Trump’s plans for tourists should send a chill through everyone ...Middle East

If you put the words “Simon Kelner” and “Donald Trump” into your search engine, the AI overview gives you the following: “Simon Kelner, a prominent British journalist [sic]… has written and commented extensively on Donald Trump, often critically.” I can’t complain about the accuracy of that, nor the suggestion that I have characterised him as an “inveterate attention seeker”.

And if you dive a little deeper, you’ll find articles in which I call Trump “a bully”, “cruel”, “narcissistic”, and “divisive”. Fair enough. In one of my columns, I say he’s operating a “quasi-dictatorship”, and, in another, I urge our Prime Minister to tell him to “take a hike” over his threat to sue the BBC. Of course, I stand by every word, but this morning I wonder whether I should not have gone in so hard on the President of the United States.

It’s not because I am revising my views on Trump. It’s because I am planning to go to America to play golf in the spring, and the news last week that the Trump administration is planning a much more in-depth check on visitors applying for a 90-day waiver to enter the US might scupper that.

More seriously, it should send a chill through everyone who is concerned by the erosion of civil liberties, by the intrusion into our private lives, and by the amount of data now collected by nation states and how it is used.

I have always supported the introduction of identity cards in the UK, believing that they are a positive security measure. Given that much of our data is already held by the likes of Apple and Amazon (and indeed the government), what do we peace-loving, law-abiding citizens have to fear from a system that collates this all in one place and is designed to keep us safer?

However, what Trump’s Department of Homeland Security is proposing is something else entirely. All those applying through the Electronic System for Travel Authorisation (ESTA) to be allowed temporary visiting rights to the US will have to declare their social media history for the past five years (although there is no detail as to how this will be collected), any telephone numbers or email addresses they have used over the previous five and 10 years respectively, and give more information about family members, including their telephone numbers.

“We want to make sure we’re not letting the wrong people come enter our country,” said the President. Yet it’s up to Trump to decide who are the “wrong people”. For instance, is it someone who’s written disobliging things about his presidency in a national newspaper and on his social media feed? This is not just a self-interested question: how many among us have expressed opinions in open forums to which The Donald and his coterie would take exception?

One can safely assume that the FBI, and its associated agencies, are closely monitoring terrorist cells across the world and are listening to seditious chatter on social media channels. But this ESTA reform would appear to be authoritarian in the extreme, and probably unworkable. It could also put off many people from visiting America – just too much trouble – and will be something of an impediment for those wanting to go to next summer’s World Cup.

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Besides which, if the safety of its citizens is foremost in the minds of the US administration, it would do well to consider that the vast majority of mass murders in America are committed by its own nationals. The most comprehensive study of mass shootings in the United States between 1966 and late 2024 concluded that 86 per cent of them were perpetrated by native-born Americans.

But logic, reason, and even practicality, do not appear to have played much of a part in these proposals. “We want safety. We want security,” said President Trump, in a trademark rhetorical sweep. Those of us who are brave enough to challenge his line of thinking (and have no plans to visit the US any time soon), might suggest that, if Trump is so concerned about keeping his people safe, he should start looking instead at his country’s gun laws.

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