Aren't Americans concerned by the loss of trust? (No visible reaction from the public?)

[TT2025]

As the title implies, I'm not quite sure if US citizens are concerned how the perception of their country is changing.

Here in the eastern flank of the EU, the society was always somewhat polarized in its views on US, but last few months the 'trans-atlantic' camp was hit like never before. And lessons learned will be hard to unlearn. 

Actually my views were shaken considerably. Spending my formative years oblivious of US involvement in affairs in Chile (etc.) and watching StarTrek and MacGyver I was buying all the 'do a good thing' and 'stand on the right side of history' stuff. After a heard from the US that it was Ukraine who started the war with Russia (presumably kidnapping Russian army and invading itself by it), followed by outright extortion by US top officials and half-aligning with Russia. (Odd silence after attack on civilian targets, lately at Sumy tells volumes.) I just can't fend off the thought that the 'do good' agenda was just a bate.

US is now projecting a Goodfellas version of itself around the globe and US citizens seem to be content. Only real pushback was due to self-inflicted stock market near crash.

So is it all just about the money? (Sincerely confused here.)

Edited Tuesday at 10:57 PM by TT2025

[nanana]

Every one wants an unassailable savior. The US is amazing and corrupt. Please people stop looking to others to be better than you are. Either you are your savior, or God is. The US is complex and has wonderful and fearful qualities. 

[viking8x6]

Yes, many of us citizens of the US are concerned about the shift in global perception of our country. But those of us who are, are mostly a lot more concerned about the shit storm that is happening all around us, which affects us directly, than we are about foreign policy.

[ErikRaw]

Our current leaders are putting a fascist state in place.  Like the other fascist nations I expect us to become ignored or sanctioned (or fractured into smaller nation-states if power from D.C. proves unable to control the whole country)

I am greatly concerned about the future of the US, as well as the global impacts of the chaos here.

[jd13]

Here in Britain, we've always seen the US as a close ally re: foreign policy, but we also keep Americans kinda at arm's length because although we share a common language, the cultural differences are huge. And I don't think Americans really realise that. But recently, even that perception of America as an ally is rapidly changing here, and that's principally because whatever your political persuasion here in Britain, most of us despise that kind of brash, vulgar, nakedly racist style of politics that Trump, Musk and Vance embody.

Remember the Trump Baby Balloon? That was us. It says a lot about how we see him, how we see ourselves, and how we see 21st century America.

Check this out: right now Trump has an approval rating of 13% here in the UK. Reform UK, Nigel Farage's far right political party, and the nearest political bedfellow to Trump's Republican party, is polling at around 25%

Work that statistic through: half of all British people who do resonate with that far right, straight white grievance politics cannot stand Trump. That's how toxic he is over here that even the British white nationalists don't like him!

That brashness, that lack of grace, or style, or dignity, that narcissism, that grandstanding... that's kind of a British stereotype about Americans anyway, and right now your government is broadcasting it in the Megawatt range. It's having a huge effect on the perception of your country here.

We voted en masse for Brexit (well, I fucking didn't but anyway), and now something like 65-70% of us want a closer relationship with Europe. That must include a good many who voted Brexit, and a major reason is because America no longer feels like a friend to Britain, or Europe.

I know a lot of Americans have been asking how America is going to survive a second Trump term, but here in Britain, a lot of us think, quite simply, that Trump is America, that he and his government embody so much of that sickening underbelly that America would rather not see of itself.

Sorry to say these harsh things, because on an individual level, many Americans are warm, wonderful people. But fuck me, this is the underbelly bursting forth like the Alien out of John Hurt's chest. And very few of us are actually that surprised...

Edited Wednesday at 05:25 PM by jd13

[SomewhereonNeptune]

1 hour ago, jd13 said:

I know a lot of Americans have been asking how America is going to survive a second Trump term, but here in Britain, a lot of us think, quite simply, that Trump is America, that he and his government embody so much of that sickening underbelly that America would rather not see of itself.

Sorry to say these harsh things, because on an individual level, many Americans are warm, wonderful people. But fuck me, this is the underbelly bursting forth like the Alien out of John Hurt's chest. And very few of us are actually that surprised...

Because, well, we ARE warm wonderful people for the most part. 😃 This is why I don't often wade into this sub-forum, but I wanted to give y'all some perspective, because most people can and do want to have civil dialogue and not have political division.

Consider that the majority of voting Americans had reasons to vote for a change as they weren't aligned with the Biden administration's direction. For 4 years, a lot of us were gaslighted about 'what was right' and 'what was wrong', told we were 'racist' for not buying into the narratives we were being fed by the media. The media out and out lied about the mental state of Biden, which has now come out in various books written by people who have worked with him directly, and people saw it fall to pieces during the Presidential debate. Simply, the emperor had no clothes and there wasn't anything to hide or explain away. And parents at school board meetings who are concerned about their kids did not deserve to be branded as 'domestic terrorists'.

We were also told there was nothing that could be done about our border security. We now realize that was wrong since we can look at the state of the border since January and see that got-aways are down by over 90%. Now that we have a policy about the treatment of TdA and MS-13, we see one party rallying to the defense of a single individual who was ruled as deportable. Twice. And a certain senator is quick to want to fly down there and return a gang leader to Maryland, but was noticeably silent on the murders committed in his state by MS-13. Now I'm an 'independent' voter, more aligned to issues and probably closer to libertarian in beliefs, and I've been finding that many of my friends who were on the fence are not leaning into the Democratic Party here because they've lost the plot on what they stand for. Other than hating Trump but offering few, if any, solutions. Their words.

We could go on but I'll stop there. I also have quite a few friends in the UK -- former colleagues, friends, the like. A couple of them are like you and struggling to understand what is happening. I don't blame them. One of them is a good friend but we'll never see eye to eye, and that's ok. A few others I've had here as guests and took them to the shooting range. They were open-minded but not very pro-gun. I'm a gun owner a few times over. Once they got the hang of it, they had a good time and a very different outlook. Being American and living in Florida is a much different experience than British living in the midlands or London. They understand it more, I won't say we always agree.

There are a few things to keep in mind about most Americans:

• The media stopped being about facts long ago, so very few are trustworthy and all are focused on spin. 
• Americans DO want a closer relationship with our allies. We don't want to alienate them, but we don't always see things the same way.
• We're not racists. Or fascists. That's just people spewing the term without an argument behind it in most cases. If you can cite an example in this administration, I can probably cite a few in the prior one, but it's just not worth the vitriol that comes from most arguments.
• Most Americans -- as shown through DOGE's discoveries -- are tired of the lack of financial transparency in our government. There's a whole discussion in that, but we're spending beyond our means for really stupid shit that doesn't benefit us (though it's likely making politicians like Stacey Abrams rich).
• And most Americans are tired of seeing our country give itself away and letting our jobs flee to places like China or India or Mexico where it diminishes our living standard. So some things need to change.

But please don't mistake people that voted for Trump as being symbolic of the average American -- they aren't -- and try not to judge the chess game right now on each individual move. There's a longer game playing out here and it remains to be seen if it'll be successful. In some ways, it has been. It's a massive shift from the past 4 years of us not really knowing who controlled the auto-pen or who actually was leading us, and people are probably not very comfortable with the rapid change of pace. I just wanted to weigh in on your post only, I'm not responding to ad hominem attacks if we disagree. 

Just because we might not agree on every single issue doesn't mean we can't be civil or either of us can't be allies. Hope this provides some perspective.
Peace, mate.

[jd13]

7 minutes ago, SomewhereonNeptune said:

Because, well, we ARE warm wonderful people for the most part. 😃

I completely agree, and you give some good, detailed perspectives here from the inside of the US. I guess I was just trying to give an external, cultural perspective - not that detailed tbh - from here in Britain. Peace to you too man 😉 

***

The other thing that I didn't say here, but have said elsewhere, is never underestimate the power of a Crisis Cult. Saw it a bit here with Brexit, and then the whole thing with Boris Johnson... and yeah, if I ever criticise the US for voting for Trump, never forget that Brits gave that utter fucking imbecile Boris Johnson a landslide election victory in 2019.

I do believe Trump's rise owes an enormous debt to crisis cult psychology. There's something kinda 'John Frum' about the evangelicals who are devoted to him, like he is literally the Second Coming who will make all this liberal, gay rights, civil rights, women's self determination, progressive stuff just.... disappear.

There's an old anthropology story about some Melanesian islanders who believed that if they danced a certain way, and prayed really hard, that Sydney Harbour Bridge would appear on the mountain, and they would become wealthy Australians. John Frum. Or the 19th century Native American Ghost Dances in response to the mass killing of all the bisons and the destruction of Plains Native cultures.

The sign of something that's dying, and this is the last gasp. Psychologists call it Extinction Burst. This really has the feel of that for me...

Edited Wednesday at 07:17 PM by jd13

[SomewhereonNeptune]

Just now, jd13 said:

I completely agree, and you give some good, detailed perspectives here from the inside of the US. I guess I was just trying to give an external, cultural perspective - not that detailed tbh - from here in Britain. Peace to you too man 😉 

Sure thing. Americans are largely likable. Maybe some of them are loud, but that's how you can identify them abroad. 🤣 Besides, most of them don't have passports anyway because our country is so damn big there's not a huge need to travel beyond it. 😃 And some of us like Piers Morgan, though I'm still on the fence.

[jd13]

3 minutes ago, SomewhereonNeptune said:

Sure thing. Americans are largely likable. Maybe some of them are loud, but that's how you can identify them abroad. 🤣 Besides, most of them don't have passports anyway because our country is so damn big there's not a huge need to travel beyond it. 😃 And some of us like Piers Morgan, though I'm still on the fence.

It says a lot about Brits that we bloody hate Piers Morgan, even though he's one of us.

Btw, edited my post above to add a whole lot of stuff about Crisis Cults. Again, an external view, but still, something else I really feel is true about the true believers of the Trump Cult...

[fuzzybttm]

23 hours ago, TT2025 said:

As the title implies, I'm not quite sure if US citizens are concerned how the perception of their country is changing.

Here in the eastern flank of the EU, the society was always somewhat polarized in its views on US, but last few months the 'trans-atlantic' camp was hit like never before. And lessons learned will be hard to unlearn. 

Actually my views were shaken considerably. Spending my formative years oblivious of US involvement in affairs in Chile (etc.) and watching StarTrek and MacGyver I was buying all the 'do a good thing' and 'stand on the right side of history' stuff. After a heard from the US that it was Ukraine who started the war with Russia (presumably kidnapping Russian army and invading itself by it), followed by outright extortion by US top officials and half-aligning with Russia. (Odd silence after attack on civilian targets, lately at Sumy tells volumes.) I just can't fend off the thought that the 'do good' agenda was just a bate.

US is now projecting a Goodfellas version of itself around the globe and US citizens seem to be content. Only real pushback was due to self-inflicted stock market near crash.

So is it all just about the money? (Sincerely confused here.)

Of course many of us are concerned, petrified, mortified...  A solid half the country voted against the syphilitic cheeto, and of the half that did, many of them have been misled politically by charlatans on the right for decades.  It all comes down to two things:  (1) Branding, and (2) Zero-Sum Politics.  With respect to branding, there's a lot of folks who just won't cross party lines because the other party is the enemy, because political divisions are entrenched.  And increasingly parties are reflections of their most polarizing features, which in turn allows others to dismiss as caricatures.  Couple that with zero-sum politics where there's two parties and for one to win the other must lose, and there's no such thing as compromise.  It's been YEARS since the majority of the middle has managed to even come remotely close to accomplishing anything because Republicans refuse to advance anything that they can't pass without Democratic support, and when Republicans are in the minority they stonewall any democratic initiative.  Then on the flip side, Democrats are bad at drawing a line in the sand, saying "this is where this bill ends and we can't solve every issue all at once," and messaging a victory so they struggle to coherently articulate a position.  The modern Republican party is a party of opposition that is now governing, which is the worst of both worlds.  And many Americans recognize that.  If you scan domestic news, most are highly critical of the Administration; anti-Trump protests draw major crowds; and everyone's downright panicked that this time he might manage to break the government beyond simple repair.

In terms of perspective, most Americans you meet beyond the US's borders tend to be wealthier, tend to be more liberal, tend to be more educated.  Only half of Americans have a passport, and most Americans who have a passport use it exactly once (i.e. they get a passport for a specific trip and that's it).  So, not universally, but generally around the globe the average vacationing American you meet will look at Trump negatively.

In terms of the appearance of contentment, the US is almost as large as all of Europe, and contains certain geographic features (e.g. the Rocky Mountain Range) that significantly divide and disperse the population.  If, for instance, Belgians wanted to, they could easily congregate in Brussels and protest, with nobody having to travel particularly far or expend significant resources.  Not to pick on Belgians, just an example.  The US is almost 5000 KM across, that's not feasible.  This issue of scale plays out in all sorts of distributional ways in the US, but importantly it makes collective action hard to objectively recognize.  Meanwhile, news sources love to feature MAGA whackjobs hooting and hollering about how much they love what Trump is doing, because he's a cult leader.

Ultimately everything's about money, higher prices and inflation and an uneven recovery from Covid-19 led to disillusionment with the governing party and for all his flaws Trump is an excellent self-promoter with a natural instinct for generating news coverage of himself.  So he won the election against a politically weak incumbent.

Unfortunately, this is the hell we get to live in.  But I'd strongly caution against assuming we're all content with it, any educated American wouldn't assume that the average citizen in the UK or France or Germany or Italy backs Keir Starmer or Emmanuel Macron or Olaf Scholz or Giorgia Meloni...

[SomewhereonNeptune]

5 hours ago, jd13 said:

The other thing that I didn't say here, but have said elsewhere, is never underestimate the power of a Crisis Cult. Saw it a bit here with Brexit, and then the whole thing with Boris Johnson... and yeah, if I ever criticise the US for voting for Trump, never forget that Brits gave that utter fucking imbecile Boris Johnson a landslide election victory in 2019.

I do believe Trump's rise owes an enormous debt to crisis cult psychology. There's something kinda 'John Frum' about the evangelicals who are devoted to him, like he is literally the Second Coming who will make all this liberal, gay rights, civil rights, women's self determination, progressive stuff just.... disappear.

I'd argue against this because the average American doesn't view things as "Crisis Cult". Most of us want to go to work, come home to families, make a decent wage and just want peace, law & order. What we had before this back into late 2020 were "mostly peaceful protests" (which involved burning and looting and lawlessness); the FBI treating parents concerned about their kids as domestic terrorists when they complain about young girls being assaulted in a girls bathroom; being more concerned about the fate of criminals entering the US rather than the victims of crime who were citizens; and, just too many other things that were 'a bridge too far' for quite a few people. 

2 hours ago, fuzzybttm said:

It's been YEARS since the majority of the middle has managed to even come remotely close to accomplishing anything because Republicans refuse to advance anything that they can't pass without Democratic support, and when Republicans are in the minority they stonewall any democratic initiative.  Then on the flip side, Democrats are bad at drawing a line in the sand, saying "this is where this bill ends and we can't solve every issue all at once," and messaging a victory so they struggle to coherently articulate a position. 

I partially agree with this, since Americans want their elected officials to work in the interests of the country. And few of them do. I'm not far-right or far-left but somewhere in the center. That describes most people in the US outside of the major cities. My district voted very overwhelmingly for Trump because for good, bad or indifferent, he could articulate positions that resonated with Americans. Democrats? Well, they shoved Harris at us and struggled to articulate a vision. At least one that wasn't "hate Trump". I could ask the question of what they support and their overall popularity rate but we all know how that is.  Hell, Democrats are admitting that their messaging is awful, but they seem to be offering more of the same thing that didn't work. 

2 hours ago, fuzzybttm said:

If you scan domestic news, most are highly critical of the Administration; anti-Trump protests draw major crowds

So I don't know if everyone saw the outcomes published on these "major crowds", but quite a few bloggers pointed out some oddities. One, they were all reading from the same script. Literally, Written down word-for-word talking points. Second, many of them are paid protestors and they've been to a variety of these protests for various reasons. Same people, different city every day. Do they actually know or believe in what they're protesting, or are they protesting as long as the cash is flowing? Third, when you ask many of them what they're protesting, a lot are just angry but can't explain the anger or articulate it well. I watched the protestors by my local Tesla dealer. A couple anti-Musk or anti-Tesla signs, and then a lot of other signs. I was really waiting for someone to hold up "Pay toilets are fascist" because it lacked a cohesive message. Gonna protest? Super. Just make sure people come away with a resonant message while they drive by at 55 mph. 

Some good points though. Have you seen the Bill Maher monologue on dinner with Trump? Surprising and Maher is a liberal. 

By the way, I'll stop here. Be well.

Edited Thursday at 12:48 AM by SomewhereonNeptune

[viking8x6]

14 hours ago, SomewhereonNeptune said:

the FBI treating parents concerned about their kids as domestic terrorists when they complain about young girls being assaulted in a girls bathroom

This is a conflation of a variety of different events and political rhetoric. In your context, it serves the purpose of illustrating the perspective of the right wing American proletariat, but please remember that "false statements and conspiracy theories" are against the rules on BZ.  There are plenty of real examples of the powers in the left wing overstepping reasonable bounds without resorting to distortion of facts.

[fuckholedc]

On 4/15/2025 at 6:54 PM, TT2025 said:

As the title implies, I'm not quite sure if US citizens are concerned how the perception of their country is changing.

Yes.  But this is so far only about 1/2 of the US adult population so far.  Remember that the current president was elected with a plurality of the vote.  Given that and given current polls some 35-45% are not concerned though because these people are American Firsters which really mostly means isolationists but does include people who want America as a superdominant entity.

Quote

So is it all just about the money? (Sincerely confused here.)

It's not just about money no.  47's actions have galvanized an opposition that came too late.  But given the current crashing of the economy it is easy to see the results of ridiculously stupid policies and actions.

[PozBearWI]

2 hours ago, viking8x6 said:

This is a conflation of a variety of different events and political rhetoric. In your context, it serves the purpose of illustrating the perspective of the right wing American proletariat, but please remember that "false statements and conspiracy theories" are against the rules on BZ.  There are plenty of real examples of the powers in the left wing overstepping reasonable bounds without resorting to distortion of facts.

Although at the moment we are in a constitutional crisis.  

[nanana]

On 4/17/2025 at 11:21 AM, viking8x6 said:

This is a conflation of a variety of different events and political rhetoric. In your context, it serves the purpose of illustrating the perspective of the right wing American proletariat, but please remember that "false statements and conspiracy theories" are against the rules on BZ

Hi viking10x10 (a conflation of truths and elongations, exaggeration, hopefully I     won't be banned or even suspended for inflation...),

A favor to ask.  Since the editorial board of this wonderful site puts a high level of trust that its moderators actually have the facts, would you do us all a favor and make your next banning for "false statements and conspiracy theories" transparent and cite your sources?  It will help educate those of us that are vulnerable in our mastery of facts and our ability to avoid being prey to "conspiracy theories" and the vicious wolves in sheep's spandex that propound them.  It will help us all do a better job of staying on the animal farm.  

Thanks in advance for any less tortuous path to your truths and coincidence theories...

Best, 

nanana