It’s bad enough that FIFA plans to charge up to $700 for the $21 tickets that United States officials said would be offered when they bid for he World Cup. Of course, they didn’t know then that they would have to invent a FIFA Peace Prize for the sad Donald Trump, who already glommed the gold trophy when it was brought to the Oval Office to be shown him. “I’m keeping it,” he muttered, because it was gold.

But another part of the gig was that the World Cup for soccer, a sport for people who find baseball too fast paced, would bring in a bunch of touristas, as would the Los Angeles summer Olympics. That would be atop the normal tourists that come to visit the United States in the usual course. They fill hotel rooms, dine at restaurants and buy tchotchkes. They provide jobs and revenue. Unlike tariffs, tourists are a huge boon for the economy.

So the Trump administration has come up with a proposal to make visitors from our friendly nations, those developed countries eligible for the U.S. Visa Waiver Program, subject to a social media colonoscopy.

The program currently requires tourists from eligible countries to fill out a short application and pay a $40 fee before coming to the United States for up to 90 days without a visa. While the application has allowed visitors to list their social media accounts since 2016, this newest proposal will make doing so mandatory. In addition to submitting years of posts for analysis, prospective tourists may also have to provide years of telephone numbers, email addresses, IP addresses, and information about family members.

If ever there was a way to make people not want to come to the United States, this is it. And it enjoys the support of the MAGA faithful, whose grasp of the problem is that it will keep those damn furriners away. After all, it’s not as if Kansas has much of a need for foreign visitors, who might overstay their visit and have babies who will be American citizens until the Supreme Court reinterprets the Fourteenth Amendment to conform with Trump’s birthright citizen Executive Order.

Not everybody thinks this is a swell idea.

Unsurprisingly, backlash to Tuesday’s announcement was swift. “Requiring temporary visitors here for a vacation or business to surrender five years of their social media to the U.S. will send the message that the American commitment to free speech is pretense, not practice,” the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a free speech advocacy group, said in a statement posted to X on Wednesday. “This is not the behavior of a country confident in its freedoms.”

Then again, it’s not as if our commitment to free speech hasn’t been taking a beating on numerous fronts of late, or that our confidence in freedom isn’t secondary to making a quick buck wherever possible or using speech as one of the litmus tests of which foreigners are deemed undesirable, even if they don’t come from “shithole countries.”

Beyond the issue of visitors being required to provide disclosure of shockingly intrusive personal information, there remains the problem of what Customs and Border Patrol plans to do with, and about, the information disclosed.

The vagueness of the directive is most concerning. It’s not at all clear what forms of speech will be considered disqualifying for a tourist seeking entry. Will speech in praise of terrorist groups get someone denied? What about criticism of Israel’s war in Gaza? Or posts that simply criticize Trump or poke fun at the American health care system?

Is it possible that CBP will vet the social media information to make sure that terrorists aren’t coming to watch a soccer match? Sure. Is criticism of Israel’s “genocide” the same as terrorism? To some, perhaps. But what about people whose social media reveals that they believe Trump is morbidly obese or has bad taste in room decor? Well, we certainly don’t want any Trump haters coming who might do harm to our favorite president, do we?

As Emma Camp at Reason points out, this same proposal would enable another administration to vet social media to deny entry to vaccine skeptics or transphobes. After all, the United States can deny entry to any foreign visitor for any reason, and this proposal would provide a wealth of information about people with views inconsistent with those the president holds dear. A new president might have a different agenda than Trump’s, you know.

More to the point, however, is what normal, decent, tourist or business visitor would expose his and his family’s world to the United States government in this way. Is it really worth it just to come here, or does this onerous and stunningly intrusive burden mean that no sane foreign traveler would tolerate providing this cornucopia of personal information just to watch a soccer match in person that he could watch on his telly?