The Trump Administration's "Fuck You, We Don't Need Your Money" Approach to Tourism Seems Counter-productive
At the 2026 World Cup Planning Task Force Conference at the White House, J.D. Vance, in his role as the world’s least likable politician, joked of tourists who might be inclined to visit the United States when it is one of three hosts of the 2026 FIFA World Cup longer than officially allowed.
"Of course, everybody is welcome to come and see this incredible event. I know we'll have visitors, probably from close to a hundred countries. We want them to come, we want them to celebrate, we want them to watch the game. But when the time is up, they'll have to go home. Otherwise, they'll have to talk to Secretary Noem.”
It wasn’t a joke. It also wasn’t funny. Vance was engaging in what old folks like me refer to as “kidding on the square.”
That’s when you make something that’s ostensibly a joke but reflects genuine feelings.
In this case, the “joke”, such as it is, is that we will ostensibly welcome international tourists and their billions of dollars when we have the honor of hosting a prestigious and lucrative international sports event but they better get the fuck out immediately if they don’t want to end up in the background of one of Kristi Noem’s publicity photos where she gets all dolled up to visit nightmarish foreign prisons where American’s undesirables are sent, sometimes with due process and sometimes without.
Who has time for all of those trials? Isn’t it just easier to assume that if the Trump administration sends someone to die in a South American gulag, then they’re probably guilty of something bad? It certainly saves time and money.
The genuine feelings being expressed by Vance, meanwhile, are raging contempt for non-Americans even under the best circumstances.
"Give me your tired, your poor/Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free/The wretched refuse of your teeming shore/Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me/I lift my lamp beside the golden door!" we once implored.
Now the United States’ attitude towards the rest of the world is, “We don’t need you. We don’t need your money, Fuck you, go away.”
In the case of wealthy World Cup tourists inspired to visit Trump’s dystopia to cheer on their home countries, we do, in fact, need them and their money but being a bully and henchman, Vance can’t keep from seething, “Fuck you, go away” to people who might commit the unforgivable crime of being in the country longer than intended.
I recently traveled for the first time in a while and was mortified to find a video of Kristi Noem greeting me at the airport before the security checkpoint.
Noem is, of course, famous for murdering a puppy. A puppy! A baby dog! She’s also known for getting glammed up for photo-ops that feel like something out of Real Housewives of a Totalitarian Dystopia and showing off our newfangled love for intentionally abusive, dispiriting foreign jails, the crueler the better.
ya don’t say!
THAT’s who we want travelers to see: a woman infamous for her cruelty to both humans and animals. Noem treats human beings like animals and animals like target practice.
As part of the Trump’s administration’s horrifyingly successful attempts to get the world to despise us, Noem recently announced that all of Harvard’s foreign students would have to get the fuck out because its administrators righteously refused to do Trump’s bidding.
Why? Because they’re fucking Harvard. With the exception of Yale, which I prefer because my sister went there, they’re the best universities in the whole country. Geniuses around the world dream of being good enough, smart enough, and accomplished enough to gain admission to Harvard, and then having the substantial financial means to attend for four years or more.
These are the people who will cure diseases, launch philanthropic endeavors, and be the leaders of tomorrow. Any nation would want the highest achievers in the world but we’re telling foreign students at Harvard to go fuck themselves because they’re probably all commies who hate us. Why else would they want to live in our country for four years or more? Only America-hating lunatics wish to visit or live in the United States.
We’re willing to destroy the reputation of one of the greatest colleges in the history of the world to make a point about the dangers of displeasing a wannabe dictator.
Donald Trump made and lost various fortunes as a hotelier. Hotels are heavily reliant on tourism, yet Trump is doing everything in his power to discourage it.
At its best, the United States is more than just the richest and most powerful country in the world. It was once a beacon of hope, a symbol of freedom, opportunity, and democracy.
That’s not true anymore. We no longer represent freedom, opportunity, or democracy. We’ve come to embody, instead, corruption, institutional and personal arrogance, racism, and intolerance.
People abroad have learned to dismiss Trump’s words as the seedy, self-aggrandizing delusions of a fantasist. The only upside to that is that people outside the United States, as well as people inside, understand that when Trump insists that under Biden’s despotic rule terrified citizens lived in fear of having their throats slit on the way to kitchen by one of millions of violent, insane illegal immigrants he’s flagrantly lying in a manner designed to inflate his ego and hurt his many enemies.
MAGA’s conception of American greatness is rooted in Trump’s cult of personality, rather than our country’s ostensible values. By their estimation, our country is great when he’s in charge and an unlivable hellhole when a Democrat inhabits the White House.
Trump has done his part to fight illegal immigration and tourism by making our country so unlivable that its own citizens want to flee in horror. The man screeching the loudest about our country’s greatness and superiority is the one doing the most to make our country inferior.
Trump doesn’t care if his isolationist policies and ugly rhetoric hurt tourism because he knows that his cult will flock to his hotels not because of their quality but rather as a way of supporting their god. It’s like a meme coin or stock in Truth Social: worthless except as a way to feed Trump’s ego and bank account.
Thanks almost exclusively to Trump, the United States is like a Tesla. It was once innovative, desirable, and the envy of people everywhere, but it has lost a great deal of its value over the past few years due to the hateful rhetoric of its leader and its numerous inherent flaws.
Vance and company soon won’t have to worry about tourists overstaying their welcome. Instead, they’ll have to worry about losing tourists who would understandably prefer to visit a country that doesn’t broadcast its contempt for outsiders and brag about its eagerness to put brown people in foreign prisons.
You can pre-order The Fractured Mirror here: https://the-fractured-mirror.backerkit.com/hosted_preorders
Nathan needed expensive, life-saving dental implants, and his dental plan didn’t cover them, so he started a GoFundMe at https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-nathans-journey-to-dental-implants. Give if you can!
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