International tourists detained at U.S. borders. Steep tariffs imposed on trade partners. Threats against longtime allies.

The onslaught of contested policies and language by the Trump administration in recent weeks is causing tourists around the globe to either cancel or reconsider travel to the United States. A growing number of visitors say they feel unwelcome or unsafe and are reluctant to support the economy of a country that some foreign officials say is waging trade wars and destabilizing its allies. A draft of a new travel ban circulating through the administration could restrict citizens from up to 43 countries, including Belarus, Cambodia and St. Lucia, from entering the United States.

“So many Americans are looking to escape the tense and toxic atmosphere at home. Why would anyone want to visit, especially right now with all the arbitrary detentions at immigration?” said Mallory Henderson, 53, a marketing consultant in London who usually visits the United States twice a year, but canceled a trip to visit her brother and niece in Boston this Easter.

“It’s a really hostile and scary time, and quite frankly, there’s plenty of other inviting and pleasant places I can go to meet up with my family,” she said.

Even before the change in administration in January, the U.S. travel industry was struggling to recover from the pandemic, mainly because of the strength of the dollar, which makes it more expensive for foreign travelers to visit, and long visa wait times. Inbound international visitor numbers were not expected to reach 2019 levels until later this year and foreign visitor spending is not projected to fully recover until 2026, according to the U.S. Travel Association.

But those expectations may now be even harder to reach, travel experts say.

The research firm Tourism Economics had originally forecast travel to the United States to grow by 9 percent this year, but in February, it updated its outlook, expecting inbound travel to decline by 5.1 percent and hotel demand to decline by 0.8 percent in 2025 — the equivalent of an $18 billion drop in spending. Much of the decline is the result of a boycott by Canadian travelers. In February, after President Trump announced tariffs on Canada, the number of Canadians driving across the border fell by 24 percent compared with the same period in 2024.

Airlines are responding to the uncertainty. Some, including Delta Air Lines and American Airlines, cut their financial forecasts for the first few months of the year, citing softness in travel spending. Scott Kirby, the chief executive of United Airlines, said the carrier had reduced the frequency of numerous routes to Canada because of a “big drop in Canadian traffic” into the United States.

“The negative sentiment shift is anticipated to be sustained by an evolving mix of Trump administration factors, including geopolitical friction on trade and national security policies, charged rhetoric and adversarial posturing,” said Adam Sacks, the president of Tourism Economics.

“High-visibility border security and immigration policies and enforcement actions are also expected to discourage visits,” he added.

Uncertainty at the U.S. border has led several countries, including Britain, Germany and Canada, to update their travel advisories for the United States, highlighting that a visa waiver does not guarantee entry into the country and that foreign visitors suspected of breaking entry rules could be detained or arrested at the border. The warnings come after a series of detentions at U.S. ports of entry that involved foreign tourists and green card holders. This month, French officials said a French scientist was denied entry because his phone, which was searched on arrival, contained personal opinions about the Trump administration’s policies. U.S. authorities rejected the claim, saying that the refusal was not tied to his “political beliefs.”

‘It Does Not Feel Right’

Travel operators in Europe have not yet reported large waves of cancellations on the scale of Canada, where many residents are boycotting travel to the United States, but a growing number of travelers are rethinking their spring and summer plans. Eric Dresin, the secretary general of the European Travel Agents’ and Tour Operators’ Associations, said “turbulent times” are expected, particularly if more countries are affected by U.S. policy changes.

Arrivals into the United States from Western Europe fell by one percent in February after increasing by 14 percent the same period last year, according to preliminary data from the U.S. National Travel and Tourism Office.

Christoph Bartel, 28, a German citizen who lives in Norway, had planned a trip to Arizona this summer to visit national parks. He canceled his plans last week in response to the Trump administration’s firing of national park employees and reversal of environmental regulations.

“It does not feel right to support the American economy when the president is causing so much sabotage,” Mr. Bartel said. “It is disappointing to abandon a special trip we planned for months, but we will go to Canada or Mexico instead.”

After Canada and Mexico, Britain supplies the largest number of visitors to the United States, with nearly four million last year. Travel agencies are seeing a split among those clients who frequently visit the United States and are not being deterred by the political climate, and those who are looking for alternative destinations in response to the policy changes.

The sheer expense of visiting the United States in the wake of the pandemic also appears to be taking a toll.

“America was always thought of as a really good value,” said Alan Wilson, the managing director of Bon Voyage Travel & Tours, a British company specializing in trips to the United States and Canada. Along with the strength of the dollar, prices of hotels have also been going up, and steep tips are a problem for many visitors.

“The British market absolutely hates the 20 percent tipping culture and how America always has its hand held out for the next gratuity,” he said. “They would rather pay the money up front.”

Mr. Wilson said his company had seen a 5 percent downturn in U.S. bookings this year compared with the same period last year, but he didn’t expect that number to change much by the summer, as most customers are already booked on multi-destination U.S. itineraries that were confirmed a year in advance.

The Crunch Is Hurting

In places like New York, Florida and California, the crunch is being felt by small travel businesses, which were optimistic that 2025 would bring growth. Luke Miller, the owner of the family-run company Real New York Tours, said his business was being decimated after droves of mainly Canadian visitors canceled following Mr. Trump’s announcement on tariffs.

“I just had 20 busloads of seniors cancel their upcoming tours. That’s thousands of dollars of losses for my small business,” Mr. Miller said, adding that he is receiving cancellations as far out as the winter holiday season and has no bookings from Europeans this summer, his second biggest market after Canada. He called the situation “heart-wrenching.”

Major destinations like New York and California are ramping up marketing efforts to reassure international tourists that they are welcome. Visit California, the state’s tourism agency, revised its overall projections for 2025 visitor spending this month to $160 billion from $166 billion, following the slowdown in the growth of international travelers and the devastating wildfires in Los Angeles in January.

“The good news is, thanks to California’s strong brand on the global stage, international visitors continue to show a strong affinity for the Golden State,” Caroline Beteta, the agency’s president, said in a statement.

New York has had similar messaging. Addressing the expense of visiting the city, Julie Coker, the president of New York City Tourism+ Conventions, said it was possible to visit on a budget, and the marketing organization would highlight those opportunities.

“This is an excellent opportunity to highlight the other boroughs and parts of New York City outside of Manhattan that are just as vibrant and have amazing, award-winning culinary, arts and cultural experiences,” she said, adding that New York had faced obstacles before and is confident that it will be able to reach its goal of recovering international spending by 2026 despite the current challenges.

Mr. Miller of Real New York Tours is not convinced. He said that if bookings did not pick up this summer, he would have to consider laying off staff.

“The reality is that we are being hit the hardest and might not survive,” he said.

Christine Chung contributed reporting.

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Jeffrey Goldberg may be one of the last journalists the Trump administration would want to inadvertently include on a private text thread discussing war plans. But according to Mr. Goldberg’s stunning revelation on Monday, that is exactly what happened.

Mr. Goldberg, 59, was a well-known national security reporter before he took over as editor in chief of The Atlantic in 2016. He was born in Brooklyn and studied at the University of Pennsylvania before dropping out and moving to Israel to serve in the Israel Defense Forces. He wrote about his time as a prison guard in 1990, during the First Intifada, for a 2006 book, “Prisoners: A Muslim and a Jew Across the Middle East Divide.” He also began a career in journalism while in Israel as a columnist for The Jerusalem Post.

Mr. Goldberg returned to the United States and worked as a police reporter at The Washington Post. He wrote for New York magazine and The New York Times Magazine, and became the New York bureau chief of the Jewish newspaper The Forward. In 2000, The New Yorker hired him as its Middle East correspondent, a role he held for five years before becoming the Washington correspondent.

In 2007, he was lured to The Atlantic after its owner, David Bradley, sent ponies to Mr. Goldberg’s Washington home for his three young children. He took over as its editor in chief nine years later.

Under Mr. Goldberg’s editorship, The Atlantic won its first Pulitzer Prize, in 2021, and also won one in 2022 and another in 2023. The magazine won the National Magazine Award for General Excellence in 2022 and 2023. Mr. Goldberg is also the moderator of PBS’s “Washington Week With The Atlantic.”

The magazine has been controlled by the Emerson Collective, an organization run by Laurene Powell Jobs, since it acquired a majority stake in 2017. Last year, The Atlantic announced that it was profitable and had more than one million subscriptions. It increased the number of print magazines it publishes to 12 a year, up from 10.

Recently, Mr. Goldberg has been beefing up political coverage at The Atlantic, hiring several top journalists from The Washington Post. The Atlantic also announced that the MSNBC “Morning Joe” co-host Jonathan Lemire and the programmer Alex Reisner would be contributing writers.

Mr. Goldberg has frequently been an antagonist to President Trump. In 2020, he reported that Mr. Trump had disparaged American military members who died during service as “losers.” In 2024, he wrote that Mr. Trump continued to have disdain for the U.S. military and had said he needed “the kind of generals that Hitler had.”

Before the election, Toyota Motor and other Japanese automakers thought a second Trump administration could be good for them.

President Trump had campaigned on dismantling policies aimed at swiftly accelerating the U.S. auto industry’s shift away from fossil fuels and to electric vehicles — directives that Toyota and other leading manufacturers of gasoline and hybrid gasoline-electric cars had also long opposed.

Toyota donated $1 million to Mr. Trump’s inauguration in January, and attendees at the company’s dealership meeting in Dallas that month said it was brimming with Trump cheer.

But as Mr. Trump’s agenda has taken shape, much of that optimism has turned to alarm.

In February, the administration signed an executive order imposing 25 percent tariffs on goods from Mexico and Canada, where Toyota and other Japanese companies assemble many of the cars they sell in the United States.

The administration has said that on April 2 it will announce “reciprocal tariffs” on countries that run large trade surpluses with the United States — a move widely expected to affect Japan and its cars.

Japan is one of the world’s largest automobile exporters, and the United States is the biggest market for companies like Toyota, Honda, Nissan, Mazda and Subaru. So, as the tariff deadline approaches, Japan is now preparing for a blow that could be devastating not only to the profits of the nation’s automakers but to its overall economy.

With Japan’s economy already stifled by inflation, some economists estimate that if Mr. Trump’s automotive tariffs take effect as threatened, they could wipe out 40 percent of potential economic growth this year.

Mr. Trump has long had a combative relationship with Japanese car companies. In the 1980s, when he floated the possibility of a presidential run, Mr. Trump railed against auto giants from Japan, once telling Oprah Winfrey that they come to the United States and “knock the hell out of” local manufacturers.

Shortly after Mr. Trump was first elected in 2016, Toyota came forward with plans to invest $10 billion in the United States. Japan’s former prime minister Shinzo Abe — who was considered a skilled Trump whisperer — leveraged the president’s love of adulation and secured a promise not to impose additional duties on Japanese cars.

Japan’s success in fending off tariffs the first time around was part of the reason many leaders in the automotive industry were sanguine — and even hopeful — about another Trump term. The other reason, especially for Toyota, involved electric vehicles, which Mr. Trump had mostly ridiculed before recently declaring himself a fan of Tesla, the company run by his close adviser Elon Musk.

In the early 2020s, when many of its competitors rushed into electric vehicles, Toyota held firm to the hybrid gas-electric cars it had pioneered decades earlier. The company argued that the world was not fully ready for electric vehicles. They were expensive for consumers and the infrastructure needed to charge their batteries remained incomplete.

Automakers were also mostly selling electric vehicles at a loss. The prospect of Mr. Trump’s rolling back initiatives intended to rapidly spur the transition to electric cars was seen as a way for Toyota to buy time, given that it had only one mass-market electric vehicle available in the United States.

Toyota lobbied against stricter Biden-era tailpipe pollution limits and supported politicians in the United States who were against what it viewed as “mandates” to sell more electric vehicles. Much of this lobbying came via Toyota’s network of car dealerships, some of which, after being prompted by Toyota, conveyed their concerns about a swift transition to electric vehicles to elected officials, according to correspondence viewed by The New York Times.

A spokesman for Toyota said providing customers with affordable vehicles and a variety of options was the best way to reduce emissions as soon as possible, which is the company’s goal. “A consumer-driven market will bring more stability and healthy competition to the auto industry,” he said.

At the January dealership meeting in Texas, leaders of Toyota’s North America business said that they believed the company had held firm during the presidency of Joseph R. Biden Jr., and that they were now hopeful they had more “like-minded politicians” in positions of power, according to two people who attended the event who were not authorized to talk publicly.

The next month, Mr. Trump outlined plans for tariffs that could hit exports of cars from Canada, Mexico and likely Japan.

The Trump administration’s plans for tariffs have shifted often. But the prospect of new taxes on foreign-made cars is already weighing on Japanese auto companies and some of their dealerships in the United States.

In Maine, Adam Lee is the chairman of Lee Auto Malls, one of the state’s largest auto dealership groups. Lee Auto Malls sells brands including Toyota, and last month it had its worst February in terms of net profit since 2009.

As Mr. Trump has unveiled his tariff agenda over the past two months, “faith in the economy has seemed to be the lowest it has been in a long time,” Mr. Lee said. “People don’t buy cars when the world is in chaos,” he added.

Analysts expect Japan and South Korea, because of their large presence in the United States and tendency to import many of the cars they sell there, to be the automaking countries most exposed to Mr. Trump’s proposed tariffs.

Toyota made about one million of the 2.3 million cars it sold in the United States last year outside the country. Executives at Nissan and Honda have warned that Mr. Trump’s tariff plans would carve deeply into their earnings.

For Japan, whose top export is cars, a 25 percent tariff on automobile exports to the United States could reduce the country’s gross domestic product by around 0.2 percent this year, according to estimates from Japan’s Nomura Research Institute.

Given that Japan’s economy has a potential growth rate of only around 0.5 percent this year, a 0.2 percent hit to G.D.P. would represent a “considerable blow,” according to the research institute.

For now, some Japanese car companies are trying to accelerate shipments to the United States before April 2. They are also beginning preparations to ramp up production to the extent they can at the 24 manufacturing plants they operate inside the United States.

Over the past seven decades, Toyota has invested more than $50 billion in the United States, and it will continue to deepen those investments, a spokesman for the company said. Including in the United States, where it directly employs more than 49,000 people, Toyota’s philosophy has always been to “build where it sells and buy where it builds,” he said. Toyota is also fully compliant with the United States-Mexico-Canada trade agreement, he added.

Groups representing the automakers in Washington have also been working their contacts on Capitol Hill. They are hoping lawmakers can help make the case for how much Japanese auto manufacturers invest in the United States and how tariffs could hurt American consumers by raising prices.

So far, Japanese officials have failed to gain promises of exemptions from tariffs.

Three people involved in the lobbying efforts, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations, say they are repeatedly asked: Are there any new investments they can commit to or ones in the pipeline they can repackage as inspired by the new president?

At the moment, the people said, they do not have new large projects to show.

Most Japanese automakers do not have excess production capacity in the United States, according to Michael Robinet, a vice president at the automotive intelligence provider S&P Global Mobility. That means that if they want to manufacture more vehicles, they would have to build new factories.

But factories would take years to build and demand significant investments from companies currently facing a “highly unstable trade environment,” Mr. Robinet said. “Automakers are not going to make decisions that have lots of zeros behind them unless they know that they have a solid business case,” he said. “And right now they don’t.”