Trump Wrecked Our Reputation Abroad. Can Democrats Put It Right? |
In many of the international news outlets around the world, you will find a section devoted to covering current events in the United States. Aside from just including it in their international coverage, many foreign news outlets devote special attention to U.S. coverage, a testament to the nation’s influence on global affairs. It can also be an interesting window into how journalists not enmeshed in the habits and tendencies of our own media elites view what’s happening in our own backyards.
Within the last two weeks—not to mention the past year—the world has been paying careful attention to what’s happening on these shores. Since 2026 began, international outlets have been fixated on whether the U.S. government plans on throwing the world into deeper chaos. Some have been prophetic, such as the French newspaper Le Monde’s December 1, 2025 editorial, “Donald Trump’s interference and incoherence on the American continent,” which commented on Trump’s insistence on seizing the Danish territory of Greenland. Others include the more humorous headline from the Dutch satirical newspaper De Speld (“The Pin”) that, in traditional Dutch bluntness, did not hold back: “Who Is J.D. Vance, the First bitch Behind President Trump?”
More recently, however, the commentary on Trump has shifted from ridicule to genuine concern about the future. A more moving cover image published on January 28 by the French magazine Charlie Hebdo depicts an ICE agent dragging the bullet-riddled body of Alex Pretti to a pile of corpses, leaving a trail of blood that resembles the American flag. Although Pretti was murdered by Customs and Border Protection agents (identified by ProPublica as Jesus Ochoa and Raymundo Gutierrez), the point is pretty clear: The Trump administration has shown no remorse for killing Americans protesting against his deportation policies. Most of all, European media outlets have hyper-focused on Trump’s threats to invade Greenland and break up NATO.
In Latin America, news outlets have anxiously commented on growing American military aggression in the region. In Mexico City, the paper of record La Jornada includes a series titled, “Caracas Under Attack and the Return of Interventionism.” Historians Miguel Tinker Salas and Victor Silverman, both at Pomona College, co-authored an op-ed for La Jornada telling readers that Trump’s foreign and domestic policies are designed to distract from his failing domestic policies. Drawing from the old Kentucky mining song “Which Side Are You On?” Tinker-Salas and Silverman noted that the battles in Minneapolis have exposed the failures of Trump’s immigration policies.
North of the border, Canada’s paper of record, The Globe and Mail, has chronicled everything from Trump’s ludicrous threats to absorb the Great White North to his damaging tariff policies. Others, like Daniel Siemens, stated more bluntly, “Are ICE agents modern-day Nazi brownshirts?”—calling for an end to the paramilitary organization.
Most of all, Canadians have rightly reacted with anger to the provocations of Donald Trump, of which they have a close-up view. As one of America’s closest allies and largest trading partners, Canada has seen a significant drop in cross-border traffic. Trump’s flippant use of tariffs to punish Canada not only contradicts his own previous revision of the North American Free Trade Agreement—the 2020 U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement, which was cobbled together during his first term—but has left permanent damage to foreign trade relations. Along with his childish labeling of Canada as a “fifty-first state,” Trump’s use of tariffs to blackmail foreign leaders led Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney to call for a realignment in the geopolitical order, in his speech on January 20 at the World Economic Forum in Davos.
Calling out Trump’s disregard for the rule of law, Carney told world leaders that such behavior has consequences: “If great powers abandon even the pretense of rules and values for the unhindered pursuit of their power and interests, the gains from ‘transactionalism’ will become harder to replicate. Hegemons cannot continually monetize their........