The Life in My Years

April 2025

“We were heading onto the ferry leaving France to England. The French border officer asked if I had applied for entry when I first arrived last week. I told him I believed the ETIAS was not required until October. He said I needed to pay the penalty within 3 days. Then when entering the UK border, the immigration officer held me for a couple of minutes to check how many days I had already been in the UK to verify I was not overstaying. I honestly believe they were harassing me simply for being American. I’m disappointed that a U.S. passport is no longer respected. I was not expecting the questions.”

That was the unfortunate experience of an American acquaintance of mine who was traveling in Europe this month, and who, for years has been traveling to Europe extensively for the past few years. My wife Cora, and I discussed this briefly. I have a hard time blaming the agents who took those unexpected extra steps. “Human nature,” I said. “Our country has become so hostile and unwelcoming that I guess this is their chance, on a personal level, for a little payback.”

If they were putting a little squeeze, just a little one, on an American, over the mistreatment being meted out by the Trump regime, I don’t blame them.

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It used to be that for Americans traveling abroad, the biggest issues were; understanding the local language, the currency, local customs, figuring out the transportation systems, and the most confounding one, when it’s customary to tip or not to tip. There’s always been the jitters at passport control but I’ve never seen an American detained.

I had a moment of pause at passport control in Vienna before the 2024 elections, when the officer thumbed through my passport and asked about a previous stay in Italy. Apparently the Italian official had stamped my passport incorrectly. After a few questions, some raised eyebrows, and a few moments of shifting her glance from my passport to my face, she waved me through.

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My wife and I are in our seventies and trying to squeeze in a few years of travel before the creaks and aches of age leave us bound to local road trips. Last December I began planning a trip to Vietnam and then put it on hold when my wife confessed that Vietnam was not her dream vacation. We agreed that if I wanted, I could plan a trip by myself.

We’ve since talked about Istanbul, and Greece, Portugal and Morocco. We’ve discussed a trip to Singapore and the Philippines, my wife’s native country. I would like to take a solo trip to Italy, the land of my mother’s birth, the land that I love dearly and consider my heart’s home. I’ve thought about Sweden, the country of my paternal family’s origin.

Those plans are all on lockdown now. Part of the reason is that I’m wary of the reception we would get while abroad. The other reason, the more worrisome, is that I’m wary of the reception I would get when clearing U.S. Customs.

Ugly Americans
I’ve traveled to Italy a number of times, ever since I was two, when my family visited mom’s extended family. As I got older I was made to understand that Americans aren’t always the most gracious of visitors. It’s that whole American exceptionalism thing that’s driven some American tourists to be arrogant, overbearing, nationalistic, and dismissive of other cultures and languages. Those high-handed tourists cultivated a bad reputation that came to have a name of its own – the ugly American. Those vulgarians dragged the rest of us down with them. And so, whenever I travel, I try to be on my best behavior and to remain low key.

Ugliest Americans
Those ugly Americans dealt with citizens abroad on a one to one basis and the damage was kept to somewhat of a minimum. But now the ugliness has been broadcast on a bullhorn by the ugliest, the most vocal, the most powerful and the most conspicuous of ugly Americans; the very leadership (and I use that term liberally). If it isn’t the tariffs, or the threats to annex or invade sovereign nations, it’s the verbalized disdain. One can look no further than America’s haughty and vile Vice-President, J.D. Vance, who hypocritically upbraided European countries on free speech; talked dismissively of “bailing out Europe,” during the Signal fiasco; and more recently tried to blame European nations for not being more forceful in trying to stop Bush’s Iraq war – because Congress didn’t have the testicular fortitude or the foresight to tell Dubya where he could stick his fictitious wmd.

I’ve been assured, by family, friends and social media acquaintances in other countries that the general feeling abroad is that, while they dislike Trump, they don’t take that dislike out on individual visitors. Those assurances came in February, but since then Trump’s ship of fools has drifted further into the seas of insanity and malice, so I’m not certain that those assurances are still generally valid (of course any American sporting MAGA gear deserves whatever disdain he receives).

The orange elephant in the room
Trump has been a lightning rod since he announced his first run in 2015. His first term was understood to be a mean spirited clown show and something of a curiosity to those around the world. Even as Trump announced, in November of 2022, his candidacy for reelection, the topic of conversation usually revolved around the question, “what in the hell are you people thinking.”

On a trip to Spain in the spring of 2023, I had a conversation with the proprietor of a bar in Barcelona who didn’t hesitate to spare her disdain for Trump. In the fall of that same year, at a dinner with my cousins in Rome, the dinner conversation revealed a morbid curiosity about Trump and MAGA. There was not yet a sounding of the authoritarian alarm, just a fascination with a theater of the bizarre.

As the election approached and Trump’s rhetoric became more Hitlerian and threatening, the conversations began to change. Just weeks before the 2024 election, in Füssen, Germany, my wife and I shared a breakfast table conversation with one of the town’s residents. It was the usual small talk between tourist and resident until it turned to politics and interest in Trump. The man was clearly concerned about another round of Trump, while adding that his own country has had a historic bad experience with a dictator.

A week later, while in Poland, we conversed with a pair of British women as we waited for a bus to take us from Auschwitz back to Krakow. Invariably the talk turned to Trump and they had plenty of questions, and clearly even more concerns. As the election was approaching, the world was looking at the prospects of a Trump 2.0 with anxiety.

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Feeling shame
I’ve always felt welcome in Europe (I’ve not been to Asia). An Uber driver or a server or just someone at the next table in a restaurant might ask where I’m from, and I would respond, “San Francisco”, and the ensuing conversation would be delightful. Three months into the Trump regime, I’m not quite so confident about delightful conversations.

Now, I and many other of my fellow Americans, at least those of us with a measure of self-awareness, are feeling embarrassed and ashamed and worried about what kind of reception we’ll receive at our foreign destinations, whether it’s at passport control or on an Uber ride or at the hotel reception desk. And this isn’t meant to reflect badly on citizens abroad – human nature is human nature.

According to a snap survey by Global Rescue, “The majority of the world’s most experienced travelers expect US tourists will be less welcome and perceived more negatively while traveling internationally in 2025 due to recent international policy proposals introduced by the US.” The survey reveals that, “Seven out of ten (72%) surveyed travelers said Americans will be perceived more negatively and less welcome when traveling abroad. Nearly a fifth (16%) reported there would be no difference in how Americans are perceived, 9% didn’t know, and 3% said Americans will be perceived more positively.”

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Returning home
But now, weeks after having discussed our concerns about our reception abroad, and watched the regime’s unabashed hard authoritarian turn, our (my wife and I) greater concern has become our reception back at U.S. Customs.

Unfounded fear or reasonable caution?
At this moment in time, the Trump regime, in the form of the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of State, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement has been running amok with the many now well documented cases of harassment, detentions, imprisonments and deportations. They’ve mostly been directed at undocumented immigrants, temporary visa holders and green card residents, but it has also spilled over into the harassment of U.S. citizens. And Trump himself has voiced the idea of sending Americans to a gulag in El Salvador.

The Trump regime has been plagued by mistakes. Errors, both administrative and stupid, have been pervasive throughout various departments, with some of the most egregious having been made by DHS and ICE; from American citizens being detained and jailed, to the well known case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia. Characteristic of an authoritarian regime, we’ve seen that the Trump administration is loath to admit mistakes and, as in the case of Abrego Garcia, resistant to correcting mistakes. “Trump is always right,” reads the popular MAGA cap.

We’re just three months in, and the future is a dark one. This year, instead of traveling abroad, Cora and I are flying to New York City, but given the atmosphere that the regime has created we’re still taking precautions before going to the airport and passing through security. We’re deleting social media from our devices. I’ll be deleting WordPress from my devices as well as Word and Google Photos. We’re turning off biometrics and using obscure passwords that can’t be traced back to our documents. I don’t normally travel with my passport within the U.S borders but this time I’m making an exception and I’ll even be carrying a copy of my U.S. birth certificate. This is prudent precaution in Trumpistan.

My wife, who is naturalized now carries with her a copy of her naturalization document. As an extra precaution, since Trump has floated the idea of denaturalizing citizens, my wife recently became a dual citizen, having just renewed her Filipino citizenship. Overly cautious? Paranoid? People are being left without a country. I want Cora to have the assurance that if worse comes to worse, she’ll not be left as a person without a country, and that she will have another government to have her back in the event that her adopted one turns its back on her.

Just as I don’t assume that the guy pulling up to the stop sign has set eyes on me before I step off the curb to cross, I don’t assume that the Trump regime will ever discover justice and humanity.

This is life in Trump’s America.