World opinion of the U.S. and Trump is in a tailspin as the pandemic persists, a Pew poll finds.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/15/us/elections/world-opinion-of-the-us-and-trump-is-in-a-tailspin-as-the-pandemic-persists-a-pew-poll-finds.html

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America’s international standing under President Trump is at or near its lowest levels since the dawn of the millennium because of his mishandling of the coronavirus pandemic, the nonpartisan Pew Research Center reported Tuesday as it released a new poll.

Pew, which surveyed residents of 13 industrialized countries on four continents, found that only 15 percent believe that the United States has done a good job combating the virus.

In every country polled, respondents gave much higher marks to their home governments, the World Health Organization and China than to the U.S., despite Mr. Trump’s claims that this country is handling the crisis better than any other and his attempts to shift blame for the outbreak to the W.H.O. and Beijing.

“Since Donald Trump took office as president, the image of the United States has suffered across many regions of the globe,” the report’s authors concluded.

The country’s falling standing accelerates a downward trend that began when Mr. Trump took office in 2017 after campaigning on a platform of “America First” — foreign opinions and alliances be damned.

Before the Trump era, public opinion of the U.S. remained steadily north of 50 percent in most countries — with the exception of the early 2000s, when President George W. Bush waged an unpopular war in Iraq. In the new survey, the U.S.’s median approval rating among the 13 countries was 34 percent.

Opinion of the U.S. are tethered tightly to those about its president. Mr. Trump netted a median approval rating of 16 percent, with a low of 9 percent in Belgium and a high of only 25 percent in Japan.

Those who did admire Mr. Trump had some demographic similarities with those who approve of him at home. “Men, people with less education and those on the right of the ideological spectrum tend to have more confidence in Trump’s handling of world affairs than their counterparts,” the report’s authors wrote.

Pew surveyed 13,273 adults from June 10 to Aug. 3 in Canada, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, the U.K., Australia, Japan and South Korea.