Opinion: Trump is bad for skiing
By Marc Peruzzi, Outside
This is not the beginning of a partisan smear campaign like the seminal “CHENEY SKIS IN JEANS” bumper stickers popular in Jackson Hole in the early aughts. Once upon a time, years before President Trump subscribed to the human-body-as-depletable-battery school of exercise avoidance, he was a skier. His children fondly remember racing dear old dad to the bottom.* Years later, they told an interviewer that Father Trump would shove them over if they attempted to pass.
No, what follows are just the facts: Trump is a clear and present danger to skiing as an industry. His bombastic speeches and immigration policies are worse than January rain when it comes to the dollars and cents and powder days that support the sport.
In a Wall Street Journal essay last month, Aspen Ski Co. President and CEO Mike Kaplan blamed the “xenophobia radiating from the Oval Office” for the dip in Mexican tourism the resort saw last year. Visits by this demographic—a core market for all the major Colorado ski resorts—fell by 30 percent. Think about it: If Mexico’s president called you a rapist and a drug dealer and said he was going to build a wall and make you pay for it, would you book a trip to Cancun?
In response to that tourism falloff and the Trump-propagated national intolerance, Aspen—which has hosted Gay Ski Week and the National Brotherhood of Skiers for years—has launched an ad campaign for the resort built around the slogan, “Love, Respect, Unity, and Commit.” The idea came from an earlier essay Kaplan penned for the Aspen Daily Times titled “We’re Still Here,” where he spoke for the reasonable folks in the ski town who care about things like, you know, the international community and the environment.
Illegal aliens cost the American citizens over a 100 billion dollars a year. Trump is doing what is best for our country in totality. There are always unintended consequences so act like big boys and work around it and quit your bawling and hysterical fits.
Maybe it is time to recruit Americans from our less than well-off communities that you never see on the slopes. Get my drift.
Throwing out percentages without actual numbers is meaningless and misleading. What percentage of total
skier visits are you talking about.
And you folks managed to work in that AGW is alive and destroying your season length. I got a bulletin for your self serving screed: About a thousand years ago CA had a drought that lasted hundreds of years all without the benefit of SUV’s or coal fired power plants. It doesn’t fit in with your fantasyland but it is a fact Jack.