In a 1975 episode of the British sitcom Fawlty Towers meant to satirize the Britons who clung to anti-German sentiment decades after World War II, hotel owner Basil Fawlty, played by John Cleese, struggles and ultimately fails to conceal his lingering resentment from a group of German tourists as his repeated Freudian slips mentioning the war reduce a young woman to tears before he makes a Hitler mustache with his fingers and goose-steps through the lobby. The scene is one of the series’s best-known; a reliable laugh-getter. More than a half-century later, President Donald Trump’s near-obsession with setting fire to alliances that have served Western interests in good stead plays like an unfunny parody of Fawlty’s comic preening.
Let’s not get things twisted—even Donald Trump’s worst offenses pale in comparison to Nazi crimes, and invoking the Holocaust to make political points is never acceptable. But the Fawlty Towers episode illustrates something that’s keenly relevant today: When a nation breaks the world’s trust, forgiveness does not come quickly or easily. That’s a hard lesson that Americans, even the liberals and progressives who might absolve themselves of contributing to Trumpian misrule, will have to learn as we grapple with the damage Trump has done to our international standing only a year into his second term.
Opinion polls reveal the shocking extent of the damage. In September, as Trump openly mused about making Canada the fifty-first state, an Ipsos poll found 60 percent of Canadians said they “could never trust the Americans the same way again,” while Canadian trips south of the border have cratered. European attitudes toward the United States have seen a similarly precipitous fall. A new poll by YouGov found that Western Europeans’ perceptions of the U.S. have turned sharply negative, particularly—and not surprisingly—in Denmark. On the economic front, loss of investor confidence has sunk the dollar, while Canada and the EU are forging trade deals with China, India, and the South American trade bloc Mercosur that leave the U.S. excluded. Even Queen doesn’t want to tour here.
But polling data, currency exchange rates, trade deals, and rock band touring schedules don’t quite capture the deep well of anger and the sense of betrayal that many people, especially Canadians and Europeans, feel toward the U.S. now.
It seems different from Bush-era anti-Americanism. When I lived in China from 2001 to 2004, any cab driver or shopkeeper who found out I was American would inevitably bring up the Iraq War. While visiting Zhengzhou, I was screamed at and physically assaulted. The anti-American stain from back then eventually faded. It will be much harder to wash out this time.
A Dane in his fifties living in the U.S. for more than 20 years, who asked not to be identified for fear of retaliation, said Nazi Germany was not an ally that turned on its partners, whereas before Trump’s belligerent rhetoric, America had been seen as a friend, “and betraying that friendship cuts far deeper than being invaded by a known aggressor and agitator.” While Americans initially dismissed the rhetoric about Greenland as just another silly idea from a silly president, he said he had entirely different feelings and the administration’s actions signaled that Trump was not just a fool but a megalomaniac.
“On a personal level, I’m trying very hard not to hate or despise everything and everyone American for allowing this to happen—but I will never again trust an American,” he wrote in a private social media message.
Trump’s fixation on acquiring Greenland—without regard for what its mostly Indigenous Inuit inhabitants want—isn’t new. As early as 2019, he was trying to get the Danes to sell it. But as with his stated desire to annex Canada, and with his imposition of tariffs on trading partners, what many Americans treat as fodder for jokes or serious media analysis is, to Canadians and Europeans, a sign that their onetime ally has become a dangerous predator.
Kristina Spohr, a professor of international history at the London School of Economics and Political Science, compared Trump’s bullying of Europe to Russia’s.
“If one person is constantly using bullying tactics or resorting to political blackmail and only takes a step back when you are really firm, then we are dealing with something very similar to what Europeans have learned in their dealings with Russia because Russia is always testing weaknesses,” Spohr said. What is so damaging is that unlike Russia, the U.S. is supposed to be on the same side as Europe and to share the same principles and values, defending freedom and democracy. “That’s also why Europeans, both leaders and ordinary people, are just flabbergasted.”
Americans’ neighbors to the north are no less flabbergasted. That’s the case with Darlene Dale, a 62-year-old Canadian Army veteran living in New Brunswick, who served alongside American forces in Afghanistan as a combat medic in 2003 and 2005. She used to travel to the U.S. frequently, including a 2016 road trip from Seattle to New York and frequent hops across the border for shopping and eating. Now, she says, she regards the U.S. as unsafe to visit and vows never to set foot on American soil again as her trust in the U.S. has been eroded “beyond repair.”
“Fought side by side, and now they turn their backs on us and threaten to make us [the fifty-first state]. No going back. Too much was sacrificed for them,” Dale wrote in a message.
Revelations that Trump met with Alberta separatists haven’t improved attitudes. Nor has the U.S. Embassy in Copenhagen’s removal of flags honoring the Danish soldiers killed in Afghanistan.
Nina Janz, a Luxembourg-based historian, said that Trump’s policies have indeed destroyed trust in the U.S. and the perception of its reliability as a partner. But she said many relationships may survive him.
“In the end, the network and the old political and institutional establishments still exist and will likely survive this period, despite Trump—at least this is what I hope,” she wrote in an email. “I actually think the damage done through mistrust may be even stronger within the U.S., internally.”
But any Americans thinking global perceptions of their country will return to some pre-MAGA kumbaya if they simply elect Democratic congressional majorities in the 2026 midterms and a Democratic president in 2028—assuming those elections are even free and fair—are kidding themselves. What, after all, is to stop American voters from getting into another snit about egg prices or foreign conflicts and electing another Republican Congress in 2030 and another fascist demagogue as president in 2032—especially when a huge majority so vividly put feelings and vibes ahead of facts and reason in 2024?
Explanations for the 2024 election results tend to focus on Democratic and Republican party strategies and the issues that animated voters. But it’s important to remember that Trump didn’t win just because 77.3 million Americans voted for him. He also won because 2.9 million voted for third-party candidates like the Green Party’s Jill Stein, while 89 million didn’t vote at all.
However much the media fail to hold voters accountable and behave as if they lack agency or control over their actions when they elect bad leaders, the consequences of more than 169 million Americans reelecting Trump by commission or omission are now on horrifying display. The people around the world bearing the brunt of Trumpism aren’t likely to look on U.S. voters charitably.
They have ample reason not to: More than 780,000 people in developing nations, two-thirds of them children, are estimated to have died from infectious diseases and malnutrition due to cuts to USAID, which were explicitly advocated in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025—a document that the U.S. media did not treat with the seriousness it warranted. Meanwhile, Ukrainians shiver in subzero temperatures as Russian missiles destroy their homes, even as Trump sends his Kremlin talking point–parroting real estate buddy Steve Witkoff to Moscow to negotiate Ukraine’s future despite Witkoff’s Russian financial ties.
No American voter can claim they didn’t know what was coming if they reelected a man who had incited an insurrection against Congress, used the Covid-19 pandemic to divide the public as more than one million Americans died, falsely accused Haitian refugees of eating people’s pets, and even said he’d put people in camps. It’s just that they wanted or tolerated a second Trump presidency as long as whatever awfulness accompanied his second term only affected people other than themselves.
That so many Americans knowingly and willingly allowed such a clearly dangerous individual back into power lays bare an American body politic awash in callous self-absorption. Who is genuinely surprised that a society that has reached such depths of moral decay that it does nothing to stop gun violence even after mass shootings of children would hand the keys to the White House to Trump and his Cabinet of horrors because its citizens just “didn’t find [Kamala] Harris compelling,” wanted to cosplay as Western saviors of the people of Gaza—who, by the way, preferred Harris—or believed Trump would lower their living costs even as he campaigned on inflationary tariffs?
Whatever excuses Americans might make for letting Trump become president again are meaningless for Kenyan mothers helplessly watching their children starve to death or Greenlanders lying awake at night terrified that the U.S. will invade them.
Spohr speculated that if the midterms run smoothly, and if there’s a change of administration in 2028, things might not go back internationally to how they were before Trump 2.0, but there may be a return domestically to something more ordinary in terms of how democratic governance and the judiciary function. As it stands, she said, the state is being dangerously dismantled before our eyes, while an imperial presidency has taken hold.
“Trump may have warned of ‘Europe’s erasure,’ but it is rather in the U.S. where the very darkest tendencies of political culture have taken hold,” she said, adding that “still, I think it’s too early to say it’s all in the bin.”
If there is to be any hope for the U.S. regaining the world’s trust, everyday Americans need to come to grips with their role in undermining it.
Because of the power we have to influence events all over the world, American voters have a far greater responsibility than our counterparts in other nations to consider how our voting decisions will affect the lives of people who have no say in our elections. In 2024, 169 million Americans consciously chose to shirk that responsibility.
What Americans, even those who voted for Harris, collectively face now is an obligation to demonstrate that we’re grown-ups and not a nation of selfish brats. That will likely require criminal penalties for members and enablers of the Trump regime, drastic changes to how the country is run, a full reckoning with the societal dysfunctions that contributed to Trump’s rise—e.g., the legacies of slavery and settler colonialism—and a length of time probably lasting decades.
Even though my Romani heritage would likely have gotten me killed under the Nazi regime, the German citizenship I have in addition to my American citizenship means I share Germany’s collective responsibility to ensure National Socialism never takes power there again. This is not to compare the Trump administration to Nazi Germany, but it is Germany’s postwar struggle to return to the world’s good graces that serves as the object lesson for what Americans will have to do unless we want our country to be permanently isolated as a pariah nation, with former allies in good standing ignoring and stepping past us.
Americans should have no illusions about the struggle that awaits us.
“Something fundamental has been broken,” wrote Tricia Castle, a 55-year-old Toronto retiree who has American family members, in an email. “The trust is gone, and the damage runs too deep to pretend things will simply ‘go back to normal.’”
As we embark on that struggle, much like Basil Fawlty’s German guests, we should not expect the rest of the world to let us live down our nation’s terrible choices anytime soon. We have much for which to atone.
