Trump has destroyed the US’s global standing in one year

One of Trump’s refrains on the campaign trail was that the Obama presidency had so damaged the United States’s reputation around the world that other countries were “laughing at them”, and that Trump, of course, would put an end to that if he got elected. It’s right out of the demagogue playbook: exaggerate the extent of problems facing the nation, then present themself as the only one who can make everything better.

Well, this demagogue’s been in office for a full year (and one day) now, so surely the world’s now teeming with respect for the USA, right? Let’s see what the polling data has to say:

In 2016, 48 percent of the world's citizens approved of the United States from a leadership perspective. By 2017, just 30 percent did. What changed, of course, was the leader. President Donald Trump has overseen a destructive period for America's reputation abroad since he took the reins from Barack Obama a year ago. Support for U.S. leadership has gone underwater—that is, more people disapprove than approve—on every continent except Africa, where a slim 51 percent maintain a favorable view. Approval fell 10 points or more in 65 countries. Gallup, the source for all this good news, conducted its polling between March and November of 2017—that is, before the U.S. president dismissed the nations of Africa as "shitholes." Perhaps that 51-percent figure is out of date.

The state Trump expressed a preference for in that now-infamous Oval Office immigration meeting, Norway, tells its own story. Support for U.S. leadership among Norwegians plummeted an astonishing 42 points between President Obama's final year in office and Trump's first. That was part of a catastrophic showing from European nations, particularly the United States' NATO allies. Approval fell by 10 points or more in 24 European countries, including 18 NATO members. In Portugal, it fell 51 points in a year. The United States is above water in just three European countries: Kosovo, Albania, and Poland. Overall, among European citizens, approval fell from 44 to 25 percent. That's still better than the lowest ebb of the George W. Bush administration, deep into the Iraq War, when just 18 percent of Europeans approved of the job he was doing. It took Bush six years to fall that far, and to sink to 35 percent worldwide. It took Trump roughly six months.

Approval of US leadership also fell by 40 points in Canada, and the cynical part of my mind is surprised it had that many points to lose. I thought outside perception of the US was already waning by the end of Obama’s tenure, dragged down by a combination of unending Republican obstructionism and generally terrible foreign policy, especially the endless wars in the Middle-East. It took Trump only months to demonstrate just how much lower it could sink – quite a bit, it turns out.

Then there’s this bit, which is extremely telling:

We can expect steeper losses among democratic allies, according to Robert Keohane, a professor of international affairs at Princeton University. "People that hold liberal values—constitutional, democratic values—are favorable to the United States when it seems to follow those values," Keohane told me, "and unfavorable when it doesn't." Approval plunged among our liberal democratic allies at the height of the Iraq War (and is plunging now) because these countries are full of educated people in a sophisticated media environment who are appalled when they feel the U.S. is betraying their shared values. […]

(Autocratic states are a different story. Their governments are, by definition, more immune to shifts in public opinion, and usually exercise more control over what information the public is exposed to anyway—thereby influencing opinion.)

There’s something a little too revealing about how other democracies are looking down on the “leader of the free world”, whilst dictatorships and military states are starting to identify with it.

The best part is that despite their fervent attempts to pretend otherwise, Trump and his cohorts have absolutely no-one but themselves to blame. Republicans control the White House, both chambers of Congress and a majority of state legislatures, yet they can’t even pass a bill to keep the government running without tripping over their own feet and pratfalling into a mud puddle. And it’s entirely the fault of their massively unpopular policies along with their own extraordinary incompetence.

(via Dispatches From the Culture Wars)