So You Live in a Pariah State | Opinion

As the second Trump administration lurches from one self-inflicted crisis to another in a seemingly relentless quest to destroy both the material and moral foundations of American power, Americans will need to get comfortable with their new status as denizens of a global pariah state. Gone is the hope that Donald Trump and his MAGA movement were some kind of aberration. Instead, leaders and ordinary people in other countries now see the United States for what it is and always might be—an aggrieved superpower drunk on resentment, besotted with tyranny, and seeking vengeance for mostly imagined slights, populated by people who either chose this sordid path or did not care enough to put up a fight.

America’s descent into what political scientists call “competitive authoritarianism” is now obvious to everyone except Republican loyalists. When the non-partisan think tank Freedom House releases its 2025 Freedom in the World report, the United States is almost certainly going to be busted down to the “partly free” category that it will share with countries like Hungary and our new buddies in El Salvador.

That realization is spreading quickly. Outside of the COVID-19 pandemic period, tourism to the United States has been robust, with millions of monthly arrivals sometimes north of 8 million typically peaking in August. But in March 2025, as horror stories began to spread about European visitors being detained in horrific conditions or turned away at points of entry after Stalinesque searches of their computers for material critical of the Trump administration, overall arrivals were down over 11 percent year-over-year. No one wants to have their family vacation turned into some Kafkaesque nightmare at the hands of ICE agents emboldened by the country’s general climate of incipient fascism.

That is true not just for leisure tourists but also for conference-goers whose research or work runs afoul of the Trump administration’s novel interpretation of the First Amendment as not applying to anyone without citizenship. It will be especially true for countries like Canada, which have served as our stalwart allies even when the United States was making objectively horrendous decisions like invading Iraq in 2003. That kind of graceless, ungrateful betrayal stings for every single Canadian, as it should. Canadian arrivals have dropped more sharply than anyone else’s.

But it’s not just that no one will want to visit the pariah state of America. It is that Americans will also see their experience traveling and working overseas degraded by the short-sighted whims of Trump administration officials. For the 51 percent of Americans who have one, those dark blue passports are perhaps the most valuable documents in the world, entitling their holders to a level of deference from most foreign officials that citizens of other countries could only dream of.

Those days are over, and they are not likely to come back. No one defers to the citizens of a country whose government and promises can’t be trusted. Now those blue passports will mark you as either one of Trump’s willing executioners or one of his hapless enablers. And because U.S. Embassies are suddenly full of people worried about their paychecks and whether they will be targeted in the next round of civil service reapings ordered by the world’s richest man, there may be no one in a position to help you.

And that’s the best-case scenario. Things could get much darker if other governments decide to retaliate against American visitors in the same indiscriminate way that the Trump administration is harassing theirs. You’ll want to think long and hard before you travel, or even transit through China and other countries that have been made the targets of MAGA retribution. There may soon be a long list of countries where it becomes as risky for Americans to travel as it has long been in Iran or Russia.

Perhaps more devastating is having to reckon with what the United States has become in the eyes of the rest of the world. What kind of people approve of a government that extra-judicially kidnaps innocents and renders them into the hands of a foreign gulag—and then hides behind that government when ordered by an American court to bring them back? What kind of people support cutting off funding for HIV treatment and abandoning innocents to starvation even if it means stiffing American farmers and contractors in the process? What kind of people back a government that feeds an ally into the maw of Russian authoritarian expansionism and then blames the victim for it?

The answer to all of these questions is “very bad people who can’t be trusted.” You’re the villains now. Don’t be surprised when you start getting treated accordingly.

David Faris is an associate professor of political science at Roosevelt University and the author of It’s Time to Fight Dirty: How Democrats Can Build a Lasting Majority in American Politics. His writing has appeared in Slate, The Week, The Washington Post, The New Republic, Washington Monthly and more. You can find him on Twitter @davidmfaris.

The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.