How America lost the respect of the world

It's difficult to quantify the extent to which Donald Trump has set back the United States. The word "substantially" springs to mind, although it's not particularly illuminating.

It seems pretty clear from reading the international press that, in just a year-and-a-half of Trumpian misrule (yes, that's all it's been!) America has lost most of the respect, influence and credibility that Barack Obama spent 8 years building up. Obama was not a perfect leader (there is no such thing is politics), but his presidency was stable and essentually decent (he was, and is, an essentually decent man). The progressive and responsible measures he brought in after the instability and knee-jerk reactions of the George W. Bush years meant that the United States could finally hold its head up internationally again, and American backpackers did not need to pin Canadian flags on their backpacks to be taken seriously. Don't get me wrong, this is not just a Democrat vs. Republican preference: it is a demonstrable fact that George W. Bush was just out of step with most of the Western world. And Donald Trump is too, but very much more so.

And it is not lost on the rest of the world that it was the American public that (gerrymandering and the vagaries of the first-past-the-post electoral system notwithstanding) voted the man in with a sizeable majority, and that many of those voters, shockingly, STILL support him (his approval rating recently went UP from the mid-30s to 43% - admittedly not high, but still half the American population seems to approve of his shenanigans). So, the responsibility for the current global instability and international resentment on trade, immigration, Middle Eastern relations, climate change, the environment, and many other issues, lies squarely at their door (even if most Americans that we personally speak to tend to be suitably abashed, apologetic and bemused by it all).

So, dust off those Canadian flags, backpackers. Get those alternative back-stories ready again, socialites. The big bad outlaw version of America is back again - in trumps.