Nick Adams was in the hot seat. Nestled between two of Britain’s least deferential journalists, President Donald Trump’s tourism envoy was less than 90 seconds into his bludgeoning by the Brits when both hosts started laughing in his face.
In the control room, production staffers for The News Agents stifled laughs as Emily Maitlis and Jon Sopel battered Adams on his position: that tourism was booming in America. That Trump loves foreigners, and it’s just the dastardly media spreading false fear that’s keeping them away. That tourism only dropped last year because visitors were waiting to come this year.
The News Agents weren’t buying it. “Nice try,” Maitlis said before resuming the onslaught. Adams stood his ground, cheerful and composed as ever, but I winced as the hosts blew gaping holes in his defenses. Adams had a different verdict on the proceedings. As he swaggered out of the studio, he looked at me with a smirk and declared in his thick Australian twang: “Masterclass.”
The Sydney-born author and social media personality, best known for his trollish posts lionizing Trump—and Hooters, and 64-oz Tomahawk steaks—was on the first leg of a sprint through Europe. As America’s first “special presidential envoy for American tourism, exceptionalism, and values,” Adams is charged with convincing the world that America under Trump is still a warm and welcoming place for foreign visitors.
For Adams, 41, it’s the ride of a lifetime. “I’m a happy warrior,” he tells me on the roof of a building in central London where he’s filming his first interview with the BBC. It’s 5 a.m. on a Monday morning, and I am not a happy warrior. But Adams is bounding around the rooftop beaming, teeth porcelain-white, face slathered in makeup, hair firmly coiffed. “But you’ve got to be intoxicated!” he responds when I mention the early hour. “By what we’re doing, by my charisma, and by the fact that we’re just about to traverse all of Europe!”
He’s wearing a blue suit and a shiny silk tie—not unlike the kind Trump sells—and ornate cowboy boots from his adopted home state of Texas. The whirlwind trip he’s calling “The Nick Adams Roadshow” will take his entourage (a small group that includes Vanity Fair, an efficient and flattering PR man, and a towering but church-mouse-quiet videographer) from London to Paris, then on to Berlin and finally Dublin.
The task before him is daunting. As the United States hosts the FIFA World Cup and its 250th anniversary celebrations, this ought to be an explosive year for international visitors. Yet the hostility toward foreigners that has been a centerpiece of Trump’s political movement is widely seen as driving a steep decline. Four million fewer visitors came to the United States in 2025, and tourism spending decreased by roughly 5%, representing a loss of more than $8 billion.
Talk to most any European, and they’ll tell you why. Many are horrified by Trump’s immigration crackdown, and they’ve seen the reports of foreign visitors being detained or deported with seemingly little due process. Jet fuel prices have spiked (and brought airfares with them) thanks to Trump’s war in Iran, which remains deeply unpopular at home and abroad. In December, the Department of Homeland Security proposed a new policy that would allow agents to search five years’ worth of visitors’ social media posts, a prospect that has become a pervasive point of discussion (and alarm) across the pond. And some Europeans simply want to register their protest of a government that has treated them like an enemy. As Sopel put it in his interview with Adams: “Why would you go to a country where you feel unwelcome?”
But Adams is out to charm these frosty Europeans into submission. He repeatedly instructs me to note his ability to enchant the various people we encountered, from young women we shared an elevator with (“See you ladies! Britain’s finest!”) to a young editor at The Spectator we met in the green room of GB News, a budget Fox News for Brits. (“Nice looking girl,” he says. “Easy on the eyes!”) “If the words ‘charm’ and ‘charisma’ are not in your story, you have not done your job,” he tells me. I have to admit there is something to this. He even gets Monocle Radio host Emma Nelson to laugh as he extols, in his Aussie drawl, the wonders of America’s sprawling cultural tapestry, from “LOB-STEH SHECKS in MAINE” to “JEE-YAZ CLURBS in NEW AW-LANES.”
Adams has his talking points down for this international circuit, an assembly line of short interviews where the hosts don’t have time for follow-ups. He carries around a sheet of paper with some reminders on it: “Some people may have been put off by talk of social media being checked for the last five years, but that plan has not been implemented,” reads one. Another prompts Adams to freestyle on his love for the USA: “My favorite places in America are: Texas, xxx, xxx.”
“All the data that’s coming across my desk,” Adams repeated with slight variations across the BBC World Service, Radio 4, GB News, The Times Radio, The Daily Mail, The Daily Mail Femail, TRT World, Travel Weekly, Wanderlust, Monocle Radio, LBC News, CNBC Europe, The Daily Telegraph, Sky News, CNN International, Le Figaro, Le Monde, Die Welt, Euronews, The Irish Independent, RTÉ Radio, and the dpa German Press Agency, “suggests that we are experiencing a rebound!”
This is Nick Adams, the professional. It’s a more buttoned-up iteration of the character he’s spent the last few years playing on social media: Nick Adams, Alpha Male.
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