Exactly one year ago this week, Donald Trump sat down with Fox News’ Bret Baier, and the host asked the former president what he considers “the most important issue” facing the country. The Republican talked about the economy, border security, and getting “the woke out of our military,” before focusing on his principal point of concern.
“Basically, respect all over the world,” Trump said. “We don’t have it anymore. We had tremendous respect three years ago. We don’t have respect anymore. … We have to get that respect back. And if we don’t, we’ve got some big problems.”
This has been a rhetorical staple for the presumptive GOP nominee for quite a while. In fact, as recently as April, Trump told a Pennsylvania audience, referring to his White House tenure, “We were the most respected country in the world. We were the most respected that we were ever respected. We were never more respected than we were four years ago.”
Those claims didn’t reflect reality in any way, as we were reminded anew last week in the latest findings from the Pew Research Center.
With many around the world closely following the fiercely contested rematch between U.S. President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump, a new Pew Research Center survey finds that, internationally, Biden is viewed more positively than his rival.
There’s quite a bit of data to review in the report, which gauged public attitudes in 34 countries, across several continents, but there were a couple of key takeaways. First, internationally, more people have confidence in Biden to do the right thing regarding world affairs, as compared to Trump.
And second, while confidence in the White House slumped badly, during Trump’s presidency, those numbers have rebounded under Biden.
Not surprisingly, there’s a great deal of variety across specific countries and regions, and it’s true that support for the Democratic incumbent abroad has slipped as his presidency has progressed. But it’s nevertheless obvious in the data that Biden enjoys the kind of international respect Trump talked about but never achieved.
All of this is consistent with other data from the last few years. Revisiting our earlier coverage, a Gallup report in 2021 found that approval ratings of U.S. leadership around the world had “largely rebounded from the record-low ratings observed during the Trump administration.” Around the same time, the Pew Research Center released a related report documenting “dramatic” improvements in the United States’ international stature once Biden replaced Trump in the Oval Office.
A year later, Gallup released another report on the United States’ standing among NATO members, concluding that U.S. leadership in the Biden era “was stronger across much of NATO than it had been in years, after languishing at low levels during the Trump administration.”
The latest Pew Research Center data, in other words, is consistent with the recent trend.








