23 Percent: The World Has Rendered Its Verdict on Trump's Second Term

The number is 23. That is the median share of adults across 36 countries who told Pew Research Center they have confidence in Donald Trump's leadership of world affairs, according to a survey released June 23, 2026. Not a margin. Not a rounding error. A number that lands with the quiet authority of a verdict.

Pew has been asking this question for more than two decades. The institution knows what normal looks like. What it found in the spring of 2026, after interviewing 42, 151 people across six continents from February through May, is not normal.

Favorable views of the United States have declined in many countries over the past year, including double-digit drops in Indonesia, Italy, Nigeria, South Africa, South Korea, and Turkey. The share of people who consider the United States a reliable partner has fallen steeply across numerous countries since the last time Pew asked this question, in 2022, during Joe Biden's presidency. These are not poll fluctuations. They are measurements of a structural shift.

The White House has a ready answer for all of this. The Trump administration has framed its foreign policy as America First in action, a phrase it applied explicitly to the Iran agreement announced June 19, 2026. The argument, consistent since inauguration, is that decades of multilateral consensus built American weakness into the system, and that disruption is the point, not a side effect. Foreign displeasure, in this framing, is confirmation that the strategy is working.

That argument deserves to be taken seriously. It also deserves to be tested against the record.

What the record shows is this: the countries registering the sharpest drops in U.S. favorability are not adversaries. Indonesia, South Korea, Nigeria, South Africa, Turkey, and Italy are treaty partners, trade partners, or both. South Korea hosts American troops under a mutual defense treaty. Italy is a NATO member. Nigeria is the largest economy in sub-Saharan Africa and a significant energy partner. Indonesia is the world's fourth most populous country and a strategically important Pacific nation. When these countries move, they do not move in isolation. They move capital, alignments, and purchasing decisions with them.

The survey asked specifically about Trump's handling of tariffs, Gaza, Iran, Greenland, and the Russia-Ukraine war. He received mostly poor marks on each. This is not an abstract reputation index. These are the policy files that determine whether allies share intelligence, whether partners absorb the costs of shared security, whether governments can survive domestically if they stand too close to Washington. Each poor mark on a specific file is a liability in a specific negotiating room.

The exception in the data is Israel, where 81 percent of adults rate the United States favorably, the highest figure in the survey. That number is not incidental. It reflects the scope of U.S. support for Israeli operations in Gaza, which the survey confirms has cost Washington credibility across predominantly Muslim publics in Malaysia, Pakistan, Turkey, and among Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. The trade is visible in the numbers: one relationship reinforced at the cost of a wider regional standing.

Some of the lowest ratings come from predominantly Muslim-majority publics, and the survey could not reach Gaza, a fact Pew disclosed explicitly. The absence matters. Gaza is the most-watched military operation in the world right now, and the population most directly affected by it is unmeasurable in this dataset. What can be measured is the reaction across the Islamic world's major democracies and it is sharply negative.

Here is the figure that deserves more attention than it will likely receive: the decline in the reliable partner question is being measured against Biden-era numbers from 2022, not against Trump's first term. That means the baseline for the comparison is a period of active alliance repair. The United States spent 2021 and 2022 rebuilding what the first Trump term cost. The current survey measures how much of that rebuilt standing has been lost in the first year and a half of the second term. The answer, in double-digit drops across six major countries, is: most of it.

This matters for a reason that goes beyond sentiment. Alliance systems run on credibility, and credibility runs on perceived reliability. When South Korea, a country that depends on the U.S. defense umbrella to deter a nuclear-armed neighbor, records a double-digit drop in favorable views, that is a security problem. Not because South Korea will abrogate its treaty tomorrow, but because the political costs to South Korean leaders of cooperation with Washington rise every time that number drops. The math of alliance management becomes harder. The votes in the UN Security Council become less predictable. The quiet coordination on sanctions enforcement becomes less automatic.

The administration's theory of the case is that respect follows strength, and that the multilateral consensus Washington previously led was a subsidy to free-riders. There is a real argument there. But the Pew data does not show a world that has been shocked into respect. It shows a world that has been shocked into recalculation. Those are different outcomes.

Recalculation looks like this: middle-income nations, according to the survey, largely agree that the United States interferes in other countries' affairs. That is a phrase with a long history in the global south. When it gains majority support in countries that previously maintained ambivalence about American power, it does not stay at the level of opinion. It becomes a political resource for governments that want to build distance, justify alternative alignments, or deflect American pressure on human rights, rule of law, or trade compliance.

The survey also finds that European views of Trump and the United States are especially negative. This comes at a moment when the Ukraine war is still unresolved. The UN Security Council briefing of June 22 called explicitly for resumed diplomatic efforts toward a full ceasefire, warning of rising civilian deaths and attacks on historic monuments. The European security architecture, already strained, is being asked to absorb additional uncertainty about American commitment precisely when the war that most tests that commitment has not ended.

The White House has not publicly responded to the Pew findings as of June 23, 2026. Its news releases that day covered a FAR regulatory overhaul and Senate nominations. The silence is its own data point.

Here is what the 23 percent figure actually measures. It is not a measure of whether foreign publics like Donald Trump personally, though they do not. It is a measure of whether the world believes American power, as currently exercised, is oriented toward outcomes they can rely on. When that number is 23, the leaders who need domestic political cover to side with Washington in a crisis do not have it. The institutions that coordinate with American policy on the assumption of shared norms find those norms contested. The agreements that depend on trust in American follow-through get priced accordingly.

The argument that foreign disapproval is proof of American strength would be more persuasive if the countries disapproving were adversaries. When the countries registering the sharpest declines are South Korea, Italy, and Nigeria, the argument requires more work than the administration has publicly done.

Twenty-three percent is not a polling problem. It is a strategic environment. The world is not waiting to see if the number improves. It is already making decisions based on it.