Many of Donald Trump’s plans for his second term as president are still taking shape, but the business events industry can get a sense of what to expect from his first term and immediate executive orders, as well as promises made during his 2024 campaign. In December, Convene asked Tommy Goodwin, vice president of Exhibitions & Conferences Alliance (ECA) to break down Trump’s anticipated impact on events and ECA’s top priorities over the next four years of his term.
According to Goodwin, there are several key areas he and ECA will be keeping an eye on as the second Trump presidency unfolds. Here is the first of four topics he touched on during our conversation:
International Travel
One of the main focuses of ECA’s 2025 public policy agenda is to ensure the growth of international travel on a number of fronts to make the U.S. more competitive globally. A top concern: The continued efforts toward reducing visa wait times. Since the pandemic, the country has faced ongoing, extensive visa wait times for incoming, would-be attendees, buyers, and exhibitors from countries like Mexico, Brazil, and India. While Capitol Hill has worked to resolve the issue — Congress allocated $50 million to the U.S. State Department in March 2024 to address passport backlogs and reduce travel wait times, resulting in visa wait times in Mexico dropping 70 percent — Goodwin still sees some “troubling areas.”

Tommy Goodwin
“The job is definitely not done,” he said. “I think having Secretary of State Marco Rubio [sworn in on Jan. 21], someone who has represented Florida politically for many years, helps them understand the importance of things like visa processing, both for the [events] industry and at large — you’ve got things like the FIFA World Cup coming up,” to be jointly held in 2026 in cities across North America, including Philadelphia, Miami, and Los Angeles, and “you’ve got the 250th anniversary of the U.S.,” on July 4, 2026.
According to Goodwin, the new administration has an opportunity to “stay the course” with the headway the Biden administration made in reducing visa wait times. “The goal should be to get every embassy and consulate down to a 90-day maximum wait time. Over the last year, the Biden administration made progress toward it, but there’s a lot of work left to do.”
Another concern when it comes to international travel under the Trump administration is travel bans. In 2017, Trump signed an executive order banning visitors from several Muslim-majority countries, and it appears this will be a continued focus during his second term. On his first day in office in 2025, Trump issued an executive order that required enhanced vetting for international travelers seeking U.S. visas, as well as a request for a report within 60 days to identify countries “for which vetting and screening information is so deficient as to warrant a partial or full suspension on the admission of nationals from those countries.”
In a 5-4 ruling in 2018, the Supreme Court upheld Trump’s original travel ban, indicating he will have the same leeway to bar nationals from certain countries from entering the country once again. “That is something that could be challenging,” Goodwin said. “He does have the authority under the law to be able to do that. That’s one where the ability to act unilaterally is there.”
Casey Gale is managing editor of Convene.