Business
While California’s tourism rallied, L.A. faced its worst year since the pandemic
Tourist spending in Los Angeles fell for the first time since the pandemic last year as wildfires, ICE raids and trade tensions discouraged people from visiting.
Direct travel spending in 2025 was slightly below the previous year in Los Angeles County, according to an economic impact report this week from Visit California. That’s a step down from an average of close to 3% growth per year over the last 10 years and an average growth of 2.7% for the whole state last year.
Los Angeles has been the center of local crises that have kept tourists away, while President Trump’s controversial trade policies have damaged the country’s reputation.
Early in the year, wildfires raged for weeks, dominating national news cycles and essentially shutting down tourism in the area for the time. Over the summer, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents descended on the city, forcing people to stay home out of fear.
“Los Angeles faced something no major American city has ever confronted with the wildfires,” Visit California Chief Executive Caroline Beteta said.
Despite the turmoil, California remained the most popular destination in the U.S. for tourism, and most counties in the state saw growth in travel.
Travel demand fell nationally, according to Visit California, but grew in 55 out of 58 California counties last year. Travel spending in the San Francisco Bay Area increased 2%.
Across Southern California, from Hollywood Boulevard to Palm Springs, foot traffic took a hit last summer. Tour buses carried fewer people, and souvenir shops sold fewer goods.
“Los Angeles is California’s primary global gateway,” Beteta said. “No other region relies as heavily on international visitation, so when global travel softens, L.A. feels it first and most acutely.”
International air arrivals to Los Angeles County fell more than 30% from August to November of 2025. In Los Angeles, current international arrivals are fewer than in previous months, though the state saw an overall 3% increase last year.
People ride the West Coaster on National Roller Coaster Day in Pacific Park on the Santa Monica Pier on Aug. 16, 2025.
(Genaro Molina/Los Angeles Times)
Travelers from Canada and the Middle East visited California in significantly fewer numbers in 2025, with arrivals from those regions down 18% and 30%, respectively.
“Less people are going to America, including the West Coast,” said Mike Duignan, a hospitality expert and professor at Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University. “People don’t like Trump, and people aren’t traveling because of lots of other geopolitical and political factors.”
Overall travel spending, which usually rises more than 2.5% a year, was down 0.1% in Los Angeles in 2025, according to this week’s data. The decrease could have been sharper if not for inflation, which is bumping up the prices of lodging, food and goods.
An 8% decline in visitor air spending — around $188 million — contributed to the county’s overall slump. The number of tourism jobs also shrank by around 1,000 last year.
Visit California said upcoming events will change the narrative around Los Angeles tourism. Some travel areas are looking up already, with hotel room revenue up 4% year over year in the county in the first quarter of 2026.
“The next three years change the equation entirely,” said Visit California’s Beteta. With the FIFA World Cup this summer and the 2028 Olympics, she said: “L.A. is entering a period of sustained global attention.”
This year, however, is starting with a lot of uncertainty as the conflict in Iran has driven up the price of fuel and airfare. A global jet fuel shortage is making it more difficult and expensive to fly just as an important summer travel season rounds the corner.
Flights to and from smaller California hubs such as Sacramento and Burbank have been canceled, while Air Canada and German airline Lufthansa slashed routes from their summer schedules earlier this month.
Rising fares and fewer flights could keep some travelers from coming for the World Cup or other reasons during the summer travel season.
“Travel is a luxury product,” Duignan said. “Significant portions of the market fundamentally choose not to engage when there are price hikes and when there is market uncertainty.”
Iran’s success in spreading these memes has surprised experts who study foreign influence operations. They say the tactics and technology on display during the war will almost certainly be replicated in other international crises, as well as major political events, including the looming elections in the United States.
“It’s spoken to the sort of Gen Z language of the internet in ways certainly diplomats don’t normally do,” said Bret Schafer, a senior director at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, an international nonprofit that has tracked Iran’s activity.
“They have taken a regime that is, I mean, brutal and pretty awful and didn’t have exactly a great global reputation and turned them into kind of a plucky, fun underdog.”
Dozens of accounts belonging to Iranian government officials and diplomats have peppered their social feeds with a previously uncharacteristic edge, reposting biting videos that mock the United States and Israel.
They portray Mr. Trump as an imperialist out for blood or as an incompetent lackey of Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, often stoking antisemitic tropes. They regularly suggest the war was launched to distract from the disclosures in the Jeffrey Epstein files.
Collectively, the posts by roughly 150 official Iranian accounts gained about 900 million views over the first 50 days of the war, a thirtyfold increase from the same period before, according to an analysis published on Thursday by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue.
“They’re talking in a way that’s fundamentally changed,” said Moustafa Ayad, another researcher at the institute. “If you go back two months and look at what they were putting out, it’s nothing like this.”
Propaganda is always adapting, reflecting the era in which it is made. Iran’s deft use of technology, experts say, has highlighted a new era of meme warfare that expands the information battlefield by using the algorithmic engines of social media to undermine an adversary’s political support. The new tactic has been called “slopaganda.”
Iran’s effort, the institute’s analysis concluded, “offers a blueprint that authoritarian actors can replicate in the future.”
The number of posts from Iranian Consulate accounts that included memes, jokes or A.I.-generated content skewering the United States or Israel has risen sharply in recent weeks as the online meme war intensified.
The Meme War
Of all memes posted by the Iranians, none have resonated as much as a series of videos featuring Legos. A small team of content creators in Iran has turned the globally recognized toy, which has its own movie franchise, into one of the most potent weapons in the meme arsenal.
In the videos, a character resembling Mr. Trump sweats or cowers. Iranian soldiers and civilians, by contrast, are cast as resolute in the face of the combined military might of the United States and Israel.
The people behind them call themselves Explosive Media — or, as they put it in their biography on TikTok, simply the “Iranian Lego team.” They have used artificial intelligence tools to generate short videos with the toy figurines manipulated to resemble Mr. Trump, Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and Satan, an Iranian epithet for the United States for decades now.
They have posted mostly on YouTube, but they also have accounts on Instagram, X, Telegram and, since last week, Facebook. They have inspired a virtual army of imitators.
The group was founded during the 12-day war between Israel and Iran last year. They call the series of videos “Victory Chronicles,” which in Persian shares a name with the Revayat-e Fath Institute, a cultural center in Tehran sponsored by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps.
That has led some news accounts to link them to the government, but a representative, reached through Facebook, said the team, with fewer than 10 members, operated independently. They have sold the broadcasting rights in Iran, including to state news agencies, the representative said.
A spokesman for Iran’s mission at the United Nations declined to comment about the country’s messaging online.
A.I.-generated videos from Explosive Media, an Iranian group, depict world leaders as Lego characters.
Pay attention to the sermons Pete Fiction
@PeteHegseth
Views 331.1k
The veil is thinning. Time is running out. RISE UP!
Views 397.6k
Explosive Media
Good. Evil.
Choose your side.
In the United States, the videos have tapped into opposition from the war’s critics on the left, but also on the right.
Renee DiResta, an associate research professor at Georgetown University who has long studied digital influence operations, attributed the widespread popularity of the Lego videos to the creators’ “incredible cultural fluency.”
They use rap songs. They refer to familiar tropes, like Mr. Trump’s love of Diet Coke or criticism of Mr. Hegseth’s drinking habits. And they are extremely topical, responding to events as they happen, as recently as Mr. Vance’s postponed trip to Pakistan for peace talks on Tuesday.
Today’s rapidly evolving technology has enabled them to create longer, scripted animations. They transform the horror of war into the realm of child’s play, depicting the violence in a sanitized way that does not necessarily repel potential viewers in the space where most are watching: social media.
“They managed to hit on all of the identity-culture aesthetics that the internet is really there for,” Ms. DiResta said. “It’s kind of immediately graspable.”
The Lego Group, based in Denmark, did not respond to a request for comment about the use of its product in wartime propaganda.
The White House also declined to respond to specific questions about Iran’s propaganda, including the president’s response to the mocking Lego memes and whether the administration had taken any steps to respond. A spokeswoman, Anna Kelly, instead questioned in an email why anyone would call “terrorist regime propaganda” effective.
The Trump administration arguably started the meme war.
It has long shown a penchant of turning political issues into memes that it spreads on official and unofficial accounts. Since the first strikes on Feb. 28, a team in the White House has posted numerous videos using images generated by A.I. or spliced with clips from action movies and video games like Call of Duty and Grand Theft Auto.
After a slow start when the war began, Iran responded in kind. Many of its memes have been produced in Iran, including the Lego videos, though not all, according to the researchers who have tracked them.
The videos are obviously animations, not deepfakes of attacks that can be debunked and thus defused, as false reports of downing jets and sinking aircraft carriers have been.
Iran’s spread of memes has largely not been restricted on social media, despite the platforms’ policies against inauthentic amplification and deceptive or excessively violent images.
X, owned by Elon Musk, has been one of the biggest outlets for Iranian propaganda, much of it spread by the country’s government agencies and diplomatic outposts around the world that have paid for X’s blue check for paid users. X did not respond to a request for comment.
Explosive Media’s accounts on Instagram and YouTube were taken down in March, though the one on Instagram was restored because it did not violate the platform’s policies, according to Meta, Instagram’s parent company. YouTube said in a statement that the account there had violated rules against deceptive practices, which apply to coordinated foreign influence campaigns.
In a measure of the campaign’s perceived value to the Iranian government, a spokesman for its Foreign Ministry, Esmaeil Baqaei, posted a rebuke on X. He called YouTube’s ban an effort to “shield the American administration’s false narrative from any competing voice.”
The popularity of the Lego videos has inspired efforts to fight fire with fire.
Charlie Curran, a 35-year-old filmmaker in Hollywood, was distressed by the shooting down of an F-15E jet in Iran, which prompted a frantic American search for the two surviving crew members. In response, he made a video in the Iranian style, depicting the rescue of one of them.
“I saw this all taking place and happening,” he said in an interview, referring to Iran’s memes, “and I was like, how is there no American response to this?”
Charlie Curran, an American filmmaker, created his own response to Iranian videos featuring Lego characters.
Rescuing American Pilot in Iran (2026, colorized)
Views 804.4k
Fighting Back
Mr. Curran said he had embraced the potential of A.I. in filmmaking. He used Anthropic’s Claude to write a script and Seedance 2.0, the video generator from China’s ByteDance, which drew international attention recently for generating a simulation of Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt brawling on a roof.
It took 30 minutes, he said, to make his 72-second video. Since he posted it on X on April 7, it has been seen more than 800,000 times. It has also been shared across other platforms, with and without credit, and seen by millions more.
“It’s not inherently difficult,” Mr. Curran said, “which is why I think you’ll see a lot more of this.”
The Justice Department’s criminal investigation of the Federal Reserve and its chair, Jerome H. Powell, appears to be over. But the ramifications for the central bank are likely to prove much longer lasting.
Nine months after President Trump made a hasty visit to the Fed’s Washington headquarters and promised to “take a look” at a costly renovation, the administration has concluded its inquiry with seemingly nothing to show. Far from the criminal charges that they once pursued, prosecutors left in their wake a dark cloud over the institution and the person Mr. Trump has chosen to next lead the central bank.
The about-face has removed, for now, the immediate threat of a further escalation against the Fed. It has also potentially cleared a path for Mr. Trump’s nominee for Fed chair, Kevin M. Warsh, to succeed Mr. Powell, whose term ends on May 15.
What will be far harder to recoup is confidence in the Fed’s ability to operate independently from a White House that has shown little restraint in its efforts to bully the central bank into slashing interest rates.
Even as Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, announced that the investigation was shutting down, she warned that she would “not hesitate” to reopen the inquiry if warranted. Ms. Pirro added that she had asked the Fed’s inspector general to take over the investigation, even though the internal watchdog had been looking into the matter since July.
Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said on Friday that the investigation “still continues” and was simply being taken up “under a different authority.”
Kathryn Judge, a Columbia Law School professor who was a Supreme Court law clerk for Justice Stephen G. Breyer, said she feared “lasting damage” from the investigation into Mr. Powell — not only for the Fed but for policymakers across government.
Until now, she said, officials did not have to worry about repercussions from “taking a strong stance on policy issues in ways that are inconsistent with the president’s agenda.” But that was the sort of pressure that Mr. Powell faced as Mr. Trump sought to force rates down.
Although the Fed cut rates last year, it did not deliver the kind of relief that Mr. Trump wanted. Since January, it has also turned cautious on subsequent reductions, a sentiment that has only grown amid the war in Iran, which has caused an acute energy shock.
“The Fed, so far, has proved resilient in ways that have proved quite helpful for the broader economy,” Ms. Judge said. She added that the country “cannot take for granted” that the Fed “will continue to prove resilient as it takes hit after hit from this administration.”
Since returning to the White House for a second term, Mr. Trump has been consistent in his desire to have more sway over the Fed, which has long set rates free from political meddling. That ability is critical, given the powerful role the central bank plays guiding the economy and ensuring low, stable inflation and a healthy labor market.
For a time, the president’s attacks had largely played out in news conferences and on social media. At one point, he flirted with firing Mr. Powell, but never took that step.
Yet Mr. Trump’s decision in August to try to oust Lisa D. Cook from the Fed’s Board of Governors over unsubstantiated allegations of mortgage fraud was a serious escalation, one now in the hands of the Supreme Court. The investigation by the Justice Department, which specifically targeted Mr. Powell and became public in January, crossed yet another threshold, quickly touching off widespread outrage.
In a rare video, Mr. Powell called out the administration for trying to leverage legal threats to coerce the Fed into lowering rates and warned about the institution’s ability to carry out its duties independently. Democrats and Republicans on Capitol Hill echoed those concerns, with many demanding that Mr. Trump back off.
Mr. Trump’s actions proved especially unpalatable to Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina, a Republican on the Senate Banking Committee. Mr. Tillis coupled his criticism with a threat to block any future nominee to the Fed until the investigation into Mr. Powell was resolved. Republicans have a slim 13-to-11 majority on the Banking Committee, giving Mr. Tillis the ability to throw a wrench into confirming Mr. Trump’s pick.
The investigation, therefore, created an immediate problem for Mr. Trump. In his quest to oust Mr. Powell, his administration had essentially complicated the very work to replace the chair with Mr. Warsh.
Since clinching the nomination, Mr. Warsh has faced intense scrutiny about how he would lead the Fed if confirmed by the Senate and whether he would defend its independence. At his confirmation hearing on Tuesday, Mr. Warsh had to repeatedly dispel doubts that he would operate as Mr. Trump’s “sock puppet,” given the president’s insistence during the selection process that he would choose only someone who supported lower rates.
Mr. Tillis had made it clear that he backed Mr. Warsh and would vote for him to be confirmed if prosecutors dropped what he called the “bogus” charges. As of late Friday, Mr. Tillis had not indicated if Ms. Pirro’s announcement — with its caveat that she could reopen the case — was sufficient.
Mr. Powell has said he will remain chair until the Senate confirms his replacement. A bigger question is whether he will serve out his term as governor, which runs through January 2028. That would give him a vote at every policy meeting while denying Mr. Trump a vacancy to fill with someone he believes will cut rates.
Mr. Powell previously said he would not leave the Fed “until the investigation is well and truly over, with transparency and finality,” but Ms. Pirro’s announcement on Friday may have fallen short of that threshold.
Peter Conti-Brown, an expert on Fed governance at the University of Pennsylvania, said Mr. Powell’s insistence on a clear, certain end to the investigation was about “not just about protecting himself but about protecting the Federal Reserve.”
“If this becomes a tried-and-true path to bully a central banker out of office, then we will see its invocation again,” said Mr. Conti-Brown, who added that the investigation had already proved damaging in other ways.
“I think it’s shaken to the core central bankers’ willingness to experiment,” he explained. He added that continued pressure would leave Fed policymakers inclined toward “fighting whatever comes their way using the tools that strike them not as best suited” but rather as “least controversial.”
Bed Bath & Beyond is coming back to California less than a year after the company’s chairman vowed it wouldn’t reopen in the Golden State.
The home goods retailer will resurface through the rebranding of 98 The Container Store locations, including 12 storefronts in California, the company announced Thursday.
Five locations are in Southern California, including one in Los Angeles and another in El Segundo.
The stores will be called “The Container Store + Bed Bath & Beyond,” offering both organizational products and home merchandise.
The transition will start on Friday and involve liquidating 30% of The Container Store’s categories and products. The store formats will start changing in May.
“This is a reset with purpose,” Jen Pape, senior vice president of The Container Store, said in the release. “We are actively reshaping our stores to make room for what’s next.”
Bed Bath & Beyond once had 80 locations in strip malls and shopping centers across California, but shuttered all storefronts after filing for bankruptcy in 2023.
The retailer’s executive chairman, Marcus Lemonis, said in August that the state is over-regulated, expensive and creates a risky business environment.
Lemonis joined a slew of business executives to denounce California’s business environment. Many executives, small-business owners and entrepreneurs complain about the state’s high taxes and cost of living, which, coupled with strict environmental regulations, can hinder business operations.
Lemonis, a regular on Fox Business Network, said the decision to forgo business in California wasn’t political, but rather a move to protect employees and customers.
“It’s a system that makes it harder to employ people, harder to keep doors open, and harder to deliver value to customers,” Lemonis wrote in a statement on X in August.
At the time, Gov. Gavin Newsom fired back at Lemonis’ claims about the state’s business landscape.
“After their bankruptcy and closure of every store, like most Americans, we thought Bed, Bath & Beyond no longer existed,” Newsrom said on X. “We wish them well in their efforts to become relevant again.”
The retailer’s inability to ignore California shows how the state is still an economic leader, with a gross domestic product higher than that of any other state and all but three countries.
More companies have moved out of the state than moved in over the last decade. Yet that net loss is dwarfed by the more than 7,000 companies founded in California during that time, according to the Public Policy Institute.
Newsom welcomed the retailer back to the state.
“With a thriving economy growing faster than all other developed nations, California always reaches out with an open hand — not a closed fist,” he posted on X.
Lemonis responded with a post suggesting it got some kind of support from the state to offset the extra costs of doing business.
“Thank you for the massive incentives,” he said in an X post, adding, “we are happy to add @BedBathBeyond to our lineup so we can generate the revenue needed to hurdle the higher than normal operating cost.”
Bed Bath & Beyond acquired The Container Store, which sells storage and organization products, in April, for about $150 million in stock and convertible notes — part of the company’s attempt at a comeback after the bankruptcy.
The Container Store exited bankruptcy in early 2025, after filing in 2024.
The company didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
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