What the World Sees…
“We know the old order is not coming back. We shouldn’t mourn it. Nostalgia is not a strategy, but we believe that from the fracture, we can build something bigger, better, stronger, more just.” - 20 January 2026, Canadian prime minister Mark Carney at the 56th World Economic Forum
It will be many generations if ever before the world again holds the United States in high regard. From abroad the story is not just about one man in the Oval Office. It is about a country that saw him clearly and lived through his first term and watched the warnings pile up and still chose to hand him power again.
When I talk with people outside America they do not just blame Donald Trump for the carnage he is driving at home and across the world. They blame the American people. They have watched the public record of a president who was impeached twice and found liable for sexual abuse in a civil trial and tried to overturn an election. They watched him get rewarded by voters with a second act. They know this was not an accident. It was a decision.
They say it is not just the American president.
It is his administration which has treated governing like permanent campaign warfare. They staffed key posts with loyalists and used executive power to punish critics and reward allies. Marco Rubio as acting National Security Advisor and Pete Hegseth at Defense and Mike Waltz at the UN and Howard Lutnick at Commerce and Scott Bessent at Treasury and Chris Wright at Energy and Doug Burgum at Interior and Linda McMahon at Education and Russell Vought at OMB and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. at HHS are the ones enabling this. I am talking about you.
It is the shadow government and inner circle that treats national policy as a personal fiefdom. Elon Musk and Russell Vought are dismantling the civil service under the guise of efficiency. Stephen Miller is architecting cruelty. Susie Wiles and Dan Scavino are operationalizing the whims of the president. I am talking about you.
It is the leaders at the FBI and the Justice Department and the Intelligence Community who accepted roles explicitly designed to shatter norms and target political enemies. Kash Patel at the FBI alongside Pam Bondi and Todd Blanche and Emil Bove turned the Justice Department into a defense firm for the president. Tulsi Gabbard as Director of National Intelligence and John Ratcliffe at the CIA are politicizing the secrets of the nation. Kristi Noem at Homeland Security and Tom Homan as the border czar are enforcing policies of mass deportation. I am talking about you.
It is the Republican Party in Congress that decided power mattered more than democracy. Even after a mob stormed the Capitol most Republican lawmakers chose to minimize or excuse or actively rewrite what the whole world saw live on their screens. Speaker Mike Johnson and Senate Majority Leader John Thune and Elise Stefanik and Jim Jordan and Steve Scalise and Lindsey Graham and Tom Cotton and the rest of the caucus that backs this agenda no matter how extreme are responsible. I am talking about you.
It is the Supreme Court that has already helped shrink voting protections and expand presidential power even as the political system that selects the justices grows more warped and mistrusted. Justices Alito and Thomas and Roberts and Gorsuch and Kavanaugh and Barrett are the ones I am talking about.
It is the military specifically the civilian leadership and the compliant top brass who wrap themselves in the language of honor while accommodating a commander in chief who treats alliances as disposable. Secretary Hegseth and the senior officers who have stayed silent as the apolitical tradition of the military is eroded preferring career survival over resignation in protest are complicit. I am talking about you.
It is the CEOs who refuse to speak up. American business leaders have watched democratic backsliding and trade brinkmanship and tariff threats send shock waves through global markets yet most choose to issue safe statements and carry on. Jamie Dimon and Tim Cook and Darren Woods and Jeff Bezos and Satya Nadella and the rest of the Business Roundtable who speak up only when their bottom lines are threatened are guilty here. I am talking about you.
It is the voters who voted for him even though he was impeached twice and incited an insurrection and was found liable for sexual abuse and was a failure from a policy perspective in his first term. The 77 million Americans who looked at all of that and still pulled the lever for him are the root cause. I am talking about you.
And it is all the others who refuse to speak out or go to protests or educate themselves on the reality of the situation and play dumb. The commentators who launder lies into arguments about both sides and the influencers who turn disinformation into a business model and the professionals who insist they are too busy to defend their own system are to blame. I am talking about you.
From abroad this looks less like a temporary crisis and more like a national choice. A choice to treat democracy as a spectator sport. A choice to accept a level of institutional vandalism that other societies would meet with mass strikes or sustained protests or coordinated political realignments. A choice to believe that somehow no matter what is done in its name America will be forgiven because it is America.
There is a quiet but profound shift happening in how the world talks about the United States. For decades people distinguished between American policies and American values. They distinguished between what Washington did and what ordinary Americans believed. That distinction is fading. The world has seen Americans vote twice for a man whose contempt for democratic norms is not a secret but a selling point. They have watched major institutions bend rather than break with him. They are adjusting their expectations accordingly.
Americans like to think of themselves as exceptional. It is exceptional for a country so powerful to gamble so casually with its own credibility. It is exceptional to treat alliances as leverage points rather than commitments. It is exceptional to turn courts and agencies and armed forces into stages for partisan theater. It is exceptional to insist that the world needs you while ignoring the growing number of governments and publics who are quietly building ways to need you less.
The tragedy is that this loss of respect will outlast Trump. Public opinion is easier to damage than to repair. Allies have begun to diversify their security relationships and trade ties precisely because they no longer trust that American voters will protect the basic guardrails of their own system. Even if the country turns away from Trumpism in some future election the memory of how far and how often it embraced him will remain.
Many Americans still imagine that history will judge this era by asking what Trump did to America. The rest of the world is already asking a different question. They are asking what America did to itself knowing exactly who he was. That is the verdict that will haunt it long after this presidency ends and it is one that no change of administration can erase.
"In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends." - Martin Luther King Jr. (sorry Howard, but I had to go here :-) )