Every US president has at his or her disposal the power of a vast surveillance state that has grown significantly in recent decades and has rejected any real effort to control it. Through America’s numerous and enigmatic intelligence agencies, presidents possess the ability to delve into the communications, movements, and relationships of ordinary Americans. Presidents of both parties have abused the surveillance state, but under a second Trump administration, this power could be abused like never before.
Donald Trump, a now convicted felon and presumptive 2024 Republican presidential candidate, has saying plans to prosecute his political opponents if he returns to the White House. He is saying would allow states to monitor pregnant women and prosecute those seeking abortions. Trump wants deport millions of undocumented immigrants. He plans invoking the Insurrection Law to quell civil unrest, which means sending the military into the streets. The much advertised Project 2025 describes how he would quickly replace thousands of career civil servants in the federal government with loyalists.
If a president were interested in prosecuting his political opponents, crushing protests, attacking undocumented immigrants, and had the right people to help them carry out those plans, surveillance could become a valuable tool in achieving those goals. Like former US President Richard Nixon in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Trump could use his surveillance powers to surveil his political opponents, disrupt protest movements, and more.
Nixon and former FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover surveilled the president’s political opponents and activists. including Martin Luther King Jr., through a program called COINTELPRO. One of the main objectives of the program. was to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit or otherwise neutralize” civil rights groups.
If he so desired, Trump could create his own version of this program, but he would be working with much more advanced technology, and it would be at a time when there are countless data points available on every American. Hoover could only have dreamed of a world where everyone walked around with tracking devices.
“Much of what we depend on, in terms of the rule of law, depends on the rules. When those rules are ignored, that’s when things start to fall apart,” says Jeffrey L. Vagle, assistant professor of law at Georgia State University. “Some of the rules, such as prosecutorial discretion, could be eroded or disappear altogether. “That could mean a number of things in terms of policing.”
Vagle says that if a second Trump administration wanted to defend its abuse of surveillance powers, it could use national security as a justification for doing so. He says presidents have done this in the past in other ways.
“Administrations of both parties have invoked the term ‘national security’ and used national security loopholes to justify surveillance and profiling,” says Patrick Toomey, deputy director of the National Security Project at the American Civil Liberties Union. “Too often they have used national security as a pretext for law enforcement to target Muslims, communities of color, and immigrants.”