Nobody Wants To Come To Donald Trump’s Sh*thole Country
Not anybody who matters, anyway.
Donald Trump likes to self-soothe by making up stories about how ever since he became president, the United States is respected again, dictators tell him we’re suddenly the “hottest” country in the world, and so on and so forth. It’s pathetic and embarrassing, and the opposite is true. The United States under Trump is an international joke and an object of pity and scorn, as anybody who’s been outside its borders since last January 20 can attest to.
Many people who haven’t been abroad know it too, but they probably haven’t run across any international travelers who have told them, because nobody’s coming here anymore. You might have recently seen a graphic like this one from back in April from John Burn-Murdoch at the Financial Times, telling the story of how tourism to the US has been collapsing:
Nobody is coming here. Canadian tourism to the US has gone down 18 percent, and those staying in the Western Hemisphere are going to South America, Central America, or the Caribbean instead. Europeans aren’t coming here. Asians are going to Europe. As of September, we were set to lose out on somewhere in the neighborhood of $30 billion in tourism bucks this year.
Why? Donald Trump’s tariffs. Donald Trump’s satanic, Hitlerian immigration policies and rhetoric. Donald Trump’s threats to invade Canada or seize Greenland. Donald Trump, just in general.
On a personal, anecdotal note, this author was out of the country in September and met many people, from all over the place, all of whom expressed a desire to visit the US … someday. But not today. Maybe in a few years when all this (*gestures wildly*) is over.
So in light of all this, it’s literally fucking insane that news broke this week that Customs and Border Protection is proposing a new rule demanding to see FIVE FULL YEARS of people’s social media posts before they let them visit the United States.
Why? To finish off the meager remains of international travelers still coming here?
Because nobody wants to visit Donald Trump’s fucking shithole country.
The story of the new proposal is truly bugfucking insane. It’s specifically about the 42 countries on the Visa Waiver Program, AKA the ones where you don’t historically need a visa to travel to the United States, AKA allegedly our closest, most trusted international friends. All of Western Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Taiwan, etc. It would require people’s full social media history to be one of the data points available to the goons at CBP, while they’re deciding if somebody is fit to spend their tourism dollars here.
To be clear, this isn’t law yet, and maybe backlash and widespread mockery might help make sure it never becomes so. But it’s of a piece with all the other insane bullshit the Trump administration has done this year to try to weed out travelers who have expressed non-regime-approved views on Dear Leader and his perfectly normal-sized hands. Who knows how many people might have infiltrated the US with hurtful Fat JD Vance memes on their phones, what dangerous threats might have slipped through the cracks, if CBP and Marco Rubio’s State Department weren’t on the case?
All of this is so stupid, this self-inflicted national suicide the Trump regime is committing on behalf of a country that actually did not give it a mandate to do that.
When Donald Trump spoke in Pennsylvania earlier this week — he’s taking his dementia brain on the road in “support” of Republican midterm candidates, aren’t all you Republican candidates “excited” about that? — he babbled his way through the words he remembers, the phrases and sentences stuck in a loop in his addled, diseased grey matter, like HAL 9000 in the process of losing its power supply.
He talked about how little girls don’t need more than 37 dolls, “two or three is nice,” and children don’t need 37 pencils, “they only need one or two” — merry Christmas, American kids! Your stockings are, um, kind of empty this year, and it’s because of the senile president’s dumbass tariffs!
He also recycled his Hitler babble about “shithole” countries, whining that we can’t get immigrants from Norway or Denmark, only the “shithole” countries. It’s almost identical to the way he said it back in 2018, because that’s what people with failing brains do, they cling to the familiar, they get stuck on the same questions and phrases, you have to keep explaining the same thing to them over and over and over again.
Back in 2018, in that specific instance, he was fixated on Haiti. This week he’s fixated on Somalia. Same white supremacist Hitler shit.
“I’ve also announced a permanent pause on Third World migration, including from hellholes like Afghanistan, Haiti, Somalia and many other countries,” he said. Then, reflecting on his 2018 meeting with senators during which he referred to certain nations as “shithole countries,” Trump said, “Remember I said that to the senators?”
He said, “Our country was going to hell. And we had a meeting, and I say, ‘Why is it we only take people from shithole countries, right?’ Why can’t we have some people from Norway, Sweden, just a few? Let us have a few from Denmark. Do you mind sending us a few people? Do you mind?’”
Maybe more people would want to come to the US from places like Norway and Sweden if our border goons weren’t seeking to demand five years of their Facebook posts, to make sure they didn’t call Dear Leader any names? Just spitballing here.
As it is, Norway and Denmark, which already rank as far happier than the US literally every time the question is asked, are among the growing list of countries telling the US to give them our tired, our poor, our huddled masses, our highly skilled scientists and researchers. (Denmark’s intelligence services have also recently and for the first time officially mentioned the US as a possible security threat to Denmark in their new threat assessment. So that’s where we are.)
As for people like that wanting to come to the US? “Up until this year, it was a dream — a wish! — that you could get a job and you could come to the U.S. And now nobody wants to come.” That’s Dr. Julie Gralow, chief medical officer at the American Society of Clinical Oncology, in an NPR article from a few weeks ago.
Articles like this one in The New Yorker, “How to leave the U.S.A.,” are becoming more and more common.
But hey, CBP is on the case, making sure none of the few people still trying to come in to the US have made any offensives jokes about right-wing American podcasters who have gone to be with the Lord in recent months, or whatever their criteria is this week. (And to those wondering about the feasibility of sifting through five years of every entrant’s social media posts, consider that it doesn’t take that long to do that when there are only six or seven people in line.)
Zeteo has a scoop that the Trump regime wants to revoke the visas of two green card holders, former European Union Commissioner Thierry Breton and Imran Ahmed, of the Center for Countering Digital Hate. Why? Because they’re being mean to poor Elon Musk and Twitter, and the EU slapped Twitter with a $140 million fine, and the Trump regime is mad.
This comes after news last week that they’re rejecting H-1B visa applicants who have ever “worked in areas that include activities such as misinformation, disinformation, content moderation, fact-checking, compliance and online safety, among others,” per Reuters. In the regime’s Newspeak, this is all being done to combat “censorship” of Americans, which in Trump’s America means anybody who’s ever censored or factchecked vile American MAGA Nazis or the foreign troll farms that give them their talking points.
It’s all so sick and so stupid, and what remains of the goodwill the rest of the world has for the US, it’s pity for the Americans who didn’t choose this.
But yet Donald Trump is out here dementia-bitching about “shithole countries” and his administration is looking for new ways to target anybody who actually still does want to come here, for however long that lasts.
We guess MAGA Nazis can take heart. At this rate, it won’t be long before there’s no country in the world anywhere that views the US as a land of opportunity.
Shithole country status: activated.
USA! USA! USA!
[NBC News]
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As I think you probably have heard, I just got back from a trip to Italy. One of the places I visited was Bologna, which has a large student population (around 20% of the city) thanks to their very old and established university. I spoke with a few students there who said similar... they would love to come to the US for work, someday. But not right now. What was once the envy of the world, the US ability to attract the best and brightest minds of the world for competitive business/technology/scientific advantage, that's ruined now. Seems to me this loss will reverberate for a long time, maybe generations.
My wife sent me an excerpt of that New Yorker article, that mentioned this:
"And thousands have been claiming German and Austrian citizenship thanks to a rule granting the designation to the descendants of Jews who were persecuted by the Nazis."
Her comment: "When the Jews flee America for Germany and Austria, it might be time to gtfo. "