I love you America, but I’ll come when he goes

OPINION

I love America. I really do. I love the scale of it, the confidence of it, the way it sells you a dream holiday with a straight face and then – often enough – delivers. I love the diners that still serve stacks of thick, fluffy pancakes, the national parks that feel like you’re on another planet, the live music that spills out of bars on weeknights, and the easy friendliness of strangers who will tell you their life story while waiting for a flight.

America will always be an extraordinary place to visit. I’ve been eight times and barring minor inconveniences I’ve largely forgotten, had eight wonderful experiences.

Which is precisely why this is so frustrating.

Right now, I won’t go.

Not because I don’t want to. Not because I’ve “gone off” America. But because the risk calculus has changed in a way that feels quietly unsettling. It’s no longer just about visas, customs queues, or whether your passport has enough blank pages. It’s about what I’ve posted, shared, liked, or commented on social media – sometimes years ago, sometimes half-jokingly, sometimes without a second thought and often on the back of a major news event. There have certainly been plenty of those.

Innocuous things. A meme. A sarcastic comment. A retweet I don’t remember. A “like” on a post that someone, somewhere, could decide is anti-Trump, anti-government, or worst of all, some vaguely defined “threat”. Not a real one. Not a credible one. Just something that might be interpreted that way if someone squints hard enough and is in the mood to take offence.

That’s the problem. Interpretation.

When entering another country, you expect rules. You expect scrutiny. What you don’t expect is the sense that your digital exhaust trail – your casual online self – might suddenly be reclassified as evidence. That the tone of a joke, stripped of context and irony, could matter more than your actual intentions. That you might find yourself explaining a Facebook comment to an official who doesn’t share your sense of humour, your politics, or your cultural shorthand.

Is this happening to everyone? No. Is it happening all the time? Of course not. But the fact that it can happen, and that the consequences are so asymmetric – detention, denial of entry, being put on a plane home or banned for life – is enough. Travel should make you curious and open, not cautious and self-censoring.

And that’s the sadness of it, because America as a destination is still phenomenal.

There is nowhere quite like it. You can stand on the rim of the Grand Canyon in the morning and feel genuinely tiny, then be in a city that reinvents itself every decade by night. You can drive for hours through landscapes that look like film sets because they have been film sets. You can eat your way through cultures, cuisines, and histories without ever leaving one country. America does abundance like nowhere else – of space, of energy, of ambition.

If you’ve got kids, as I do, or grandkids, America is home to some of the greatest theme parks on Earth. I’ve been to Disney and Universal Studios parks on both sides of the country and the inner kid in me bursts out every time. I hope to one day be able to share that with my daughter.

The people, too. Despite the politics, despite the noise, the overwhelming majority of Americans on the ground are warm, friendly, generous, curious and polite. They ask where you’re from. They mean it. They want to know what you think. They tell you what they think, often with refreshing directness. That openness is one of America’s great, underappreciated strengths.

Which makes the current moment feel like such a waste.

Politics everywhere has become louder, sharper, and more performative, but in the US it feels inescapable. It’s not just something you watch from afar; it’s something that now seems to shadow the act of crossing the border itself. The message – intended or not – is that dissent is suspect, humour is risky, and silence might be safer.

I shouldn’t have to travel or exist like that. I’m a free man, in a free country, wanting to visit other free countries. Everyone is welcome to disagree with what I say, and I may disagree with you. But I won’t disagree with your right to speak your mind, and nor should you.

So for now, I’ll go elsewhere. I’ll spend my time and money in places where the biggest concern at immigration is whether I’ve overstayed my holiday visa, not whether I once shared the “wrong” article. I’ll visit countries confident enough not to care what I think of their leaders. I’ll enjoy being a tourist, not a potential data point.

This isn’t a boycott. It’s not a grand moral stand. It’s just a pause.

Because I still believe America will one day sort itself out. It always has, eventually. The country has an extraordinary ability to swing too far in one direction, realise it, argue ferociously about it, and then correct the course. That messy self-renewal is part of its national character. It just doesn’t happen on a tidy timetable.

One day, the temperature will drop. The paranoia will ease. The sense that everyone is watching everyone else will hopefully fade. And when it does, I’ll be back – happily wearing my Mickey ears and eagerly sporting something with the stars and stripes on it. I’ll walk those streets again, tip too much, talk to strangers, get lost on purpose, ride the rollercoasters, cheer for sports teams and remember why America captured my imagination in the first place.

Until then, I love you America.

But I’ll come when he goes.