At Donald Trump’s campaign-style event in Pennsylvania this week, the president repeated one of his favorite boasts. “We’re respected again as a country,” the Republican declared. He pushed a similar line a week earlier at a White House Cabinet meeting, claiming, “America is strong and respected again. On the world stage, we’re really respected.”
This has been a rhetorical staple for the incumbent president across both of his terms. It’s also demonstrably ridiculous: International public opinion research has consistently shown that global respect and confidence in the U.S. has reached record depths under Trump.
But it’s not just foreign citizens who’ve lost respect for the Trump-led U.S.; it’s also foreign officials. The New York Times reported:
Denmark’s military intelligence service raised concerns for the first time about the United States in its annual threat assessment, saying in a report released Wednesday that shifts in American policy are generating new uncertainties for Denmark’s security.
The report points to the United States’ use of tariffs against allies and its intensified activity in the Arctic, and raises many of the same concerns that European leaders have voiced about the direction of President Trump’s America-first foreign policy.
“The United States uses economic power, including threats of high tariffs, to enforce its will, and no longer rules out the use of military force, even against allies,” the report said.
In case this isn’t obvious, Denmark is a longtime U.S. ally and a NATO member. Nevertheless, as a Bloomberg News report summarized, “A Danish intelligence agency has for the first time described the US as a potential security risk.”
That assessment comes after comments Trump made earlier this year in which he not only admonished Denmark but refused to take the possibility of military force off the table as part of the Republican’s imperialistic ambition of annexing Greenland.
The concerns raised by Denmark’s military intelligence service dovetail with this week’s criticism from German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, who said, after seeing the new White House National Security Strategy, that Europe needs to be become “much more independent” from the United States for its security. It also comes a month after British officials, for the first time in modern history, started curtailing intelligence sharing with the U.S. to avoid complicity in possible war crimes. Months earlier, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney announced that his country would forge new alliances because it was clear that the U.S. is “no longer a reliable partner.” In August, Trump insisted, “We’re respected all over the world — like never before, probably.” A variety of words come to mind when describing how traditional our allies see the United States in 2025, but “respected” isn’t one of them.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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