In 2025, the United States became the only country on earth — out of 184 studied — to see international tourist spending fall. The damage is quantifiable, the cause is documented, and the leadership failure it exposes is constitutional in its severity.
There is a particular kind of national humiliation that arrives not in the form of a diplomatic crisis or a battlefield defeat, but in an empty hotel room, a shuttered gift shop, a restaurant table that will not be filled tonight. That humiliation is now arriving across the United States in wave after devastating wave — the direct and documented consequence of an administration that has spent fifteen months telling the world, in word and policy alike, that it is not welcome here. The numbers have come in. The verdict is unmistakable. And for a nation that once styled itself the world’s great welcome mat, the reckoning is historic.
In 2025, while global international arrivals grew by 4 percent, the United States recorded a 5.4 percent decline in foreign visitors — a reversal sharper than anything seen outside the COVID-19 pandemic. The World Travel & Tourism Council, which tracks 184 economies, found that America was the only nation among them to see foreign visitor spending fall. The world did not stop traveling. It simply stopped traveling here. Economists, industry leaders, and a growing chorus of legislators have pointed the finger squarely at the policies and rhetoric of President Donald Trump — and the evidence leaves little room for alternative explanation.
1. The “Trump Slump” — America, Alone in Decline
Before Trump returned to office, the trajectory of American tourism was one of cautious optimism. As recently as December 2024, Oxford Economics’ Tourism Economics division had projected an 8.8 percent boost in international arrivals and a 16 percent increase in spending by foreign visitors for 2025. The industry was bracing for a bumper year — close to 79 million foreign visitors, approaching pre-pandemic levels. Within weeks of the inauguration, those projections began to collapse.
By the end of 2025, Tourism Economics had revised its forecast to a decline of 8.2 percent in international arrivals. The World Travel & Tourism Council estimated that spending by overseas visitors had fallen 7 percent, to less than $169 billion — well below the $184 billion that had been anticipated. Julia Simpson, the Council’s president and chief executive, described the situation without equivocation: “The world’s biggest travel and tourism economy,” she said, “is heading in the wrong direction.” Of the 184 economies the Council tracks, the United States stands alone. Not behind. Alone.
Ryan Bourne, an economist at the Cato Institute, has been direct about the cause. The decline, he told Al Jazeera, “can be put down to the president’s trade wars and some of the fallout about fears about getting ensnared in immigration enforcement.” That is not a progressive talking point. That is a libertarian economist, at a libertarian institution, drawing a straight line between White House policy and economic collapse in a major American industry.
“The sentiment drag has proven to be severe — airline bookings indicate the sharp inbound travel slowdown would likely persist in the months ahead.”
— Tourism Economics (Oxford Economics Division), September 2025
2. The Canadian Catastrophe — When Your Closest Ally Stops Visiting
No element of the tourism collapse is more concrete — or more self-inflicted — than the collapse of Canadian visitation to the United States. Canadians have historically been America’s single largest source of international tourists, accounting for roughly 28 percent of all foreign visitors. In 2024, they made 20.4 million trips to the United States and spent $20.5 billion, supporting approximately 140,000 American jobs. That relationship, built over generations of shared culture, family ties, and geographic proximity, has been systematically demolished in a little over a year.
Trump’s repeated threats to annex Canada as a “51st state,” his imposition of sweeping tariffs on Canadian goods, and his administration’s aggressive immigration posture triggered what has become the largest sustained travel boycott in modern American tourism history. By the end of 2025, Canadian visits to the United States had fallen by 21 percent — 4.2 million fewer visitors — costing the American economy $4.5 billion in lost spending. A March 2026 analysis from the Centre for Economic Policy Research found that by mid-2025, establishments in areas most dependent on Canadian visitors were employing roughly 6 percent fewer workers than comparable businesses in less-exposed markets.
A December 2025 report from the Democratic minority of Congress’s Joint Economic Committee documented the damage with granularity that should have been a political emergency. In Montana, where Canadians accounted for nearly 80 percent of international visitors, one hotel reported a $38,000 loss after a Canadian sports team canceled a reservation covering 70 rooms and a 200-person dinner. An Old Orchard Beach, Maine business owner described 2025 as “the worst year we’ve had — even worse than COVID.” Across the U.S.-Canada border, passenger vehicle crossings fell by nearly 20 percent between January and October — some states seeing declines of more than 28 percent.
Senator Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire, the committee’s ranking member, summarized the catastrophe plainly: “In the wake of President Trump’s reckless tariffs and needless provocations, fewer and fewer Canadians are making trips to the United States, putting many American businesses in jeopardy and straining the close ties that bind our two nations.” As of early 2026, that damage is not subsiding. Data from the first months of 2026 show the decline accelerating, with no sign of recovery in sight. CNBC reported in March 2026 that the percentage of Canadians holding an unfavorable view of the United States hit its highest level since the Pew Research Center began asking the question in 2002.
The number of fewer Canadian visitors to the US in 2025. Canadian air bookings for US travel were down 35–42% year-over-year at the peak of the boycott.
American jobs that depended on Canadian tourist spending in 2024, according to the U.S. Travel Association and the Congressional Joint Economic Committee.
The total estimated tourism revenue shortfall for the US economy in 2025, according to Travel and Tour World, citing World Travel & Tourism Council data.
Jobs potentially lost if international tourism falls 10%, per Oxford Economics’ Implan analysis — reported by Fortune — with dining, lodging, and entertainment hardest hit.
3. The Travel Ban Regime — Walling Off the World
Beyond the economic signals sent by trade war rhetoric, the Trump administration has also constructed an expanding legal architecture designed to keep visitors out. On June 4, 2025, a presidential proclamation imposed full or partial entry bans on nationals from 19 countries. On December 16, 2025, the administration expanded that to 39 countries — nearly one-fifth of all nations on earth — with the expanded ban taking effect January 1, 2026. The U.S. State Department was directed to cease issuing tourist, student, and business visas to affected nationals. The targets, overwhelmingly, were Muslim-majority, Black-majority, African, and Southeast Asian nations.
The American Immigration Council documented the immediate consequences: children unable to reunite with parents in the United States, foreign doctors kept from patients, immigrant entrepreneurs deterred from international business travel. The Presidents’ Alliance on Higher Education and Immigration called the expansion “a self-inflicted wound that directly undermines our economic competitiveness.” Meanwhile, the administration proposed requiring visitors from Visa Waiver countries — covering much of Europe, Asia, and the Pacific — to submit five years of social media history as a condition of entry. The U.S. Travel Association issued a warning: “This policy could have a chilling effect on travel to the United States. If we get this policy wrong, millions of travelers could take their business and the billions of dollars they spend elsewhere.”
The travel ban has also collided grotesquely with the administration’s own hosting commitments. The United States is co-hosting the 2026 FIFA World Cup, a global event that was supposed to provide a turnaround moment for American tourism. But the ban covers several nations with World Cup qualifying teams, including Iran, Senegal, Ivory Coast, and Haiti. European flight bookings to the United States for the summer of 2026 are down more than 14 percent year-over-year, according to aviation analytics firm Cirium — in what should have been the industry’s rebound year.
Trump returns to office; Tourism Economics had forecast a 9% increase in US international arrivals for the year. Instead, a steep decline begins within weeks.
Tariffs on Canada, China, and Mexico announced. Foreign air arrivals fall 10% that month alone — the worst single-month drop on record outside COVID, per the International Trade Administration.
First travel ban proclamation imposes full entry restrictions on nationals of 12 countries and partial restrictions on 7 more, effective June 9, 2025.
Air France, British Airways, and Lufthansa cut flights to Atlanta, Las Vegas, Miami, and New York. For the first time in nearly two decades, more US residents drove into Canada than Canadians made the reverse trip.
Travel ban expanded to 39 countries, effective January 1, 2026 — covering nearly 20% of all nations on earth, targeting predominantly African, Muslim-majority, and Black-majority countries.
US Customs proposes requiring five years of social media history from visitors under the Visa Waiver Program. The US Travel Association warns of a “chilling effect” on millions of additional travelers.
European flight bookings for summer 2026 fall more than 14% year-over-year — in a World Cup year that was supposed to reverse the decline. Tourism experts at Toronto Metropolitan University conclude recovery is “unlikely” in 2026.
4. The Economic Reckoning — What $29 Billion and 230,000 Jobs Actually Mean
The scale of the economic harm must not be allowed to fade into abstraction. A 10 percent drop in international tourism — a figure that March 2025 alone briefly touched — could cost the United States $23 billion in gross domestic product and the equivalent of roughly 230,000 jobs, according to estimates from Implan chief economist Jennifer Thorvaldson, published by Fortune. Dining and lodging alone would forfeit more than 95,000 jobs between them. Entertainment would lose an estimated 25,000. These are not hypothetical figures about distant industries. They are the bartenders of Las Vegas, the hotel desk clerks of the Adirondacks, the restaurateurs of Buffalo, the shop owners of Niagara Falls.
Las Vegas finished 2025 with its lowest visitor count since 2010, excluding pandemic years. In Western New York, 3.6 million fewer travelers crossed from Canada compared to the prior period, gutting retail and leisure businesses along the border. The Adirondacks region reported $14 million in losses. Myrtle Beach cut resort prices by 50 percent for Canadian visitors after reporting a 30 percent drop in arrivals. New York City — America’s top destination for overseas tourism — projected a 17 percent drop in international visitors for the year because of Trump’s tariffs and detentions of immigrants.
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The projected $29 billion in total tourism revenue losses has broad downstream effects. Tourism is not merely a leisure industry — it functions as one of the United States’ largest service exports. When the World Travel & Tourism Council says the United States will not return to its pre-COVID tourism revenue level before 2030, it is describing a decade of stunted economic growth that will touch millions of working Americans who never cast a vote in any direction on tariff policy. The administration’s “America First” posture has, in practice, been America Last — in the only international economic ranking where the comparison is direct, and only the United States is losing.
“In my 37 years in the travel industry, I have never seen anything like what the Canadians have pulled off.”
— Unnamed industry veteran, quoted by Forbes, 2026
5. What Leadership Requires — and What This Administration Has Demonstrated
The tourism crisis is not merely an economic failure. It is a diagnostic one. What the data reveals is an administration that has systematically prioritized inflammatory rhetoric over consequence, that has pursued policies with entirely foreseeable results and then declined to change course as those results materialized, and that has damaged relationships with allied nations in ways that will outlast any single fiscal quarter. This is not a complex policy environment that produced unexpected outcomes. Economists, travel industry leaders, and Canada’s own statistical agency were watching the collapse happen in real time and saying so, loudly, and on the record. The administration’s response was either silence or escalation.
By April 2026, more than 85 House Democrats — along with a pair of Democratic senators — had publicly called for President Trump to be impeached or for Vice President J.D. Vance and the Cabinet to convene and consider invoking the 25th Amendment. That call was precipitated primarily by alarming statements Trump made about Iran — but the tourism crisis represents a distinct and equally serious dimension of the same underlying question: is this president capable of exercising the duties of his office in the interest of the American people?
The economic self-harm documented here — billions lost, hundreds of thousands of jobs imperiled, America’s global reputation as a welcoming destination in tatters — is not the result of complex geopolitical forces beyond any president’s control. It is the direct result of choices: choices about language, about tariffs, about immigration enforcement, about who is welcome and who is not. A competent executive who understood the consequences would have weighed the costs. This one has not.
When a President Demonstrates He Cannot Govern in the National Interest: The Constitutional Case
Section 4 of the 25th Amendment, ratified in 1967, provides a mechanism for the involuntary transfer of presidential power when the Vice President and a majority of the Cabinet — or “such other body as Congress may by law provide” — determine that the president “is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.” The amendment does not specify that inability must be physical or medical in nature. Constitutional scholars have long recognized that demonstrable, sustained inability to govern competently, or to refrain from conduct causing severe national harm, falls within the amendment’s contemplative scope.
On April 14, 2026, House Judiciary Committee Ranking Member Jamie Raskin of Maryland introduced legislation to establish an independent, 17-member Commission on Presidential Capacity — precisely the “other body” the amendment contemplates — with 50 Democratic co-sponsors. The bill was prompted in part by Trump’s apocalyptic Iran rhetoric, but Raskin and his colleagues have grounded their broader argument in a pattern of conduct: “Public trust in Donald Trump’s ability to meet the duties of his office has dropped to unprecedented lows,” the legislation states. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and more than 85 other House Democrats explicitly called for invocation of the 25th Amendment. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries signaled openness to the movement, with one senior House progressive noting that “Trump’s actions the last couple days were scary” and that the caucus’s posture reflects “where the electorate is.”
The tourism crisis is directly germane to any competency assessment. The President of the United States took a series of actions — tariff imposition, annexation rhetoric toward Canada, the expansion of travel bans to cover nearly one-fifth of the world, the imposition of social media surveillance requirements for visitors — each of which had the entirely foreseeable and documented effect of collapsing international tourism, costing the American economy tens of billions of dollars, and destroying 140,000 jobs’ worth of Canadian visitor spending alone. The administration had access to the data. It had the warnings of the U.S. Travel Association, the World Travel & Tourism Council, Tourism Economics, and its own State Department. It continued on the same trajectory regardless.
The practical barriers to 25th Amendment invocation are substantial and must be acknowledged honestly. The Republican-dominated House and Senate are unlikely to pass Raskin’s commission bill. Vice President Vance has shown no inclination to act against the man who placed him in office. A supermajority vote of two-thirds in both chambers would be required to sustain a removal if the president contested it — an impossibility in the current composition. These are real barriers. But they are political barriers, not constitutional ones. The amendment exists precisely because the framers recognized that a president could cause catastrophic harm while remaining technically within the law. The harm catalogued here — quantified, sourced, and ongoing — is precisely the kind of damage that the amendment was designed to address. The political will to act does not yet exist. The constitutional case does.
Editorial Conclusion
The United States did not stumble into this tourism catastrophe. It was led there — by a president who made enemies of allies, put ideology before arithmetic, and told the world it was not welcome, then acted surprised when the world believed him. The economic damage — billions in lost revenue, hundreds of thousands of jobs threatened, America’s international reputation degraded to its lowest point in two decades — is not a side effect of otherwise sound policy. It is the policy. When a government consistently and knowingly produces outcomes that harm the very American workers it claims to champion, the question before the republic is no longer partisan. It is constitutional. What we require is not simply new leadership in tone, but a reckoning with whether the current holder of the office possesses the judgment, the impulse control, and the basic competency that the presidency demands. History will record that the question was asked. What remains is whether those with the constitutional authority to answer it will summon the courage to do so.
Sources & References
- Al Jazeera — “Foreign Tourism to the US Drops Amid Trump-Era Policies”
- Bloomberg — “How Trump’s Tariffs Impact Global Travel, In Charts”
- PBS NewsHour — “A Downturn in International Travel to the U.S. May Last Beyond Summer”
- Fortune — “U.S. May Lose 230,000 Jobs If Foreign Tourists Stay Away”
- Travel and Tour World — “US Tourism Is Now Facing Major Plummet”
- CBC News — “Elbows Up in 2025: How a Year of Canadian Boycotts Played Out”
- CEPR / VoxEU — “When Neighbours Stop Knocking: The Hidden Impact of Canada’s 2025 Tourism Decline”
- CBC News — “Canadian Boycott of U.S. Hitting Border States Hard: Congressional Report”
- Wikipedia — “2025–2026 Canadian Boycott of the United States”
- The Deep Dive — “Canada’s Travel Boycott Cost the US $4.5 Billion in 2025”
- U.S. Senate Joint Economic Committee (Minority) — Report on Canadian Tourism Decline
- CNBC — “One Year After Trump’s Sovereignty Threats, Canadians Keep ‘Elbows Up'”
- American Immigration Council — “Trump’s 2025 Travel Ban: Who Is Affected and What It Could Cost”
- AFAR Magazine — “Trump’s Travel Ban and Restrictions Will Expand to These Countries”
- Congressional Research Service — “Expanded ‘Travel Ban’ to Take Effect January 1, 2026”
- Al Jazeera — “US Social Media Rules for Tourists Could Have ‘Chilling Effect’ on Travel”
- Euronews — “US Tourism Is Experiencing a ‘Trump Slump’: Will the FIFA World Cup Reverse the Trend?”
- The Conversation — “Will a ‘Trump Slump’ Continue to Hit US Tourism in 2026?”
- Deseret News — “Democrats Introduce 25th Amendment Commission Bill”
- Axios — “House Democratic Leadership Signals Openness to 25th Amendment Push”
