Bob Beck's Foreign Policy Blog

In an interview in the June 2025 edition of the Atlantic magazine, President Trump boasted of his second term, “I run the country and the world.”  While our putative American Caesar may believe he possesses illimitable power on the global scene, a series of international elections since his inauguration have cast doubt on the veracity of his Atlantic rodomontade. 

Let’s start to the north with our heretofore closest friends, the Canadians. In a general election that was originally projected to bring the country’s conservative party back to power in a strong rebuke to the liberal government of resigning, long-time Premier Justin Trudeau, the liberals cruised to victory on a decidedly anti-Trump campaign. Conservative party leader Pierre Poilievre, who even lost his seat in parliament in the plebiscite, gradually distanced himself from Trump during the campaign due to the president’s inflammatory diction on trade and the 51st state drivel. Suffice it to say, Canada voted against Trump in a big way.

Farther afield, in May of this year Romania voted in consequential presidential elections that pitted Nicușor Dan, the liberal mayor of the country’s capital city, Bucharest, against George Simion, a hard-right devotee of America’s hyperbolic overlord. Simion, who promised to “make Romania great again,” campaigned on an anti-Ukraine, anti-European Union (EU) program while the soft-spoken Dan, the anti-Trump, called for continued support to Kyiv and increased cooperation with the EU. By a slight margin, Dan won the polls which Simion, true to his Trumpian roots, immediately claimed were rigged.  

Moving Down Under, our Aussie allies carried out general elections in May to determine the next government. The labor prime minister, Anthony Albanese, had been languishing in opinion polls prior to Trump’s return to power in Washington as Australians were critical of the incumbent on a host of domestic issues. However, Albanese sprinted to a convincing victory, thanks in large part to his main competitor’s—center right leader Peter Dutton—embrace of the US President. Against the backdrop of punitive tariff threats and Trump’s seemingly vindictive foreign policies, highlighted by the late February White House beat-down of Ukrainian President Zelensky, the proud Aussies made their preferences quite clear in the resounding victory for the center-left. 

Returning to the European continent, the Trump brand fared much better in two other significant plebiscites. In Berlin, the alt-right, populist AfD party (Alternative für Deutschland) finished a strong second in general elections held February 23, 2025. Although they were kept out of a coalition government by Germany’s main centrist parties, AfD, with strong support from Vice President Vance and Elon Musk, at the time President Trump’s primary bromance partner, served notice that their days on the political fringe are over. Given the party’s ties to neo-Nazism, its open disdain for the EU, and embrace of Russia, AfD’s eventual rise to power in the heart of Europe would pose a serious challenge to the current Brussel’s-led continental governance. 

Roughly 360 miles due east of Berlin as the European Swallow flies across the North German plain, Polish polls were also the subject of intense White House interest. In a tightly contested presidential contest, conservative historian and political novice, Karol Nawrocki, defeated the liberal mayor of Warsaw, Rafal Trzaskowski, by less than two percentage points. Because of the inherent powers in the Polish presidency, Nawrocki’s victory likely condemns the country to increased political stalemate, thwarting the attempts of Warsaw’s current centrist regime to improve relations with the EU. 

In the lead-up to the election, which highlighted the deep fissures in Polish society on cultural issues as well as relations with Brussels, conservative heavyweights from Europe and America actively supported the Nawrocki candidacy. America’s Secretary of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem, whose political cheerleading prowess seemingly far exceeds her grasp of core legal concepts, made an impassioned, and ultimately successful, plea at a conference in Poland in late May to elect Nawrocki.

Consequently, Trump’s influence on foreign voters has been mixed since he returned to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. It is clear from his and his team’s fervent support for conservative candidates across the globe that he believes his own oratory about running the world. However, empirical data—those dreaded facts—from the past six months indicate that a significant portion of the world’s citizenry is not interested in buying what Trump 2.0 is selling.

Note: This article was published by both the Monadnock Ledger-Transcript (10 July) and the Brattleboro Reformer (8 July).