump administration’s new plan will require visitors, including citizens of countries that have been America’s closest allies since before Trump discovered self-tanner, to surrender every digital breadcrumb they’ve dropped online since 2020. The government wants your phone numbers, emails, fingerprints, face, DNA, iris scans, your family’s birthdates, and, presumably, a notarized letter from your kindergarten teacher confirming you were well-behaved.

And in classic Trump fashion, it arrives wrapped in that trademark tone of faux-statesmanlike gravitas: this is all to ensure visitors “do not bear hostile attitudes” toward America’s culture, government, or founding principles.

If you’ve ever heard something more perfectly engineered to be both authoritarian and utterly unenforceable, congratulations; you’ve spent time inside Trump World.

Let’s be clear: this isn’t about safety. If it were, the White House wouldn’t be simultaneously rolling out the other half of this brilliant two-part immigration innovation: the Trump Gold Card; a $1 million fast-pass to the front of the visa line.

That’s right. If you can’t pass the attitude test on Twitter, maybe you can pass the bank-wire test in Zurich.

Nothing says “I’m no threat to America” like dropping a cool million for the privilege of skipping whatever bureaucratic nightmare the administration is inflicting on everyone else. And if you’re really feeling spicy, the forthcoming Trump Platinum Card will only set you back five million and grant you nearly a year in the United States without paying taxes on your foreign income.

Call me crazy, but this sounds less like national security and more like a clearance sale at the world’s stupidest authoritarian gift shop.

The administration is essentially shouting: We don’t trust you unless you delete every bikini pic, purge your Reddit history, quit reposting Gaza news, and never engage in public protest again; but if you’ve got an extra million lying around, welcome to America, comrade.

And just to underline the stupidity: what kind of person has both $5 million in liquid assets and a pressing need for American residency without scrutiny?

I’ll tell you who.

Money launderers. Drug traffickers. Russian oligarchs whose yachts have been seized more times than Trump has contradicted himself in a single sentence. Human rights violators who make the TSA look like the Girl Scouts. People who do not care what nonsense the CBP (Customs and Border Protection) asks for, because their “online activity” doesn’t exist or is conveniently curated by a PR team large enough to staff a minor embassy.

Meanwhile, millions of average, harmless travelers — fans coming for the World Cup, families planning a California road trip, Canadians who used to drive across the border to buy gas and discount Oreos — are instead being greeted with a digital strip-search and a bill for extra fees, background checks, and biometrics more suited to a dystopian sci-fi reboot.

Tourism is cratering. California down 9%. Hollywood Boulevard losing half its foot traffic. Las Vegas bleeding visitors like a busted slot machine. Canadians staying home in record numbers. Even the Grand Canyon — one of the few national treasures Trump hasn’t tried to put his name on — is now charging foreign tourists an extra hundred bucks a day, plus regular admission, plus the indignity of knowing America trusts them less than a Mar-a-Lago member “donating” for ambassadorship consideration.

And let’s not forget: national parks are now free on Trump’s birthday but not Martin Luther King Jr. Day or Juneteenth.

It’s like they’re not even trying to hide the rot anymore.

I spent years enabling Trump’s worst impulses, and I’m telling you plainly: the goal here is not safety. It’s control. It’s fear. And it’s profit. Always the profit.

The White House wants to monitor your ideology and monetize your desperation at the same time. They want the data of ordinary tourists while leaving the golden gates wide open for anyone rich enough to buy their way past the “hostile attitude” screening.

If you ever needed proof that authoritarianism in America won’t arrive through tanks in the streets but through a jacked-up version of the ESTA (Electronic System for Travel Authorization) website and a checkout page with a million-dollar “expedite” button, here it is.

The administration doesn’t care who loves America. Only who can pay for the privilege of being suspected less.

And that, more than any tourist’s Instagram, is the real danger.

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