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If you want to understand just how unpopular Donald Trump is internationally, look no further than a new poll, which shows that people from across the globe do not approve of President Joe Biden’s handling of a range of issues, yet still prefer the Democrat over his GOP challenger… often by a wide margin.
From the global economy and climate change to the conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza, a survey quizzing participants from 34 countries shows that people more disapprove than approve of how Biden is handling them.
While the difference among the former two is marginal, the US president gets much poorer grades for how he is dealing with international conflicts and the issue of China.
And he is headed in the wrong direction.
In two-thirds of the countries where this information was available, he is trending downwards. That includes double-digit declines in Australia, Israel, Japan, Poland, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, and the United Kingdom.
And yet, people everywhere have much greater confidence in Biden than Trump.
The former president trails his successor everywhere but in Bangladesh (where they are tied), Tunisia, and Hungary.
Elsewhere, people prefer Biden over Trump, including by more than 40 percent in four European countries (Sweden, Germany, Poland, and Netherlands), by 29 percent and 28 percent in Japan and South Korea, and by 24 percent (Mexico) and 22 percent (Canada) among countries with a border to the US.
To be fair, people in Russia and North Korea were not quizzed.
Among all countries, 43 percent of respondents expressed that they had more confidence in Biden than Trump, and 28 percent said the opposite.
On the plus side, people across the globe overall (but not in some countries, such as Germany) have slightly more confidence in the former president than Russia’s Vladimir Putin or China’s Xi Jinping to do the right thing in world affairs.
Opinion of the US, while the country is viewed more positively in general than its current and previous leader, is trending in the wrong direction.
Especially in advanced economies, people are now more skeptical of US democracy. And who can blame them after Trump’s attempted coup and continued efforts to undermine the integrity of elections?
Most Europeans now say that democracy as practiced in the United States “used to be” a good example but has not been recently.
That distinction is most pronounced in one of the US’s neighbors, who are likely most exposed to American media and politics.
Just 13 percent of Canadians believe that the US is currently a good example, while more than two-thirds of them say that used to be the case but is not now.
