Last year was a good year across the entire globe for the multi-trillion-dollar tourism business, save for one country: the United States. Donald Trump and the Republican Party have launched a bigoted assault on everyone who does not share their racist, ignorant and narrow worldview in a naive belief that is how they will unite society behind them, because they are children who think that threatening everyone is how you get your way. Unfortunately for our modern party of know-nothings, soft power still exists, and in any kind of war, your opponent still gets a vote. International travelers voted with their feet last year in Trump’s war on them, as worldwide international travel increased 4% in 2025, all while travel to the United States fell by 4.2%, according to data from the International Trade Administration.
Whether Trumpers can bring themselves to admit it or not, this assault on a significant sector of the American economy is clearly by design. The Trump regime has suspended visa issuance to 75 different countries, and Customs and Border Protection reported that border searches of electronic devices were up 18% in 2025. Another way to look at Trump’s tariffs and his emboldening of DHS to embrace its inherent anti-constitutional nature is that one inseparable goal of those policies is to drastically reduce tourism to the United States. I know logic is not a word we should use with this crew, but this dramatic relative drop in tourism last year is the logical outcome of their policies. Trump and the Republicans have an isolationist cultural and economic belief that simply does not comport on to any kind of objective reality, and so in their pigheaded attempt to do baby’s first authoritarianism, they have tanked Canadian travel to the United States by 10.2%. Opening 2025 by throwing a Canadian woman into one of ICE’s detention camps for two weeks was a message to the rest of the world that they heeded: don’t come here.
Yikes www.ft.com/content/8f6d…
— Jacob Weindling (@jakeweindling.bsky.social) February 6, 2026 at 12:13 PM
While ignoramuses cooking their brains on the MechaHitler CSAM site will dismiss this as woke hysteric nonsense, this is a serious economic problem. Tourism is big business in one of the largest tourist destinations in the world. The industry accounts for 37% of Nevada’s GDP, a state Trump won in 2024. This is where Canadians have dramatically aided Nevada’s state economy, but reflecting their revulsion to America’s authoritarian project, Las Vegas saw their visitor numbers drop 12% in February 2025, and visitor counts were down 7% for the first half of last year. Canadian airlines Air Canada and WestJet reported up to 33% fewer passengers traveling to Vegas. This trend follows everywhere you look, as Canadians are integral to a trillion-dollar American industry they are now abandoning en masse.
Canadian tourism in Michigan, another 2024 Trump state, fell 20% in 2025. Washington saw a 24% drop in Canadian visitors, while Canadian travel to New York fell by 30% in October compared to the previous year. The Thousand Islands region that has long attracted visitors from eastern Ontario reported a 60% loss in Canadian-spending revenue on the New York side of their operations. Florida saw an 8.7% decline in tourism in the first nine months of last year. No state is safe from this dynamic because almost every state has a region where tourism is a significant driver of economic growth, and the states most dependent on tourism like Florida and Nevada have been hit the hardest by Trump’s policies (Hawaii is highly dependent on tourism too, but they are still recovering from the catastrophic 2023 Maui fire, so you can’t chock all their 2025 struggles up to Trump, just some of them).
Trump and his useful idiots on the right can make all the insulting 51st state jokes they want, but the truth of the matter is that we have long depended on Canada for our own economic growth, and we’re now undermining that to serve the temper tantrum of a bunch of overgrown 12-year-olds who don’t know shit about fuck.
Last June, Bloomberg reported that “the American economy will lose out on $12.5 billion this year, according to the World Travel & Tourism Council.” As dire as that sounds, that estimate wound up being low. “‘The US is the only major destination in the world that is tracking a decline in international visitor spending,’” said Erik Hansen, a senior vice-president at the US Travel Association, to the Financial Times this week. “‘It’s a tremendous impact,’ he said, citing a decline of about 11 million international visitors, which amounts to $50 billion in lost spending. ‘Even a single percentage point that we lose means billions of dollars, it means hundreds of thousands of jobs.’”
There are 13 states—over a quarter of the union—that sit on the nearly 4,000-mile long border of the United States and Canada. This is a huge issue, literally. Trump and the rest of MAGA alienating Canada is not only an unforgivable sin in the context of butchering a truly loving relationship with our most trusted neighbor, but they are also destroying a vital economic bond. Every single state along the border has seen dramatic losses in their tourism industries as a direct consequence of Trump and the GOP’s shortsighted boorishness.
Tourism typically accounts for roughly 3% of US annual GDP, and in 2024, it produced about $2.9 trillion in economic output. To put in further context how important tourism is to the economy, both mining (1.3%) and utilities (1.5%) combine for a smaller share of total GDP than tourism does. There is a blasé attitude on the right about this revanchist inward turn where they are declaring to the world that America is not a friendly nation to outsiders anymore, as if they will suffer no consequences for it. They think that because we are Americans, we can dictate the fate of the world to the rest of it over their protestations. Last year proved that we can’t do what MAGA thinks we can do, and we are sacrificing at least one multi-trillion-dollar U.S. industry at the altar of their own suicidal ignorance, while they have introduced once unthinkable phrases into the global lexicon like the “sell America” trade.
MAGA can best be understood as a temper tantrum from the most maladjusted Americans that the world is not exactly as they picture it, and they will try to bend it to their weak wills or destroy America trying. The extreme drop-off in Canadian tourism is a harrowing development for an economy that is already struggling to create jobs. Hiring in America practically froze in the second half of last year, and outside a couple of industries, job growth is either flat or slightly negative over the last several months. We are witnessing Trump and the GOP enacting the depraved authoritarian agenda they have always wanted to enact, and it is harming their golden goose. Trump’s approval ratings on the economy are at all-time lows, and there’s little reason to believe that trend will meaningfully change so long as his same economy stifling policies are still in place.
Borrowing costs are up since Trump came into office, and America’s debt was downgraded when the Republicans passed their budget last year that made their ethnic-cleansing operation one of the most well-funded armies in the world. The Republican agenda was on display for the whole world to see in 2025, and the whole world recoiled from America. From our debt. From our asset markets. From our beautiful landscapes. From freaking Disneyland. Trump and MAGA desire a world where Americans are more isolated than ever, and they are getting it. Their safe space for bigots is one filled with lower growth, higher interest rates, and an outside world pushed towards China’s sphere of influence.
There is no reason to think that tourism, a mid-sized contributor to U.S. GDP and an immense source of American soft power, is going to remain that way under these ignorant schlubs. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney was explicit about making some kind of permanent pivot away from the United States last month, and it’s an open question whether tourist levels along the northern border will ever recover to their pre-Trump levels. American tourism may be permanently debilitated because Trump and the GOP made everyone else around the world realize that there are plenty of other places they’d rather visit than a country run by the biggest antisocial freaks on the planet.
