Austin Fido
My favourite moment of the recently concluded (and seemingly interminable) US presidential campaign was the pro-Trump election-night watch party in Port of Spain that made national news. As became almost immediately clear when the Facebook flyer advertising the Cipriani Boulevard shindig for MAGA sympathisers started circulating far beyond anything like its intended audience, the notion that there are enough Donald Trump fans in TT to fill even a small commercial property is noteworthy.
Not so far away, in Miami for example, 70-odd Trump supporters watching TV at a bar is little more than a typical Tuesday night. But in Port of Spain, that’s a news story.
Trump is a popular guy in the country of his birth – and he has more than 70 million recently-cast votes to prove it. But if it feels like the rest of the world is shaking its head with sadness and confusion at the news that America has once again decided it wants Trump to be its president, it is because that is mostly true. A pre-election YouGov poll of a basket of European nations found only seven per cent of Danes surveyed favoured Trump over Kamala Harris; in Germany, it was 14 per cent; in Britain, 16 per cent. In Italy, where the current Prime Minister, Giorgia Meloni, is a veteran of neo-fascist and fascist-adjacent politics, the survey only found 24 per cent of respondents willing to voice support for Trump. (Meloni’s own approval rating was around 41 per cent as recently as September, per online data-gatherers Statista.)
In mid-2024, an ABC Australia poll logged Trump support among Australians at 27 per cent (compared to 48 per cent for Harris). Polling for the Economist found a similar lack of Trump-thusiasm in Kenya, Japan and South Korea.
It is certainly wrong to say the entire world is struggling to understand how Trump might be quite so unremittingly popular in the US. That previously mentioned Economist poll found respondents favouring Trump over Harris (or the “Democratic Party candidate,” as styled in the questions) in about one-third of the countries it surveyed, including more than 50 per cent plumping for Trump in Nigeria, Turkey and Vietnam (where Trump preference was staggeringly high: around 70 per cent). It may be hard to believe there is a corner of Cipriani Boulevard that is forever Hanoi, but here we are: we live in interesting times.
For the rest of the world and the 60-million-plus Americans who voted for Harris, “interesting” might read as “baffling.” In 2016, a Pew Research Center survey of global attitudes to America and its president found 64 per cent expressing a favourable view of the US and 74 per cent declaring confidence in President Obama. By 2019, the same study was reporting 53 per cent of respondents around the world had a favourable view of the US, and 31 per cent had confidence in President Trump.
It would appear that is more or less where global confidence in Trump remains: he’s the guy who tanked his country’s popularity around the world by 20 per cent in less than four years. That’s quite t
