For many of us, the United States means music, progress, hope. Whatever their president does, plenty of Americans continue to believe in those too<\/p>\n
It seems as inevitable as the economic chaos let loose by Donald Trump\u2019s mad avalanche of tariffs<\/a>: a precipitous drop in the number of tourists visiting the US, which is now forecast to be even worse than initially feared. In February, overseas travel to the country was down by 5% compared with the previous year \u2013 and, now, reputable forecasters are predicting a drop<\/a> of nearly twice that size.<\/p>\n We all know why. Trump\u2019s hostile words about Canada and Mexico have hit the US\u2019s top two markets<\/a> for tourism. <\/strong>Finnish, German and Danish transgender and non-binary people have been advised<\/a> by their governments to contact a US diplomatic mission before travelling there. Note also a trickle of reports about outsiders falling foul of the cruel stringency apparently now gripping the American authorities: a 28-year-old woman from north Wales held for 19 days<\/a> in a detention centre and escorted on to her plane home in chains; the French scientist who was summarily denied entry<\/a> into the US after his phone was found to contain messages criticising the president. Those stories intensify the Trump administration\u2019s general air of brutality and belligerence, which also brings familiar fears to the surface: of guns, politicised thuggery<\/a> and a country in a frighteningly volatile state. The result is the sudden understanding of the US as somewhere that may be best unvisited \u2013 which, for millions of people, brings on a very painful pang of loss.<\/p>\n Continue reading…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" For many of us, the United States means music, progress, hope. Whatever their president does, plenty of Americans continue to believe in those too It seems as inevitable as the economic chaos let loose by Donald Trump\u2019s mad avalanche of tariffs: a precipitous drop in the number of tourists visiting the US, which is now … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-38043","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38043","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=38043"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38043\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=38043"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=38043"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=38043"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}