Yesterday afternoon, Donald Trump celebrated America’s so-called Liberation Day by announcing a slew of tariffs on dozens of countries. His plan, if fully implemented, will return the United States to the highest tariff duty as a share of the economy since the late 1800s, before the invention of the automobile, aspirin, and the incandescent light bulb. Michael Cembalest, the widely read analyst at JP Morgan Wealth Management, wrote that the White House announcement “borders on twilight zone territory.”
The most fitting analysis for this moment, however, does not come from an economist or a financial researcher. It comes from the screenwriter William Goldman, who pithily captured his industry’s lack of foresight with one of the most famous aphorisms in Hollywood history: “Nobody knows anything.”
You’re not going to find a better three-word summary of the Trump tariffs than that. If there’s anything worse than an economic plan that attempts to revive the 19th-century protectionist U.S. economy, it’s the fact that the people responsible for explaining and implementing it don’t seem to have any idea what they’re doing, or why.
On one side, you have the longtime Trump aide Peter Navarro, who has said that Trump’s tariffs will raise $6 trillion over the next decade, making it the largest tax increase in American history. On another, you have pro-Trump tech folks, such as Palmer Luckey, who have instead claimed that the goal is the opposite: a world of fully free trade, as countries remove their existing trade barriers in the face of the new penalties. On yet another track, there is Stephen Miran, the chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, who has suggested that the tariff salvo is part of a master plan to rebalance America’s relationship with the global economy by reducing the value of the dollar and reviving manufacturing employment in the United States.
These three alleged goals—raising revenue, restoring free trade, and rejiggering the global economy—are incompatible with one another. The first and second explanations are mutually exclusive: The state can’t raise tax revenue in the long run with a levy that is designed to disappear. The second and third explanations are mutually exclusive too: You can’t reindustrialize by doubling down on the global-trade free-for-all that supposedly immiserated the Rust Belt in the first place. Either global free trade is an economic Valhalla worth fighting for, or it’s the cursed political order that we’re trying desperately to destroy.
As for Trump’s alleged devotion to bringing back manufacturing jobs, the administration has attacked the implementation of the CHIPS bill, which invested in the very same high-tech semiconductors that a strategic reindustrialization effort would seek to prioritize. There is no single coherent explanation for the tariffs, only competing hypotheses that violate one another’s internal logic because, when it comes to explaining this economic policy, nobody knows anything.
One might expect clarity from Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. But even he doesn’t seem to understand what’s going on. The “tariff gun will always be loaded and on the table, but rarely discharged,” he said last year. So much for that. Yesterday, a Bloomberg reporter asked Bessent if the Trump administration has plans to negotiate with America’s trading partners. “We’re just going to have to wait and see,” he said. Was the administration ready to negotiate with the European Union, China, or India? “We’ll see.” Asked why Canada and Mexico were missing from the president’s list of tariffs, he switched it up: “I’m not sure.” Nobody knows anything.
By the numbers, the tariffs are less an expression of economic theory and more a Dadaist art piece about the meaninglessness of expertise. The Trump administration slapped 10 percent tariffs on Heard Island and McDonalds Islands, which are uninhabited, and on the British Indian Ocean Territory, whose residents are mostly American and British military service members. One of the highest tariff rates, 50 percent, was imposed on the African nation of Lesotho, whose average citizen earns less than $5 a day. Why? Because the administration’s formula for supposedly “reciprocal” tariff rates apparently has nothing to do with tariffs. The Trump team seems to have calculated each penalty by dividing the U.S. trade deficit with a given country by how much the U.S. imports from it and then doing a rough adjustment. Because Lesotho’s citizens are too poor to afford most U.S. exports, while the U.S. imports $237 million in diamonds and other goods from the small landlocked nation, we have reserved close to our highest-possible tariff rate for one of the world’s poorest countries. The notion that taxing Lesotho gemstones is necessary for the U.S. to add steel jobs in Ohio is so absurd that I briefly lost consciousness in the middle of writing this sentence.
If the tariffs violate their own internal logic and basic common sense, what are they? Most likely, they represent little more than the all-of-government metastasis of Trump’s personality, which sees grandiosity as a strategy to pull counterparties to the negotiating table and strike deals that benefit Trump’s ego or wallet. This personality style is clear, and it has been clearly stated, even if its application to geopolitics is confounding to observe. “My style of deal-making is pretty simple and straightforward,” Trump writes in The Art of the Deal. “I aim very high, and then I just keep pushing and pushing and pushing to get what I’m after. Sometimes I settle for less than I sought but in most cases I still end up with what I want.”
One can see this playbook—threat, leverage, concession, repeat—playing out across all of society. It’s happening in trade. It’s happening in law. It’s happening in academia. In the first two months of his second term, Trump has already squeezed enormous concessions out of white-shoe law firms and major universities. Trump appears to care more about the process of gaining leverage over others—including other countries—than he does about any particular effective tariff rate. The endgame here is that there is no endgame, only the infinite game of power and leverage.
Trump’s defenders praise the president for using chaos to shake up broken systems. But they fail to see the downside of uncertainty. Is a textile company really supposed to open a U.S. factory when our trade policy seems likely to change every month as Trump personally negotiates with the entire planet? Are manufacturing firms really supposed to invest in expensive factory expansions when the Liberation Day tariffs caused a global sell-off that signals an international downturn? Trump’s personality is, and has always been, zero-sum and urgent, craving chaos, but economic growth is positive-sum and long-term-oriented, craving certainty for its largest investments. The scariest thing about the Trump tariffs isn’t the numbers, but the underlying message. We’re all living inside the president’s head, and nobody knows anything.
Last month, when the Trump administration invoked the Alien Enemies Act to remove people without any legal process, my organization, the ACLU, sued to try to stop the deportations.
At first, things proceeded as one might expect. Because we showed that our clients were in imminent danger and that the Trump administration’s actions had, at minimum, serious legal problems, the federal court hearing the case ordered the government to pause the deportations and “immediately” send back any deportation flights that were already “in the air.” But then things took a surprising turn. The Trump administration kept the planes going, whisking our clients to a Salvadoran prison. Since then, the judge has been trying to determine whether his orders were violated. The government has repeatedly evaded the judge’s simple questions about its actions, and has now flatly refused to answer them, claiming that details about the flights, which can largely be corroborated through public information and Cabinet secretaries’ own social-media posts, involve “state secrets.”
These and similar executive actions have spurred serious concerns that the Trump administration is bringing the country into a full-fledged constitutional crisis. Plaintiffs in at least three other constitutional cases challenging Donald Trump’s actions—two cases related to Trump’s freezing of USAID funds and an ACLU case about his threat to cut off federal-grant funding to medical facilities that provide health care for transgender youth—have had to return to court to enforce prior orders. Meanwhile, Trump’s close advisers and allies—including Vice President J. D. Vance, Elon Musk, and a few members of Congress—have suggested, some more directly than others, that the president should disobey judicial rulings and wage a war of words against federal judges. But the Trump administration has not openly defied a court order, at least not yet, and there are still many tools that advocates and citizens have at their disposal to ensure that rule of law prevails in America.
For now, the Trump administration is mostly testing existing limits on executive power. Trump remarked early on to a Washington Post reporter that he “always abides” by court orders and expresses disagreement through appeal, but his actions tell a different story. Justice Department attorneys have responded to charges of noncompliance with technical rebuttals about what happened and when, and have taken the extraordinary position that the courts have no role in reviewing whether the president’s actions comply with the Constitution.
While these disputes make their way to the Supreme Court, Chief Justice John Roberts has made his views known on Trump’s statement outside the courts. After Trump called for the impeachment of the judge in the Alien Enemies Act case, the chief justice issued a rare public statement cautioning that appeal, not impeachment, is the proper recourse for disagreeing with a court ruling.
Meanwhile, Trump is taking ever more radical actions to undermine the foundations of American democracy. Since Inauguration Day, Trump has attacked the Fourteenth Amendment’s birthright-citizenship guarantee. He has detained green-card holders and international students for their constitutionally protected speech. He has attacked the rights of trans youth to access health care. And he has mounted an aggressive assault on institutions essential to a free country, threatening sanctions against major media companies, universities, and legal firms. Trump has targeted five of the nation’s largest law firms for past representation of his political opponents or disfavored causes and other lawyers who work on national security, public safety, and election integrity.
Attacks against lawyers and judges are especially dangerous because Trump knows that the courts’ constitutional role is to check him when he violates the Constitution and laws enacted by Congress. There will always be good lawyers who will be undeterred in the honorable pursuit of our profession, but Trump’s fear tactics are already working. The president is using the power of the federal government to silence opposition.
Even in this grim landscape, plaintiffs and others who oppose Trump’s lawlessness have powerful tools to counter him. In the USAID cases, federal workers won their motions to enforce the court’s preliminary orders, and so far have prevailed in both the court of appeals and the Supreme Court. Legal remedies, which also have political consequences, can force even powerful executive-branch officials to comply.
I speak from experience. In 2015, I led a legal team that brought a contempt motion against then-Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County, Arizona, who had defied multiple court orders in our case challenging racial profiling and unjustified traffic stops of Latino residents. After a 22-day trial, the district court held Arpaio in civil contempt of court, ordered reforms to the internal-affairs system, and imposed an independent authority to conduct disciplinary proceedings in certain misconduct cases. When we proved that Arpaio’s disobedience was willful, federal prosecutors initiated criminal contempt proceedings. Although Trump later pardoned Arpaio, the civil-contempt remedies proved far more consequential: Our clients—a plaintiff class of Latino residents—protected themselves from lawless misconduct.
Similarly, in 2018, the ACLU and our partners had to enforce court orders after we successfully challenged Kansas’s state voter-ID law under the National Voter Registration Act. In contempt proceedings, then–Secretary of State Kris Kobach was forced to add 18,000 disenfranchised citizens to the voter rolls and issue corrected guidance to election officials. To deal with Kobach’s repeated violations, the district court also imposed a financial sanction and ordered him to take a course on civil procedure and legal ethics.
In both the Arpaio and Kobach cases, a political reckoning soon emerged. Contempt proceedings educate and galvanize the public. Every day of our 22-day contempt trial against Arpaio, we were met outside the courthouse by two groups: reporters and community protesters. It was the work of everyone together, especially our clients, that ensured that the rule of law prevailed. In the Arpaio case, the people of Maricopa County delivered another measure of justice when they voted him out of office in the next election.
There is, of course, a difference between Trump and other recalcitrant defendants: Federal courts cannot enforce their own orders; they depend on the U.S. Marshals Service, a law-enforcement agency within the Justice Department. And because the judiciary’s enforcement arm is in the executive branch, the president may direct the Marshals Service to stand down. The constitutional crisis comes to a head when the courts order Trump to comply, and he essentially responds: You can’t make me.
If Trump precipitates this constitutional crisis, the remedy the Framers provided was impeachment and removal from office. If Congress refuses to impeach the president, Americans still have other tools to constrain him, including at the ballot box. The ultimate check on his abuses will be in the hands of the people. The constitutional system of checks and balances is still holding—for now.
State secrets are necessary, no matter who is president, because safeguarding certain kinds of information stops America’s enemies from doing us harm. They are also fraught, because when executive-branch officials can hide the truth, many abuse that power to cover up misdeeds.
This tests the virtue of any administration—a test that Donald Trump’s administration is failing. Its officials have recently betrayed a ludicrous double standard: They would have the public believe that the exact times at which F-18s will take off to attack an enemy and bomb its target are not classified, even prior to an attack, but also that, long after alleged undocumented immigrants are deported, national security demands that the time their deportation flights took off should remain secret. In short, they treat sensitive information with scandalous carelessness while invoking state secrets to hide facts that endanger no one.
The first of these matters concerns a U.S. military attack on Houthi fighters in Yemen last month. There is an obvious national-security interest in keeping attack plans secret: Doing so better protects American service members and makes their missions more likely to succeed. One struggles to think of any occasion when classifying and closely guarding information is more justified.
But Trump officials failed to safeguard the attack plans. As The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, reported last week, White House National Security Adviser Mike Waltz created a group chat on Signal, a nongovernmental messaging app, to discuss the attack on the Houthis—and inadvertently included Goldberg in the chat. Later, Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defense, used the chat to tell its 17 other members exactly when American war planes would take off and when American bombs would hit enemy targets. He did this even though many of the people on the chat seemingly had no need for such specific information, and even though sharing it on a group chat risked a security breach—as illustrated by Goldberg’s inclusion and the fact that none of the officials seemed to notice his presence.
Critics argued that the content of the group chat was both illegal and irresponsible––illegal because it would seem to violate laws that dictate how sensitive national-security information must be handled, and irresponsible because if the information in the group chat had reached America’s enemies, the lives of the pilots and their mission could’ve been endangered. “Everyone here knows that the Russians or the Chinese could have gotten all of that information, and they could have passed it on to the Houthis, who easily could have repositioned weapons and altered their plans to knock down planes or sink ships,” Democratic Representative Jim Himes said at a congressional hearing last week.
The Trump administration rejected such critiques. Before The Atlantic published the contents of the group chat, Hegseth downplayed the sensitivity of the information that he’d shared with the group. And Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, who was also included in the chat, testified under oath that the information wasn’t classified. “There were no sources, methods, locations, or war plans that were shared,” Gabbard said. Even after The Atlantic made the texts public, the White House insisted that the material was not classified, to the bafflement of many national-security experts, who well know that far less sensitive information is routinely classified and that if attack plans weren’t, they should have been.
The Trump administration has taken a sharply contrasting approach to state secrets in the second matter: its deportation of scores of people to a brutal prison in El Salvador, despite an order from U.S. District Court Judge James Boasberg to halt the deportations. The Trump administration claims that all the deportees are foreign gang members. Attorneys and family members of some of the men say that the government is wrong, and that they never got a chance to contest the facts. Facing a lawsuit by the ACLU and challenges from attorneys representing various detainees, the administration has argued that Boasberg’s order was not applicable, because it came down when the detainees were already outside U.S. airspace. In response, Boasberg demanded to know exactly when the two planes had taken off and left U.S. airspace, and when the detainees on board had been transferred from American to Salvadoran authorities.
Yet rather than answer the judge, Trump-administration officials invoked the state-secrets privilege, a legal doctrine that forecloses adjudicating some matters in court because disclosing the information at issue would purportedly threaten national security. In a notice filed last week, the administration argued that “confirming the exact time the flights departed, or their particular locations at some other time, would facilitate efforts to track those flights and future flights,” endangering the Americans operating them. They made this claim despite the fact that administration officials had already commented publicly about the location of the flights at the time that the judge’s order was issued, and despite the fact that future flights needn’t take off at the same time.
Every president in my lifetime has abused the state-secrets privilege. Still, I find this juxtaposition striking, and the administration’s positions disingenuous and indefensible. Government officials have every reason to closely guard the exact timing of a future military strike, and there is no civic benefit to sharing it. Meanwhile, there is no reason to closely guard the timing of a past deportation flight, and obvious civic benefit to clarifying it in response to a lawful judicial inquiry. Yet in both cases, the Trump team chose what was costly to the national interest, but possibly beneficial to their political interests, as they attempted to obfuscate the degree to which they’d behaved carelessly or, potentially, unlawfully.
Mark Twain said, “Patriotism is supporting your country all of the time, but your government only when it deserves it.” In this matter, the Trump administration is neither patriotic nor deserving of support.
On January 21, 2017, President Donald Trump’s then–press secretary, Sean Spicer, claimed that Trump had drawn the largest audience to ever witness a presidential inauguration. Photographs clearly showed that the assertion was false; Trump’s predecessor, Barack Obama, had drawn a much larger crowd at his first inauguration. But it didn’t matter.
“These attempts to lessen the enthusiasm of the inauguration are shameful and wrong,” Spicer said.
In one sense, Spicer’s lie was trivial. But in another sense, it mattered quite a lot, because it was a lie about a demonstrable fact. Kellyanne Conway, then a counselor to Trump, memorably defended Spicer by claiming that he was offering “alternative facts,” treating observable reality like hot wax, to be molded at will.
Fast-forward eight years. Trump is once again president. Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor in chief of The Atlantic, was mistakenly included on a private group chat—via Signal, a nongovernmental messaging app—in which Trump-administration officials discussed a planned bombing campaign in Yemen. Goldberg reported on the reckless and devastating breach of national security. But rather than acknowledging the mistake and promising to address it, the Trump administration reflexively followed its standard approach: attack. Smear. Prevaricate.
“He is, as you know, is a sleazebag, but at the highest level,” Trump said of Goldberg. “His magazine is failing.” Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, who shared the most sensitive information on the group chat, wrapped his attack on Goldberg in layers of lies: “You’re talking about a deceitful and highly discredited so-called journalist who’s made a profession of peddling hoaxes time and time again.” He added, “Nobody was texting war plans.” Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said on social media, “This entire story was another hoax written by a Trump-hater who is well-known for his sensationalist spin.” One high-level person after another insisted that the story was much ado about nothing. The information that had been shared, they assured us, was nothing that was dangerous to disclose.
Except that it was.
As The Washington Postreported, “The Yemen attack timeline that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth posted to a Signal chat group would have been so highly classified, under Pentagon guidelines, that the details should have been restricted to a special, compartmented channel with its own code word and with access tightly limited, according to former Defense Department officials.” Jennifer Griffin, the chief national-security correspondent at Fox News, reported that a former senior Department of Defense official had told her that the sort of information present in the chat “allows the enemy to move the target and increase lethal actions against U.S. forces.”
National Security Adviser Mike Waltz, who’d inadvertently invited Goldberg to the chat, said, “I can tell you for 100 percent: I don’t know this guy,” and that he “wouldn’t know him if I bumped into him, if I saw him in a police lineup.” A photo soon surfaced of the two standing together at a 2021 event.
In response to the Trump administration’s black fog, Goldberg—who’d initially chosen to characterize in general terms, without providing specific details, the nature of the information shared in the Signal chat—released the texts in order to allow people to reach their own conclusions. For its part, the Trump administration once again wants you to believe that two and two make five.
IN THE 1944 FILM GASLIGHT, a young woman, Paula Alquist, falls in love with and marries an older man, Gregory Anton. Over the course of the film, Gregory—cunning, moody, charismatic—deceives Paula into thinking that she is losing her mind. He does so by manipulating her memory, accusing her of hiding paintings and stealing things, isolating her, diminishing her self-worth and confidence, and denying reality. The film’s title refers to Gregory’s trick of secretly dimming and brightening the indoor gas lighting while insisting that Paula is imagining the changes.
Near the end of the movie, Paula finds out that she has been deceived by Gregory, a murderer who wants her committed to a mental institution so he can gain control of an estate. The inspector who solves the case tells Paula, “You’re not going out of your mind. You’re slowly and systematically being driven out of your mind.”
The film gave us the term gaslighting,which describes a certain type of psychological manipulation. To succeed, it requires those who are targeted to become so disoriented that they begin to doubt themselves, to become confused, and to question their own perception of reality. Clinical psychologists say that as gaslighting plays out, not only do its victims start to deny reality; they begin to accept the false reality of the person gaslighting them.
Gaslighters are manipulative and controlling, comfortable belittling and insulting others. They are accomplished at denying, lying, and projecting. And sometimes, if they’re lucky enough and skilled enough, they make it to the White House. When they do, the horrors that are usually visited on an individual are instead visited on an entire nation.
At that point, the enormous machinery of the federal government, supported by outside groups and media outlets, becomes part of a massive and relentless disinformation campaign. The aim is to provoke distrust, confusion, and disorientation, which corrodes people’s confidence in institutions and undermines their grasp of reality. The ultimate goal is to divide and weaken civil society, and to undermine its ability to mobilize and cohere.
When there is no objective truth, when everyone gets to make up their own reality, their own script, and their own facts, authoritarians thrive.
“The point of modern propaganda isn’t only to misinform or push an agenda,” Garry Kasparov, a Russian pro-democracy leader, wrote in 2016. “It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth.”
AS DISINFORMATION INCREASES, and as more and more individuals and institutions go silent, it becomes ever more important for truth tellers to speak up, if only to assure those who don’t believe the propaganda that they’re not losing their mind.
They need to do for their fellow citizens what the police inspector did for Paula Alquist.
Getting through America’s epistemic crisis—where there’s no agreed-upon reality, where there’s a breakdown of a society’s system for deciding what’s true—won’t be quick or easy, especially because the Trump administration still has more than 1,350 days to go. The task of reconstructing truth is a generational one, and a lot of pieces need to come together.
It starts by asking the right questions, such as the one recently posed by Kristin Du Mez, a history professor at Calvin University: “How do we as citizens participate in a democracy when disinformation is so prevalent, and when so many seem so willing to believe the lies and ignore the reality that is right in front of us? When so many are willing to abandon all values to choose their side, every single time?”
People who feel more and more powerless have asked me a version of this question: “What can I do practically as a citizen, apart from vote and call my representative, to help preserve American democracy against Trump’s assault against our institutions and truth itself?”
I’ve struggled to offer an answer; so have those I’ve reached out to for counsel. I have yet to receive a menu of compelling options. But I am certain that what needs to inform the answers to these questions, and what needs to precede a comprehensive plan of action, is knowledge.
That means turning to experts on the history of disinformation, such as Thomas Rid, who can talk about how societies have addressed these questions in the past; political psychologists, such as Australia’s Karen Stenner, who can help develop the language for how to reach people awash in distortions and deceptions; and experts in psychology and neuroscience, such as Jay Van Bavel, whose work addresses issues of group identity, social motivation, cooperation, intergroup bias, and social media. It includes turning to cognitive scientists such as Steven Sloman and Philip Fernbach, who study how people reason, make decisions, and form attitudes and beliefs; philosophers of science such as Cailin O’Connor and James Owen Weatherall, who argue that social forces explain the persistence of false beliefs; Peter Pomerantsev, who specializes in overcoming the challenges of digital-era disinformation and polarization; and political scientists such as Brendan Nyhan, who works on subjects including misperception and conspiracy theories.
Experts in the field of misinformation say that we know a lot about different kinds of misinformation, who is targeted and why, and the means to spread it. What we don’t know, at least not yet, is how to stop it. (Interventions in which people had placed hope a few years ago—including fact-checking, warning labels, and digital-literacy training—have a somewhat mixed record.)
“Things that can break down trust began rapidly scaling over the past decade or so, whereas the things that can rebuild trust just do not scale,” Lara Putnam, a history professor at the University of Pittsburgh who works on disinformation, toldThe New York Times. Figuring out how to scale up trust and truth is a central challenge of our time. It will take individuals and groups working together to insist on seeing the world as it actually is. Think of it as a dissident movement, an American Solidarity movement.
I HAVE A HUNCH, OR AT LEAST A HOPE. As Donald Trump’s malevolence intertwines with his incompetence, public disenchantment will grow. We’re already seeing signs of that as public fury at Elon Musk is being directed at Tesla. We’ve also seen it in town halls in red districts, where Republican members of Congress are being met not just with anxiety but also with anger. Republicans are being told to stop holding in-person town halls with constituents. And we see it in the rising panic caused by the stock-market collapse, the result of Trump’s carelessly destructive tariff policy, which is destabilizing the world’s trading system and shattering the American-led world order.
I imagine there will be more, much more, to follow, as the injuries Trump inflicts on Americans catalyze widespread fury and opposition.
Trump is an agent of chaos, and chaos has a human cost.
If disenchantment with Trump and Musk and the rest of this freak show leads to mass protests, it could be an inflection point, not just against Trump’s policies but also against the vertigo-inducing disinformation he promotes during almost every one of his waking hours.
I’ve long wondered how long it will take Americans to stop tolerating the unrelenting conflict and antipathy, which divides not just citizens but also families, that is endemic to life in the Trump era. The answer may be that they will stop tolerating it at the point when the quality of their life is degraded, when preventable diseases spread, when car prices and egg prices skyrocket, when 401(k) accounts start losing significant value.
At that point, Trump-style nihilism may lose its appeal; his disinformation campaign may begin to blow apart, and people may be reminded that living in truth is better than living within lies.
The drama has a long way to go, but the whirligig of time brings in his revenges.
Sure enough, in Old Orchard Beach, an inn owner with a substantial French Canadian clientele recently told CNN that most of his bookings have evaporated since Trump’s inauguration. Meanwhile, demand for flights from Canada to South Florida has fallen 20 percent compared with a year ago, the Miami Heraldreported. Hotel owners in South Florida told the newspaper that business is down; Fort Lauderdale’s tourism-marketing agency said it is “deeply concerned” about the effects of potential travel restrictions.
Trump’s insistence on disrupting trade relationships with—and asserting dominance over—even America’s closest international partners is putting the economy at risk, and not just in tourist areas in South Florida and coastal Maine. The president sees other countries as moochers and takers, and he appears to believe that the United States is so powerful and its economy so strong that the rest of the world will simply bow to American demands. But sovereign nations and their citizens can make their own choices, and Canadians aren’t the only ones who bristle at threats and obvious signs of disrespect from the United States.
People around the world are getting the message that the U.S. resents foreigners who are trying to cross into its territory. Amid Trump’s immigration crackdown, the United Nations recently urged staffers at the organization’s New York headquarters to carry their work ID and copies of their passports and visas. Stories circulate about what the administration calls “enhanced vetting.” News outlets in the U.S. and abroad are reporting anecdotes about foreign nationals who are held for weeks when they try to enter the country.
After some of its citizens were detained at the border recently, Germany updated its travel advisory to warn that a U.S. visa or entry waiver does not guarantee admittance. In other words: Buyer beware. Last month, other European democracies similarly revised their guidance to travelers who lawfully visit the U.S. The United Kingdom warns that U.S. officials “set and enforce entry rules strictly” and that travelers could be subject to arrest and detention. Some advisories warn members of the LGBTQ community about increasing hostility in the United States and potential pitfalls awaiting people whose passports record a gender identity different from their birth sex.
These advisories are vague. They do not instruct anyone not to visit the United States, as they might Iran or North Korea. But they are acknowledging that Trump’s border-enforcement efforts are unpredictable enough to have introduced a new variable in tourism decisions. The Trump administration may claim to be fighting illegal immigration, but in its aggressive roundups it is also making grievous errors. As The Atlantic’s Nick Miroff recently reported, it admitted to deporting one man to a megaprison in El Salvador “because of an administrative error” and insisted that he had no recourse in American courts.
Other democratic nations have an obligation to protect their citizens. We didn’t particularly worry about traveling to the United States before,these countries are warning, but now we do. And we think you should too.
Over the years, the United States has benefited immensely from being a reliable global presence and a welcoming destination with predictable rules and regulations for visitors. That reputation is now in danger, purely because of Trump’s strategy of dumping on other countries. A new study by the research company Tourism Economics is anticipating a 5 percent decline in foreign visits to the United States due to tariff wars and “polarizing Trump Administration rhetoric” and policies. (This study was done before “Liberation Day,” when the president imposed tariffs against almost all countries in the world.)
For every action the administration takes, other countries will respond according to their own values and the demands of their own domestic politics. “The old relationship we had with the United States based on deepening integration of our economies and tight security and military cooperation is over,” Canada’s new prime minister, Mark Carney, recently warned.
That’s become all too clear in Old Orchard Beach, where business owners brace for the consequences of Trump’s picking a fight with Canada. Chambers of commerce in tourist towns are scrambling to attract more U.S. visitors. But the tourism season in Maine is short, and the numbers this year are bad.
