In the United States, nothing terrifies the new right quite like population decline. It’s arguably their defining feature; a constant anxiety over something they perceive to be an existential threat. So in a contradiction that only Donald Trump could pull off, their chosen leader is accelerating that decline unlike any president in US history.
According to Bloomberg, one well-regarded population estimate warns that 2026 is primed to be the year of the first real population decline in the 250 year history of the United States. One of the main reasons, Census officials say, is the Trump administration’s incredibly aggressive deportation campaign.
From July 2024 to July 2025, US Census data released this week shows the total US population only grew by around 0.5 percent, or 1.8 million people — a rate that seems all but certain to slip into the negative.
The cause isn’t an abnormal number of deaths or a plummeting birthrate — though that’s slipping too, exacerbating the trend — but instead a collapse in the rate of migration from 2.7 million people in July, 2024 down to just 1.3 million in 2025 as the White House does everything in its power to make the country hostile to immigrants.
“If current trends continue, net international migration is projected to be approximately 321,000 by July 2026, representing another decline of nearly 1 million since July 1, 2025,” the Census report reads.
Things aren’t about to get any better, either. According to data released by the Congressional Budget Office, the US birth surplus — the number of births over deaths — is expected to completely collapse by 2030. When that happens, the US will be totally dependent on immigration to sustain population growth.
On one hand, population decline is to be expected in advanced market economies as GDP grows. The reason for this is simple: in agrarian systems, children are assets, helping the household sustain itself. In industrial market systems, however, children are financial liabilities, costing wage earning parents precious work hours, on top of food, clothes, and other resources.
Sure enough, fertility rates in high-income countries have been on the decline for a century, with countries like Germany, Italy, Japan, and Spain already falling well below the threshold to maintain a stable population size.
Yet for the United States, the acceleration brought about by Trump is cause for alarm. Prior to Trump’s return to the oval office, the US population wasn’t expected to begin declining until around 2080 — meaning the president who took up the far-right’s clarion call for population growth is instead setting the country up for a much earlier reckoning with a falling population.
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