Trump on flock cameras: "I like them"

Our Take

Don Lemon's latest clip catches former President Trump offering a quick, casual endorsement of Flock Safety's license plate cameras — "I like them." It's a small soundbite, but it says a lot. Surveillance tech like this doesn't fall along neat left-right lines. Politicians across the spectrum tend to like anything marketed as "public safety," even when it means a private company is quietly building a searchable log of where every car in town goes.

That's the real story here, not the politics of who said what. Flock's pitch to elected officials is simple: crime-fighting tool, no controversy. But the systems these officials are casually praising sweep up the movements of millions of innocent drivers, store that data, and often share it across jurisdictions with little public oversight. When a comment like this gets applause instead of scrutiny, it's a sign of how normalized this kind of tracking has become in American political culture.

Credit to Don Lemon for putting this exchange on record — it's worth watching closely, not just for the quote but for what it reveals about how little pushback these systems get from either party. If you want to see whether your own neighborhood is already wired up, check our camera map, and if you'd rather do something about it than just watch the headlines roll by, our take-action page has real steps you can take locally.