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A new survey by the Pew Research Center finds that global views of President Trump are overwhelmingly negative, and fewer people say the U.S. is a reliable partner.
Among more than 42,000 respondents across 36 countries, approximately two-thirds expressed no confidence in Trump’s leadership of world affairs.
The polling was carried out between Feb. 8 and May 13, largely during the U.S. and Israeli war against Iran. The war has drawn global condemnation while upending the world economy.
Researchers also surveyed respondents on Trump’s most controversial global policies of the last year and a half. These policies include major cuts to U.S. foreign assistance; his imposition of tariffs; his hard-line immigration actions and deportations; the capture of Venezuela’s former president, Nicolás Maduro; his handling of Russia’s war against Ukraine; the president’s threats to take over Greenland; and the Israel-Hamas conflict in the Gaza Strip.
“We actually saw some big shifts last year after Trump took office, but what we have in this year’s data is that there’s even further decline in most countries that we also surveyed last year,” said Richard Wike, director of global attitudes research at Pew.
Confidence in Trump declined since last year in 16 of 24 nations, Pew found, and no surveyed country showed an increase in positive attitudes toward the president. Only 23 percent of respondents said they have confidence in Trump doing the right thing in global affairs.
Respondents have more confidence in French President Emmanuel Macron (43 percent), Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky (35 percent), Chinese President Xi Jinping (34 percent) and Russian President Vladimir Putin (31 percent). Only Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu elicited less confidence than Trump, at 18 percent.
Surveys were not conducted in Russia or China. Wike said government policies in those countries have made it more difficult for foreign nongovernmental organizations to operate, and people are less likely to express their true opinions.
Some of the lowest ratings came from predominantly Muslim populations, Pew noted, including Malaysians, Pakistanis, Turks, and Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Pew notes it was not able to survey Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.
Turkey and Palestinians in the West Bank and Jerusalem recorded the lowest confidence in Trump, at 6 percent and 4 percent, respectively. In Turkey — which is a NATO ally — only 13 percent had a favorable view of the U.S., while only 9 percent of Palestinian respondents in the West Bank and Jerusalem had a favorable view of the U.S.
The survey comes as the U.S. hosts the World Cup, where some international visitors have shared positive experiences of their travels and surprise at a warm reception in American cities.
It’s not clear how many foreigners have traveled to the U.S., but there are early indications the numbers are below the projections by the Trump administration and FIFA, which expected between 6 million and 10 million attendees.
While Pew didn’t survey respondents on their attitudes about the U.S. hosting the World Cup, Wike said other surveys have shown that people who have greater contact with the U.S., have friends or family in the country or have visited the U.S. generally have a more positive view.
“People distinguish between how they feel about a country’s culture, quite often, versus how they feel about its policies and things like that,” he said.
“It’s certainly possible that in different ways it [the World Cup] could have a positive impact on how people see the U.S.”
In the latest data, Wike said one of the things that stood out to him was “huge shifts” on the question of U.S. reliability. In many countries, there was a 20 point increase in negative views of the U.S. compared with when the question was asked in 2022.
Wike mentioned Sweden, which joined NATO in 2022 following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, as an example. At that time, 83 percent of Swedes said they considered the U.S. a reliable partner. That number is down to 31 percent today.
The survey notes that attitudes toward Trump in France, Germany, Spain and the United Kingdom are about equal or somewhat higher than ratings earned by President George W. Bush at the end of his second term.
There were some outliers in the survey, with seven surveyed countries recording a majority with positive views of the U.S. — in Hungary, the Philippines, Ghana, Nigeria, Kenya and Colombia.
In Israel, 81 percent of respondents have a positive view of the U.S., and 66 percent of respondents said they have confidence in Trump to do the right thing in world affairs.
Wike said Trump gets better ratings among Europeans on the ideological right and populist right, but even those numbers are declining. In Hungary, among members of former Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz party, 78 percent have confidence Trump will do the right thing in world affairs, but that’s down from 88 percent the previous year.
In Italy, an increasing number of respondents from the right-wing Lega and Brothers of Italy parties have no confidence Trump will do the right thing. The survey occurred before Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, head of the Brothers of Italy, shot back at Trump and said he had made up a story of her begging for a photo at the Group of Seven summit in France.
“It’s worth noting that even among right-wing populists, his ratings typically aren’t super positive or anything like that, but he gets better ratings among folks who are on the populist right in Europe, and even among them he’s down a bit,” Wike said.
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