Tik-Tok

Trump’s America has managed the rare feat of turning a holiday into a background check. Anyone from the visa waiver countries – Britain included – is now expected to hand over five years of social media history before being allowed to admire the Grand Canyon or queue for a hotdog at Times Square. Five years. Every joke, every gripe, every photo of the cat. The land of the free has reinvented itself as the world’s nosiest neighbour, rummaging through your digital laundry like a parish busybody convinced you’ve been living a life of sin.

And this arrives just as US tourism is already coughing up blood. Visitor numbers have been sliding for years. Europeans have quietly gravitated to friendlier destinations. Australians are wondering if New York is worth the grief. Business travel has decamped to Berlin, Toronto, Singapore – anywhere that doesn’t demand to rummage through your Facebook memories before you’re allowed to buy a coffee. Conferences have noticed too; when delegates start saying “let’s not bother with the US next year”, that is soft power swirling down the plughole.

Now pile this new surveillance fetish on top and watch the damage accelerate. Instead of the World Cup delivering a tourism boom, it risks becoming the most elaborate exercise in repelling visitors ever attempted. Imagine telling fans from Tokyo, Berlin, Sydney or Reykjavik that to attend a festival of sport they must first provide a five year dossier of their digital thoughts for ideological inspection. Nothing says “welcome to America” quite like being screened for sarcasm at the border.

And the blueprint for this nonsense is obvious. Trump hasn’t invented anything. He’s simply photocopied Putin’s homework. If you can’t control what people say inside your borders, control who’s allowed in. Demand ideological tidiness. Treat entry as a favour bestowed upon the compliant. Undermine NATO to please Moscow, antagonise allies, flirt with strongmen, and now import a little Kremlin paranoia straight into the ESTA form. Call it security if you like, but it works exactly like Russia’s long standing tactic: raise the cost of honest speech until most people think twice before saying anything at all.

The free speech hypocrisy is the crowning insult. Trump bellows about censorship while constructing a system that effectively forces foreigners to muzzle themselves before they even book a flight. Freedom of speech, Trump style, means you can say whatever you like, as long as you never actually said anything.

And then there’s the small matter of practicality. How, exactly, is any of this supposed to be policed? Tens of millions of visitors. Five years of posts each. Some poor soul in DHS scrolling through a decade of TikToks from Hamburg, a Facebook rant about broadband from Osaka, an ill judged 2020 Instagram story involving tequila and a sombrero. It is not a screening process. It is a punishment for the civil service. Even Russia, master of administrative cruelty, never attempted anything this ludicrous.

Algorithms won’t save them either. Automated filters misread humour, nuance, irony – essentially the whole British personality. One flippant “start a revolution if the trains are late again” and you’ll be flagged as an ideological threat. Someone in Nebraska will be paid to decide whether your 2019 post about healthcare constitutes “potential hostility”. The queues at US immigration will stretch halfway back to Heathrow.

And while this bureaucratic farce unfolds, tourism will shrink, business will retreat, the World Cup glow will fizzle out, and America will continue mistaking paranoia for strength. Visitors will turn to destinations that don’t behave like insecure superpowers. Investors will meet elsewhere. Academics will give up entirely. The world will conclude that if America wants to copy the Kremlin, it can do so without their company.

If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, Putin must be delighted. America, once the confident host of the world, is now taking hosting tips from Moscow. For a nation preparing to stage the largest sporting tournament on earth, it is quite some own goal.

Imagine the world saying “let’s do that too”. It is the quickest way to show Americans what their government is asking of everyone else. And it is the quickest way for Trump’s great freedom project to collapse into global ridicule when he's prevented from visiting any other country because of his criticisms.

Are you listening, Trump? You're stupid beyond belief!