When I wrote several months ago that President Donald Trump’s tirades against Mexicans, Muslims and other foreigners would hurt the U.S. tourism industry, many angry Trump supporters wrote to complain that I was part of an alleged media conspiracy to discredit the U.S. leader.
Well, the official results are in, and — indeed — Trump is really bad for tourism.
According to the Trump administration’s own Department of Commerce’s National Travel and Tourism Office, the number of international visitors arriving in the United States during the first six months of this year dropped by almost 4 percent from the same period last year. By comparison, international tourism globally rose by 4 percent during the same period, according to the London-based World Travel & Tourism Council (WTTC.)
This is no trivial matter. Tourism is