‘I’ve never seen it this empty’: The ‘Trump slump’ hits home in Las Vegas

In the 20 years that Erika Swanton has worked in retail on the Las Vegas Strip, she has never known summer business to be so slow. The number of customers visiting the skincare shop she works in has halved. “I’ve never seen the economy like this, not even in 2008,” she says. “People used to come to Las Vegas and spend money. Now they’re scared to spend.”

Vegas has always been a place of extravagance, a luxury destination where tourists can embrace the carefree hedonism of gambling, boozing and spending. But now Sin City tourism is in a slump. Visitor numbers fell by 11.3 per cent year-on-year in June and were down by 7.3 per cent across the first six months of the year. In percentage terms, that is equivalent to the drop recorded over the entirety of the two-year period during the 2008-09 global financial crisis.

As hotel revenues fall, restaurant workers get their hours cut and tattoo artists report huge falls in their income, the city is fast becoming the canary in the coal mine for the wider US economy. Las Vegas’ tourism industry is American consumerism in its purest form. Its decline is a clear warning sign that President Donald Trump’s “economic revolution” of a global trade war and an ­immigration crackdown is now hitting the ultimate engine of American GDP: consumer spending.

Traffic on the decline

Midweek on the Las Vegas Strip, nowhere feels busy. Just a third of the blackjack tables at the Flamingo, one of the city’s famous hotel casinos, are occupied. Outside, there is barely any traffic. Swanton says her drive to work used to take 20 minutes. Now it takes nine. “There were so many machines open in the casino last night,” says Heather Harter, 54, who is staying at the Excalibur Hotel and Casino. “I’ve never seen it this empty, and I’ve been coming here since my kids were little.”

Tom Connolly, 70, another Las Vegas regular who is staying at the New York-New York Hotel and Casino, says: “The reason we came was my wife got offered four free nights, $US125 in food and beverage credit and $US150 in casino credit. The hotel solicited us to come out here. To me, that suggests they need the business.”

Figures from the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority (LVCVA) show hotel occupancy was down by nearly one-tenth year-on-year in June. As hotels cut prices, revenues per room fell by an even steeper 13.8 per cent. Even the city’s biggest hotel brands are taking a hit. Caesars Entertainment, which runs nine properties in Las Vegas, including Caesars Palace, ­reported an 8 per cent drop in its Las Vegas earnings between April and June.

MGM Resorts, which operates 12 hotels on the Strip, similarly reported a 9 per cent fall in second quarter Las Vegas earnings. Bill Hornbuckle, its chief executive, said this was primarily because of room remodelling at the flagship MGM Grand hotel, but it also reflected lower midweek bookings at its cheaper properties, the Excalibur and the Luxor.

Part of the decline in visitors is because of a fall in international numbers. Canadians, for one, are increasingly steering clear of the US in the wake of Trump’s tariffs and his message that Canada should become America’s 51st state. But international visitors make up only 12 per cent of Las Vegas’s visitors. Steve Hill, chief executive of the LVCVA, says this is primarily a story about Americans. “The reduction that we’ve seen is largely domestic, and at its core is a concern that consumers have about the economy, about their financial situation and their jobs,” says Hill.

First cracks are appearing

The Vegas downturn is a hint of what is really going on under the surface of the wider US economy. Mike PeQueen, managing director at Hightower Las Vegas, a wealth management firm, says: “Las Vegas has a fair reputation as a canary in the coal mine for greater US discretionary spending.”

Trump’s radical economic agenda, which has included raising tariffs on imports to their highest level since the 1930s, and widespread immigrant deportations, has triggered major downgrades in growth forecasts, sent consumer confidence plunging and raised new fears about inflation. As Yssa Dror, who works in the skincare shop with Swanton, says, “People are afraid to spend because they don’t know what’s going to happen next.”

A massive downward revision in national jobs statistics earlier this month was one of the first signs that cracks are emerging in the economy for everyday Americans. In Vegas, the storm has already hit. In the first six months of the year, Las Vegas had 1.5 million fewer visitors compared to the same period last year.

Vegas is often characterised as a boom and bust town, but the reality is that in the five decades since LVCVA data began in 1970, its visitor numbers have been on a steady upward trajectory. During this time, the annual total has multiplied more than six times over. Ominously, there have only been three years when Las Vegas has seen visitor numbers drop by more than a million, or by more than 3 per cent, in a single year: in 2008 and 2009, during the global financial crisis, and in 2020, with the COVID-19 pandemic.

In other words, for half a century the only major drops that Las Vegas has seen in visitor numbers have been driven by international crises. But that was until Trump came to power. “This theme of an economic slowdown permeates, frankly, almost every discussion that we have with clients,” says Jeremy Aguero, of Applied Analysis, a research firm in Las Vegas.

The drop-off in visitors is concentrated at the lower end of the price scale, says the LVCVA’s Steve Hill. “The core of the concern here is with folks who have to live on a budget. They need disposable income in order to be able to come,” he adds. Those who are still coming also seem to have less spare cash. The share of visitors staying with friends and family instead of hotels has nearly doubled from 7 per cent to 13 per cent, according to preliminary data from Hill’s outfit.

There are signs investors have become more cautious, too. The billionaire Tilman Fertitta, now Trump’s ambassador to Italy, last month confirmed that he had shelved plans to develop a new Las Vegas hotel-casino project, tentatively called Centre Strip, which would have boasted 2400 rooms. For now, the site is a parking lot.

Fear and loathing in Vegas

Gloria Valdez, 38, who works as a hostess at The D, a downtown hotel-casino, says restaurant reservations where she works have plunged by two-thirds and ­customers are becoming far more frugal. “You used to see the tables full of appetisers, salads, drinks, a lot of extras because people wanted to try all of the food,” she says. “Now you see a couple sharing one meal.”

Earlier this year, Valdez’s hours were cut from five days per week to four. “I’m a single mum, I have two kids. I’m so worried about losing my job.”

Vegas customers are not just concerned about money; they are also concerned about Trump’s immigration crackdown. Trump was elected on a promise to make mass deportations. He has directed Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to make a wave of ­immigration raids across the country, a policy that has hit Nevada’s neighbour, California, particularly hard. America’s 12 million or so undocumented immigrants – a substantial part of the population – are now living in fear. “We’ve heard anecdotally that some of our ­customers are concerned about staying in hotels,” says Hill. “They’re worried about raids, frankly.”

Valdez notes a particularly large drop-off in Latino customers. “They’re scared to get on planes.”

Whatever the causes, the downturn in Las Vegas tourism will have ripple effects across the city’s economy. Workers like Valdez are the lifeblood of the local economy, with thousands of workers employed to serve tourists in the regional diners, bars and casinos. Even tattoo parlours are suffering.

Wayne Fields, 47, a tattoo artist at Vegas Ink, says: “Las Vegas has always been good until this year. In the last couple of months, my pay has dropped by 70 per cent.” Normally, Fields would earn between $US8000 ($12,300) and $US15,000 ($23,000) per month. In July, he earned just $US4000 ($6200). “I’m starting to dip into investments to pay bills to stay above water,” he says. “I’m even contemplating taking a second job.”

This may all be concerning news for the president, whom Fields voted for, and Las Vegas itself, which ­matters deeply to Trump. Trump and his family have a stake here in the form of the golden Trump International Hotel Las Vegas, which towers above the Strip.

But more importantly, Nevada, which voted for Joe Biden in 2020, swung Republican red in 2024 by a slim margin. The state was a clear priority for Trump on his election campaign, when he repeated a story about how a Nevada waitress gave him the idea to scrap tax on tips.

Within days of his inauguration as president, Trump visited Las Vegas for the first rally of his second term to reiterate his promise. “We’re going to get it for you: no tax on tips.” He signed the policy into law in July as part of his One Big Beautiful Bill.

But now Trump could be undoing his own efforts to woo the state’s hospitality workers. Ted Pappageorge, secretary-treasurer of Las Vegas’s 60,000-member Culinary Workers Union, says: “If you don’t have those tips, if your tips are reduced, then the tax credit doesn’t matter. Unless there’s a course correction here, we could be in for some significant lay-offs. The Trump slump is here in Vegas.”

Edited version of a story that originally appeared in The Telegraph (UK).

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