U.S. President Doubts He Must Adhere to the U.S. Constitution

by Eric Zuesse / May 13th, 2025

U.S. President Trump, when asked by NBC News on May 4th whether he is required to carry out — never violate — the U.S. Constitution, said, “I don’t know. I’m not, I’m not a lawyer. I don’t know.” The Oath of Office that he has twice taken, is “I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.” Trump does not think that as President he is obligated by that oath to never violate the U.S. Constitution. He said this right there, on May 4. Here is the excerpt where he said this, from the interview, starting where the interviewer asked the question, up to where she abandoned the matter:

Kristen Welker: Your secretary of state says everyone who’s here, citizens and non-citizens, deserve due process. Do you agree, Mr. President?

President Donald Trump: I don’t know. I’m not, I’m not a lawyer. I don’t know.

Kristen Welker: Well, the Fifth Amendment says as much.

President Donald Trump: I don’t know. It seems — it might say that, but if you’re talking about that, then we’d have to have a million or 2 million or 3 million trials. We have thousands of people that are some murderers and some drug dealers and some of the worst people on Earth.

Kristen Welker: But is — 

President Donald Trump: Some of the worst, most dangerous people on Earth. And I was elected to get them the hell out of here and the courts are holding me from doing it.

Kristen Welker: But even given those numbers that you’re talking about, don’t you need to uphold the Constitution of the United States as president?

President Donald Trump: I don’t know. I have to respond by saying, again, I have brilliant lawyers that work for me, and they are going to obviously follow what the Supreme Court said. What you said is not what I heard the Supreme Court said. They have a different interpretation.

Kristen Welker: Is anyone in your administration right now in contact with El Salvador about returning Abrego Garcia to the United States?

She abandoned the matter, though it is the most important matter that any U.S. citizen ought to consider regarding the President; and, so, continuing any further with her canned list of questions there, was displaying her incompetence. For example, she could have asked him, “What did you twice swear to as you took the Presidential Oath of Office?,” but chose not to. She could have asked him “Why do you need to be told this by your lawyers, though it’s right there in the Oath that you twice swore to?” But she chose not to.

On May 11 (exactly a week later), Politico headlined “Hill leaders question Trump’s attempted Library of Congress takeover.” It IS the library of Congress; it is part of the Legislative Branch, not of the Executive Branch; and, so, it is controlled by the Congress if America still has a Constitutional Government. But, according to Politico’s report, this is merely a political squable between all Democrats, on the one hand, versus almost all Republicans, on the other. “Congressional Democrats have castigated Trump’s moves at the library and have called for Congress to end the president’s power to nominate the top librarian.” However, the real question here is not “the president’s power to nominate the top librarian.” It is instead whether the Congress will uphold the Constitution by slamming down, with at least near unanimity, the President’s ability to hire or fire anyone to act in that capacity WITHOUT A PRIOR congressional vote on any such decision.

Maybe it is not ONLY the President who is spitting upon the U.S. Constitution, but the members of Congress also. The congressional oath of office is:

“I, (name), do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion, …”

Is “mental reservation or purpose of evasions” what the people who voted for such traitors had voted for? This is why America has been proven, time and again (at least after 1980) to be a dictatorship, ruled by its political megadonors, who always get their ways, while the public do not.

Has the rot in Washington reached so deep that it IS the Government? Apparently so.

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Eric Zuesse is an investigative historian. His new book, America's Empire of Evil: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public. Read other articles by Eric.

Theroux’s Film on Israel’s Violent Settlers Was a Mirror

Resist the calls to look away

by Jonathan Cook / May 13th, 2025

For once, the BBC aired a documentary showing Israeli society’s dark underbelly. The backlash is not because Louis Theroux got it wrong. It’s because his film tells us far too much about ourselves

Louis Theroux explains in a commentary published by the Guardian on 10 May why the backlash to his recent film about violent, Israeli state-backed settlers misses the point.

His critics say he is unfairly presenting a few marginal “crazies” in Israeli society, who rampage across the West Bank to drive out the native Palestinian population, as significant and influential.

That’s exactly what they are, Theroux responds.

Settler leader Daniella Weiss, who Theroux spent much time following and interviewing, “enjoys enormous clout within the Israeli cabinet and … has the protection of the army in her project of settler expansionism”.

He quotes Haaretz journalist Etan Nechin in noting that the setters’ “representatives are literally sitting in the government and control everything from the police to treasury”.

Theroux makes a further point about why it is important to focus on the settlers and understand what they really represent.

“A film about extreme West Bank settlers isn’t simply about a region of the Middle East. It’s also about ‘us’,” he writes in the Guardian.

He adds: “The urgency here is that West Bank settlers are a bellwether for where society may be going in countries across the west… Around the same time that the documentary aired, Israel’s national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, who is a settler, was being hosted at [Donald Trump’s] Mar-a-Lago.”

There has been a backlash to Theroux’s documentary – just as there is continuing support for Israel, even as it commits what the International Court of Justice deems a “plausible genocide” – precisely because those extremists are “us”.

The gun-toting, stone-throwing, orchard-burning, house-torching settlers are from Texas, London and Paris. And so are many of the soldiers – some of them volunteers from western countries – who are currently slaughtering and enforcing the starvation of children in Gaza.

It is “us” watching this genocide unfold in slow-motion and shrugging our shoulders, or both-sidesing the stream of constant Israeli crimes on our screens. It is “us” still sending weapons to make the genocide possible. It is “us” decrying the protesters marching against the genocide, against the starvation of babies, as “antisemites”, “haters” and “supporters of terrorism”.

Israel’s crimes didn’t begin 19 months ago. They date back a century or more. They began with Britain’s sponsorship of an exclusive Jewish enclave imposed on the Middle East – a colonising state-to-be that was always going to require the containment and ultimately the expulsion, or extermination, of the native, Palestinian population.

That process had nothing more to do with “Jewish control” then than it does now. After all, it was an arch anti-semite, Arthur Balfour – Lord Balfour – who wrote the infamous Balfour Declaration in 1917 promising a Jewish state on the Palestinians’ homeland. He was supported by the entire British cabinet – apart from Edwin Montagu, the only Jewish government minister, who rightly lamented Britain’s support for a Jewish state in Palestine as evidence of his countrymen’s enduring antisemitism.

Why were Balfour and the other government ministers so keen to have “the Jews” in the Middle East?

Religious reasons played a part, to be sure. But more important were all-too practical, foreign policy objectives.

First because, like other governments driven by ethno-nationalist sentiment that was then running riot in European capitals, the British government preferred that “a Jewish state”, dependent on Britain, would project its interests as a British colony in the oil-rich Middle East.

If Britain didn’t seek to promote and harness a European Jewish presence in the region first – to weaponise those Jews against “the natives” – France or Germany might do so instead.

It was a race between European powers for regional control. Though ultimately, of course, they were beaten to the finishing line by the United States, which has been Israel’s main patron since the founding of a so-called “Jewish state” through the mass ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people in 1948.

The crimes Israel carries out today were engineered – made inevitable – by the decisions western powers took from the early twentieth century onwards.

Which is why Theroux is right that we in the West are responsible for Israel’s actions in a way that is entirely untrue of Burma or China or Russia.

Israel’s supporters want us looking away from Israel’s crimes to Burma’s, China’s or Russia’s precisely because Israel is “us”. Its state terrorism is ours.

If the Israel fortress colony falls, so the fear goes, the West’s system of colonial power projection – those 800-plus military bases the US has stationed around the world in its bid for “global full-spectrum dominance” – will begin to unravel with it.

Israel is still secretly viewed by the West – by “us” – as it was by the father of Zionism, Theodor Herzl, 130 years ago: as “a rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism”.

Those cheerleading Israel’s genocide, or staying complicity silent, are the ideological inheritors of Lord Balfour and his ugly racism.

Either they wish for “the Jews” to complete the takeover of historic Palestine – exterminating or ethnically cleansing what is left of “the natives” – as a public flexing of “our” muscle, as a demonstration of who controls the world, of what awaits anyone who defies “our” might.

Or they have been so brainwashed by a fearmongering western narrative that the world is divided into two – and only the western half is actually civilised – that the slaughter and maiming of many tens of thousands of Palestinian children and the starvation of a million more seems a reasonable, even moral, response to the state of the world.

Yes, the West’s Jewish populations have been more easily sold on this preposterous notion because, given their history of western persecution, they are more easily persuaded to live in a state of permanent fear, they are more readily convinced by establishment narratives that there are exceptional reasons to support this genocide.

But “our” leaders are no less in thrall to this kind of perverse logic. They gain their positions only after they have been fully initiated into an institutionalised system of power that requires fealty to western – chiefly US – projection of dominance across the globe.

Whatever Starmer’s personal feelings (assuming he has any), the fact is he is not wrong in proclaiming that his government is in no position to impose a sales ban on the components for F-35 fighter jets, the ones dropping bombs on Gaza’s population to level their homes and shred their children.

As his government implicitly acknowledges, the West’s system of arms production is necessarily so tightly integrated that no one, apart from the central hub of empire headquartered in the US, is in a position to change course. The West’s arms industries, just like its financial industries, are simply too big to fail.

Britain is locked in to producing F-35 components not specifically because Israel needs them, but because the West – because the US – needs them for its projection of power, for its continuing control of resources, for its global dominance – or, in the British government’s bogus rhetoric, to safeguard “Nato security” and “international peace”.

Were Starmer to dare to refuse, it would be no different from some local, small-time mafia boss telling the Don in Washington to take a hike. The British prime minister knows his fate would be straight out of a Sopranos script.

This too is the reason why he has been secretly shipping weapons to Israel for use in Gaza – more than 8,500 items – in violation of the promise he made to the British public last year that the shipments had stopped.

While Starmer has to placate those in his party who cannot stomach being complicit in genocide, he also has to keep the Don happy. And the Don is far more dangerous than either Starmer’s party or the British parliament.

Theroux’s film, The Settlers, is a vanishingly rare example of popular documentary-making showing Israeli society’s dark underbelly. The backlash is not because his thesis is wrong. It is because it tells us far too much about ourselves.

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Jonathan Cook, based in Nazareth, Israel is a winner of the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His latest books are Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East (Pluto Press) and Disappearing Palestine: Israel's Experiments in Human Despair (Zed Books). Read other articles by Jonathan, or visit Jonathan's website.

RFK Jr. brags about taking grandkids swimming in creek with sewage health warnings

David Edwards
May 12, 2025 

RAW STORY


FILE PHOTO: Robert F. Kennedy Jr., U.S. President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee to run the Department of Health and Human Services, walks through Capitol Hill between meetings with senators in Washington, U.S., December 16, 2024. REUTERS/Elizabeth Frantz/File Photo

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was criticized after taking his grandchildren swimming in an unsafe creek with a high bacteria count because of sewage runoff.

In a post to X on Sunday, Kennedy revealed that he spent Mother's Day swimming with his family in Washington, D.C.'s Rock Creek.

"Mother's Day hike in Dumbarton Oaks Park with Amaryllis, Bobby, Kick, and Jackson, and a swim with my grandchildren, Bobcat and Cassius in Rock Creek," the secretary wrote.

The Washingtonian noted that the waterway was dangerous because sewage flows directly into it.

"[O]n July 14, 2015, the D.C. Department of Energy and the Environment found bacteria levels over 2,420 times the most probable number of colonies in 100 milliliters (MPN)," environmental consultant Marchant Wentworth pointed out in an opinion piece for The Washington Post. "This is far in excess of the Environmental Protection Agency standard of 410 MPN."

The National Park Service officially forbids swimming and wading in the creek.

"Swimming and wading are not allowed due to high bacteria levels," the agency's website warned. "Stay out of the water to protect streambanks, plants and animals and keep you and your family (including pets!) safe from illness."

"Rock Creek has high levels of bacteria and other infectious pathogens that make swimming, wading, and other contact with the water a hazard to human (and pet) health. Please protect yourself and your pooches by staying on trails and out of the creek. All District waterways are subject to a swim ban - this means wading, too!"

 

 

David Corn

‪@davidcorn.bsky.social‬

Just what we want. The top public health official in the US government telling people it's okay to swim in a waterway with an extremely high bacteria count (due to sewage run-off) that has numerous warning signs declaring swimming and wading are unsafe and prohibited.

May 12, 2025 at 7:53 AM

162 reposts

24 quotes

527 likes

'There will be some bumps': Pope's MAGA brother expects 'heated conversation' with Trump

Erik De La Garza
May 12, 2025 

RAW STORY


Newly elected Pope Leo XIV, Cardinal Robert Prevost of the United States, appears on the balcony of St. Peter's Basilica at the Vatican, May 8, 2025. REUTERS/Stoyan Nenov TPX IMAGES OF THE DAY

Louis Provost, the brother of newly elected Pope Leo XIV, delivered revealing comments on Piers Morgan Uncensored on YouTube, where he pushed back on the idea that the new American pope will steer the Catholic Church in a radically progressive direction.

“No, I do not,” Provost said Monday when asked if his younger brother would be a liberal pope. “I don’t think he is going to roll back the changes that [Pope] Francis made…but he will maintain that”

Provost went on to reject the idea that Pope Leo is “woke” and made clear he does not expect to see any major hard left shifts.

“Can you confirm or deny that your little brother is woke?” Morgan asked directly.

“I don’t know that I would even go that far to say he is woke,” Provost replied Monday. “He is probably more liberal than I am, but that’s us. And again, that’s his position as a priest in the church, as part of the clergy.”

While he suggested that the pope may expand advisory roles for women, he dismissed the likelihood of women priests or gay marriage being embraced.

“We know they exist," the Florida resident and self-described MAGA supporter added. “They are there, in the church's eye, I think homosexuality, [gay] marriage is not right, it's not correct.”

Asked about a potential clash with President Donald Trump, Provost predicted that, “If and when he meets with President Trump, I don’t doubt there will be some bumps in the discussion and some heated conversation.”

However, “I don’t think either one of them will blow up like Trump and Zelensky in the White House," he said, noting his brother is “not an argumentative person.”

He concluded: “I don't think he is going to go, pull the church hard left. I think he’s going to be down the middle.”

Watch the video below via YouTube or at the link here:

'Buried in final pages': GOP quietly slips plan to let Trump crush nonprofits into bill

Jake Johnson, 

Common Dreams
May 13, 2025 


U.S. President Donald Trump gestures while he poses for a picture at the presidential box at the Kennedy Center, in Washington, D.C., U.S., March 17, 2025. REUTERS/Carlos Barria

House Republicans on Monday quietly revived a proposal that would grant the Trump administration broad authority to crush nonprofits it views as part of the political opposition, from environmental justice organizations to news outlets.

Fight for the Future and other advocacy groups called attention to the measure, which was buried in the final pages of the House Ways and Means Committee's draft reconciliation bill, starting on page 380.

A markup hearing for the legislation is scheduled to take place on Tuesday at 2:30 pm ET.

The proposal would empower the U.S. Treasury Department to revoke the tax-exempt status of nonprofits deemed material supporters of terrorism, with only a hollow simulacrum of due process for the accused organizations. It is already illegal for nonprofits to provide material support for terrorism.


"The House is about to hand the Trump administration the ability to strip nonprofits of their 501(c)3 status without any reason or recourse. This is a five-alarm fire for nonprofits nationwide," said Lia Holland, campaigns and communications director at Fight for the Future. "If the text of last autumn's H.R. 9495 is passed in the budget, any organization with goals that do not line up with MAGA can be destroyed with a wink from Trump to the Treasury."
The measure passed the Republican-controlled House late last year with the support of more than a dozen Democrats, but it never received a vote in the Senate.

"This terribly thought-out legislation means that under the current administration, every environmental, racial justice, LGBTQ+, gender justice, immigration justice, and—particularly—any anti-genocide organization throughout the country may be on the chopping block," said Holland. "If Democrats capitulate to the wanton destruction of crucial civil society institutions, they had better expect civil society to burn them to the ground for that betrayal."

The GOP's renewed push for what opponents have called the "nonprofit killer bill" comes as the Trump administration wages war on nonprofit organizations, threatening to strip them of their tax-exempt status as part of a sweeping attack on the president's political opponents.

"In the months since inauguration, Trump and his Cabinet have found other means of cracking down on political speech—particularly speech in favor of Palestinians—by deporting student activists and revoking hundreds of student visas. He has already threatened to attempt to revoke the tax-exempt status of Harvard University, part of his larger quest to discipline and punish colleges," journalist Noah Hurowitz wrote for The Intercept late Monday.

"But the nonprofit clause of the tax bill would give the president wider power to go after organizations that stand in his way," Hurowitz added.

Robert McCaw, government affairs director at the Council on American-Islamic Relations, said Monday that "this provision is the latest in a growing wave of legislative attacks on constitutional rights."

"CAIR is urging every member of the Ways and Means Committee to VOTE NO on the inclusion of this provision and to support an expected amendment to strike the language," the group said in a statement. "Three Democratic members of the committee—Reps. Brad Schneider (Ill.), Tom Suozzi (N.Y.), and Jimmy Panetta (Calif.)—previously voted in favor of the Nonprofit Killer Bill on the House floor last year. They must reverse course and vote to oppose it in committee."

'AOC can win': MAGA TV anchor stuns co-hosts with 2028 prediction

David Edwards
May 13, 2025 




U.S. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) speaks during a "Fighting Oligarchy" rally with U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) in Denver, Colorado, U.S. March 21, 2025. REUTERS/Kevin Mohatt

MAGA TV anchor David Brody shocked his co-hosts by predicting that Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) could win the presidency in 2028.

"I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but I'm going to go against the grain here this morning and say, absolutely, AOC can win the presidency," Brody said during a Real America's Voice segment on Tuesday. "Listen, guys, Kamala Harris got 75 million votes. Word salad. Kamala Harris got 75 million votes. And, you're telling me that AOC can't get more than 75 million votes? Absolutely, she can."

"No," co-host Gina Loudon disagreed.

"Oh, absolutely," Brody opined. "There won't be a Trump next time around. So you better hope J.D. Vance does just as well as Trump. I can't see that [as] possible. Maybe he does. But the point is, is that AOC has got the it factor."

"If you want to sleep on her, so to speak, as they like to say back in 1994, whatever it was, go ahead," he added. "I'm not."

Loudon slammed Ocasio-Cortez and other Democrats as "kind of emotional tantrum-throwing women."


"And I'm sorry if I sound sexist, I kind of am," she admitted. "You know, if you want a woman to win the presidency, you don't put up an AOC or a word salad Kamala. You put up someone who's rational. You put up someone like a Margaret Thatcher, right?"

Ocasio-Cortez recently refused to rule out a White House run.

Watch the video below from Real America's Voice.

It can happen: How Trump could use military to stay in office long after second term

The Conversation
May 13, 2025


Trump hosts a campaign event at the Prairie du Chien Area Arts Center Source: REUTERS

By Pascal Lupien, Brock University

United States President Donald Trump has repeatedly floated the idea of remaining in office after his second term ends in 2029. Since the 22nd Amendment of the U.S. Constitution was ratified in 1951, no U.S. president has challenged the two-term limit it established.

However, attempts to circumvent constitutional term limits are not unprecedented elsewhere.

Virtually every country in Latin America has enshrined constitutional term limits as a safeguard against tyranny. These rules vary: some allow only a single term, some permit two, while others enable non-consecutive re-election. Yet several presidents have managed to defy these provisions.

Recent examples include Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua, Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, Evo Morales in Bolivia, Rafael Correa in Ecuador and Nayib Bukele in El Salvador.

Although the institutional norms and political cultures of these countries differ from those of the U.S., examining how term limits have been dismantled offers valuable insights into how any similar efforts by Trump might unfold.
How presidents have overstayed their term

The most common tactic is for presidents to first ensure their political party in the legislature is fully subservient to them, and then leverage a loyal majority to amend the Constitution — a move that has already been initiated in the U.S.

Ortega and Correa successfully used their legislative majorities to pass constitutional amendments that eliminated term limits in Nicaragua and Ecuador.

Whether Trump has achieved the same level of unwavering loyalty among Republicans is debatable, but getting amendments through the U.S. Congress is significantly more difficult. The process requires a two-thirds majority vote in both houses, followed by ratification from three-quarters of state legislatures.

In contrast, Nicaragua’s constitution can be amended with a 60 per cent majority and, as in Ecuador, sub-national jurisdictions have no say in the matter.

Another crucial step involves co-opting or capturing the judiciary. In Bolivia, Morales achieved a controversial third term in 2014 supported by a partisan Constitutional Tribunal. More recently, El Salvador’s Bukele secured a 2021 Supreme Court ruling (from judges he appointed) allowing him to seek immediate re-election in 2024, despite a constitutional prohibition on consecutive terms.

We have seen a worrying pattern of subservience to Trump by the U.S. Supreme Court. The limits of this deference are increasingly uncertain.

Securing popular support

Some presidents have turned to plebiscites to legitimize constitutional tampering by appealing directly to the electorate and framing the move as a democratic exercise. Chávez employed this strategy in Venezuela, winning a 2009 referendum to abolish term limits.

The absence of a national referendum mechanism in the U.S. — where popular consultations are organized at the sub-national (state) level — limits the options available to a president seeking to remove term limits through this type of populist ploy.

Related to this, populist presidents who have successfully circumvented term limits have typically done so while enjoying extraordinarily high levels of public support.

Correa maintained approval ratings near 70 per cent during much of his presidency, while independent polls have put Bukele’s support at well over 80 per cent. Both, along with Morales and Chávez, leveraged their popularity to justify constitutional changes through legislative and judicial channels, framing their actions as carrying out the will of the people.

In contrast, Trump’s approval ratings have consistently remained far lower. Currently, his favourability sits in the low 40s, making any attempt to claim a broad popular mandate for a third term both dubious and precarious.

The military matters

Due to inevitable opposition, military support is central to any leader’s attempt to defy the constitution. In much of Latin America, the military is highly politicized, and armed forces have historically been shaped by doctrines of internal control rather than external defence.

Rooted in Cold War-era national security ideologies, this orientation casts domestic dissenters (“socialists,” Indigenous movements, unionists) as internal enemies, legitimizing repression as a patriotic duty.

In some countries, military oaths reflect this politicization. In both Nicaragua and Venezuela, these oaths increasingly emphasize loyalty to the president or ruling party and their revolutionary legacy, undermining institutional neutrality.

By contrast, in the U.S., military personnel swear an oath to defend the Constitution, not the president. While they must follow orders, these must align with constitutional and legal boundaries.

The absence of a tradition of using soldiers against American citizens and an institutional culture of constitutional loyalty and political neutrality may, at least in principle, provide some protection against the authoritarian overreach that has allowed certain Latin American presidents to remain in power indefinitely.

But a substantial portion of the U.S. armed forces leans politically to the right, like their counterparts in Latin America, raising concerns that partisan sympathies within the military could influence its response to a constitutional crisis.

Furthermore, the increasing use of non-military security forces — such as local police and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) — against civilians demonstrates that the state has a range of instruments at its disposal for exercising control.

The U.S. government’s use of ICE is reminiscent of how governments in countries like Venezuela and Nicaragua have used police and paramilitary units loyal to the president with impunity to suppress dissent.

The perils of complacency


Many in the West still hold on to the belief that constitutional erosion is something that only happens in the Global South. Some believe that American institutions are uniquely resilient and therefore capable of withstanding any attempt to subvert the Constitution.

For much of U.S. history, this confidence may have been justified, but today, it’s not only complacent but dangerous.

The strength of democratic institutions depends on the political will to defend them. Time will tell if the barriers that exist in the U.S. are strong enough to withstand the pressures now being placed upon them. What is clear is that relying on increasingly tenuous institutional resilience or historical exceptionalism is no substitute for vigilance and active defence of democratic norms.

Pascal Lupien, Associate Professor, Political Science, Brock University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

'Do you like Hamas?' Leading political commentators describe grilling at US airports

Julia Conley, Common Dreams
May 13, 2025


Customs and Border Protection Revenue Division. CBP is a federal law enforcement agency of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. (Photo credit: Jonathan Weiss / Shutterstock)

"It happened," said progressive online political commentator Hasan Piker on Sunday in a cryptic post on the social media site X—one that suggested he wasn't altogether surprised when he was detained for several hours by border agents at a Chicago airport after flying back to the U.S. from France.

He explained to his 1.5 million followers later that he had been stopped by Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents "for additional questioning."

"I'm out, it wasn't that bad," said Piker. "Very strange experience overall though."

Piker shares his commentary primarily on YouTube and the streaming platform Twitch, and detailed the ordeal for his followers on both platforms.

The questions over the two-hour period suggested that the Trump administration has been following Piker's commentary, which has recently included vehement criticism of U.S. support for Israel as it bombards and starves the people of Gaza.

"They straight up tried to get something out of me that I think they could use to basically detain me permanently," Piker said. "[The agent] kept saying stuff like, do you like Hamas? Do you support Hamas? Do you think Hamas is a terror group or a resistance group?"

Piker shared his story as TikTok creator Savannah Pinder, who makes anti-Trump videos and clothing, said publicly that she had been detained at Miami International Airport after passing through Global Entry.


Pinder was taken to several different screening rooms and questioned about her work, travel history, and her father's citizenship status. Her father was born in Panama and became a U.S. citizen. Pinder, is a U.S. citizen and was born and raised in the United States.

"They asked me to provide my social media accounts for them to go through my TikTok, my Snapchat, my Instagram, and my Facebook, as well as show them how much I was making daily on TikTok," Pinder said. "If you are a United States citizen, you still have the chance of being detained coming back into the United States right now."

Journalist Séamus Malekafzali, whose work has been published in The Nation, The Intercept, and other publications, said he has had several experiences like the one described by Piker at Chicago O'Hare International Airport.

"Been pulled into secondary screening many times and O'Hare CBP had the most involved and specific questions about Gaza for me by far," said Malekafzali.

Ari Cohn, lead counsel for tech policy at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, said the incidents show that Immigration and Customs Enforcement and CBP "are the 'enemies domestic' that federal officials swear an oath to defend against."

"No U.S. citizen should be detained by law enforcement, at the border or anywhere, because of their protected speech," said Cohn.

Piker said he believes border agents are detaining and questioning commentators and journalists "to try to create an environment of fear, to try to get people like myself or at least like others that would be in my shoes, that don't have that same level of security, to shut the f–k up."

The incidents follow the abductions by federal immigration agents of foreign student protesters whom the Trump administration has pushed to deport for speaking out against U.S. support for Israel and expressing support for Palestinian civilians in Gaza.Immigration agents "flagging and detaining one of the U.S.'s largest left-wing voices for their political opinions while the Trump administration suggests they might suspend habeas corpus does not portend well for the future," said lawyer and writer Alex Peter.

Progressive influencer tells of detention at US airport


By AFP
May 12, 2025

A high-profile left-wing influencer and political commentator said Monday he was detained for hours by US border officials and interrogated about his political views.

Hasan Piker — who has millions of followers on YouTube, Twitch and X, and been outspoken in his criticism of Israel — says he was held at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport for over two hours on Sunday.

He spoke out as the administration of President Donald Trump is facing growing criticism over claims of punitive action taken by federal agents against legal US residents for merely voicing progressive opinions.

Piker said his exchanges with officials were largely cordial but added that an officer asked him about his views on Trump and whether he has been in contact with militant groups Hamas and Hezbollah.

“He’s like, ‘Do you talk about Trump?’ And that was the first time where I was like, ‘What is this question?'” Piker said on a video posted to his YouTube account.

“I literally straight up told him. I was like, ‘Why are you asking me this… what does this have to do with anything?'”

Piker says he told the official: “I don’t like Trump. Like, what are you going to do? It’s protected by the First Amendment.”

The commentator maintains that his online content has never broken the law and only engaged in speech protected by the US Constitution.

“The reason for why they’re doing that is, I think, to try to create an environment of fear, to try to get people like myself — or at least like others that would be in my shoes that don’t have that same level of security — to shut… up,” Piker added.

Advocacy group Defending Rights & Dissent said it was “deeply disturbed” by the notion of border officials stopping political commentators to interrogate them about constitutionally-protected speech.

“Such an abuse of power is an affront to press freedom,” it said.

US Customs and Border Patrol did not respond immediately to a request for comment.