'Provide troubled world with moral leadership': Sanders says Trump hurt US image abroad

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) is never one to mince words when criticizing the Trump administration, and he lamented the decline in the United States' global image after the Pew Research Center revealed its findings on the country's perception abroad. "There was once a time when the U.S. inspired the world through its commitment to democracy and justice. Sadly, under Trump, that's no longer the case. But together, we can and will reclaim our values and once again provide a troubled world with the moral leadership it needs," he wrote on X.

The 84-year-old's Saturday post came after Pew found that China is now viewed more positively than the U.S. in 25 of the 36 countries and territories surveyed—the first time in the roughly 20 years Pew has tracked global opinion that China has topped the U.S. Just three years ago, the U.S. led China by 26 percentage points in favorability; that gap has now flipped in Beijing's favor, with several Asia-Pacific and Middle Eastern countries leading the pack.

The trend has mirrored the countries' respective leaders—confidence that Trump will do the right thing in world affairs has declined significantly. Many people still lack confidence in Xi, but positive views of him have become more widespread. More people overall now say they have confidence in the Chinese leader than in Trump—a reversal from the latter half of Joe Biden's presidency, when confidence in Biden outpaced confidence in Xi despite Biden's own ratings declining in many places around 2024.

The one area where the U.S. still outpaces China is personal freedoms: More people say the U.S. government respects its people's personal freedoms than say the same of China's government. But that gap is narrowing, driven largely by a decline in the share of people saying the U.S. respects those freedoms. The results are based on surveys of 42,151 adults conducted from February 8 to May 13, 2026. Only six out of 36 countries sided with the US—Poland, the Philippines, South Korea, India, Japan, and Israel.

There are multiple reasons for the decline in global views of the U.S., Laura Silver, associate director of Pew's Global Attitudes Research and one of the researchers on the study, told NPR. Trump's demands to control Greenland, the American military raid that captured Venezuela's then-leader Nicolás Maduro, and the U.S. handling of the Israeli-Hamas war in Gaza have all led to low approval in many countries, she said, adding that people increasingly see the U.S. as failing to contribute to global peace and stability.