The saga of Mahmoud Khalil, a legal U.S. resident, is beyond chilling. The Trump administration clearly wants to be able to disappear whoever they want whenever they want to wherever they want. It doesn’t matter if you’re a legal citizen or a visiting French academic, America is now punishing people for thought crimes against its dear leader. The goal of this administration is very clearly to criminalize any criticism of America’s longtime fascist movement that Hitler glowingly cited as his inspiration. Every day, there is less daylight between the Nazis and the Republican Party than there was the day before.
And while the headline of all this is obviously that concentration camps and the like are no longer a possibility, but a reality slowly enveloping fascist America, there is an economic aspect to this that like Trump’s trade war or Elon’s gutting of the federal government, seems like it was specifically designed to crash the U.S. economy. Americans have proven that they can be very indifferent to the suffering of others, but the economy hits all of us and no one will be immune to the generational economic crash that Trump is pursuing.
The Republican know-nothings will surely dismiss the importance of foreigners to America because that is their entire bankrupt ethos in life, but the fact is America is a global tourism powerhouse. No country in the world makes more money from tourism than we do and it’s not remotely close. The World Travel and Tourism Council estimated that tourism contributes $2.36 trillion to the U.S. economy every year (equivalent to a little over eight percent of annual GDP), nearly double that of China’s tourism market which is the second-largest at $1.3 trillion. Really driving home how much larger the U.S. tourism market is than any of its peers, Germany is third at $487 billion, nearly twenty percent as large as America’s. Tourism is so central to our economy that it is the among the three largest employers in 29 states.
What happens if eight percent of GDP just disappears? What happens to all those jobs if no one travels here for fear of being sent to a concentration camp in El Salvador? That’s the intended goal of Trump’s fascist policies, because no one in their right mind would willingly travel to the United States right now. We are rightfully, a global pariah and these travel advisories from two countries central to our tourism industry are just the start of America’s increasing isolation. When, not if at this point in my Cassandra-biased opinion, Trump crashes the U.S. economy and takes other countries’ economies down with it, it will only further incentivize our former allies to end their relationship with a nation who has proven it cannot be a trusted partner of the international community anymore. The collapse of the United States of America is upon us, and the world is actively planning for a future without it.
GET SPLINTER RIGHT IN YOUR INBOX
The Truth Hurts
