President Donald Trump publicly endorsed a warrantless AI surveillance network that tracks millions of American drivers this week, just days before he and First Lady Melania Trump visit North Carolina — where citizens have already taken to destroying the very cameras the president says he likes.
The dual storylines expose a fault line for an America-First presidency built on populist trust: voters who want their government focused on citizens at home also expect that government to leave them the hell alone.
Aboard Air Force One on Sunday, Trump was asked about Flock Safety cameras, which use automated license plate readers to feed drivers' personal information to law enforcement without a warrant. "I like them," Trump told reporters, according to the Daily Caller. "I sort of like them because of that, because of law enforcement. But some people don't; they think it's an infringement."
Pressed by the reporter — "They help catch a lot of criminals" — Trump doubled down: "I like them."
That's a shift from August 17, when Trump told the Daily Caller he'd make up his mind "over the next couple of weeks" and that the technology was "being studied right now."
The study period appears to be over, and the Fourth Amendment lost.
Flock's network of over 120,000 cameras has drawn bipartisan fire for documented abuses. Republican Sen. Josh Hawley launched a probe on August 26 after an audit in St. Charles County, Missouri, revealed a civilian employee ran Flock searches for personal reasons. In Milwaukee, a police officer searched his girlfriend's license plate 124 times and her former boyfriend's 55 times, entering "investigation" as justification each time, according to Hawley's letter. The officer wasn't caught by Flock's audit systems — a private citizen discovered the abuse by looking up his own plate.
Independent Sen. Bernie Sanders has promised legislation to "stop Flock and AI mass surveillance," warning of totalitarianism. When Hawley and Sanders agree on something, working Americans should pay attention.
Citizens in multiple states already are. Police in Winona, Minnesota, reported eight Flock cameras destroyed on August 4, following similar resistance in Ohio, Texas, and North Carolina — the very state Trump visits this week.
On Wednesday, Trump will speak at a campaign rally in Gastonia for Republican Senate candidate Michael Whatley. Melania Trump will visit Ashe County on Tuesday — her first trip to the state since January 2025 — to discuss "community resiliency and education technology in American schools," according to a White House release cited by the Asheville Citizen-Times. The White House did not specify which school, and the event is closed to the public.
The Asheville Citizen-Times framed the visit as a standard political trip, noting rally logistics and ticket registration through the White House website. What it didn't address: the irony of a First Lady promoting technology in schools while her husband endorses a surveillance apparatus that tracks citizens without warrants.
The Daily Caller, meanwhile, reported Trump's Flock endorsement straightforwardly but framed the backlash as a debate between law enforcement efficacy and privacy concerns — without pressing on the core constitutional question of whether a private company should be warehousing Americans' movement data for government access.
Trump's America-First coalition was built on the promise that Washington would finally serve the people it forgot. Warrantless surveillance of those same people is a strange way to keep it.
