A free and critical press is often trumpeted as a bastion of democratic practice, especially under liberal ideals of governance. Under these ideals, as in Jürgen Habermas’ theories of the public sphere, public opinion should form in a highly agonistic contest of rational arguments. These ideals have been rightly critiqued at length, as they do not describe how public opinion forms in practice, and they especially do not reflect how many subaltern populations are excluded. However, one point has yet to be made: how public opinion forms in relation to violent imperial adventures and interventions, and thus how public debates become sites for producing subjects who believe they can weigh the merits of imperial and colonial policy. Since the mid-19th century, public opinion in powerful North Atlantic countries has deliberated and debated at length the reasoning, legitimacy, and results of imperial intervention and colonial governance in the Middle East and North Africa. In this paper, I suggest calling the knowing subjects which form in these debates “imperial publics,” and I explore this form of democratic imperialism through the contemporary example of the US presidential campaign and debates about foreign—or better, imperial—policy on Palestine/Israel. In particular, I consider how US presidential elections heightens attention to different subject positions with respect to US policy on Palestine/Israel, where news reporting and media coverage becomes central to addressing American audiences as knowing subjects that can debate various topics, like one- vs two-states solutions and now of course the Trump plan. Furthermore, I examine the formation of US imperial publics through my research on the Israeli English online press. In the late 1990s, the Israeli press went online and also began to experiment with English versions. Today English news outlets like Haaretz.com, Jpost.com, and TimesofIsrael.com are among the most important sources of news on Palestine/Israel for North Atlantic audiences, and further they have become vital sources for other journalists, including US news companies. I have done 8 months of ethnographic research with the journalists who run such news sites, and I will work alongside them during the summer while they cover the US election debates about Palestine/Israel. This paper describes how their reporting feeds into the contest for the US presidency. It will thus contribute to studies of imperialism and colonialism in Palestine/Israel—which have focused on legal, military, and bureaucratic institutions—by discussing the under-examined aspect of public opinion.