The United States' reputation internationally has taken a massive hit in recent weeks, partially as a result of both President Donald Trump's rollout of sweeping new tariffs and by the Trump administration taking a radically different approach to European and Middle Eastern policy compared to his predecessors. Now, one former national security official has a theory about the root cause of this antipathy — and how it actually goes beyond the current administration.
During a Friday segment on MSNBC, Ben Rhodes — who was deputy national security advisor to former President Barack Obama — pointed out that Trump was elected to the presidency twice. And that during his 2024 campaign for the White House, he ran on "mass tariffs, mass deportations [and] destruction of the U.S. administrative state." And Rhodes observed that Trump was elected again in spite of his turbulent first term, signifying to the international community that the American public actively chose "chaos."
"What the rest of the world has watched is, after the chaos of the first Trump presidency, after the chaos of January 6th ... he got elected on that platform with a bigger margin than he won eight years ago," Rhodes said. "And so the hard thing that we all have to reckon with is, it's not like Donald Trump is just doing this. He was elected to do these things."
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Rhodes went on to argue that Trump's reelection has broken the "trust" other countries previously had in the United States, and that regaining that trust will take more than one election cycle. He proposed that regaining that trust and retaking power would require a "regeneration of American politics" in which Democrats embrace their identity as an opposition party and leadership is handed off to an entirely new generation.
"They don't trust the president of United States and Donald Trump, and they don't trust America because we elected Donald Trump twice, and we have to deal with that now," he said.
"So how do we come back from this? ... We're kind of waiting for the Democratic Party to come up with some formula in a laboratory in Washington. We're waiting for some politician to emerge with the right talking points or messaging strategy or the right electoral strategy every four years in Wisconsin," he continued. "It's going to have to involve people that are not in politics getting involved. It's going to have to be people looking out for one another. It's got to be people standing up for things that they believe in."
Rhodes emphasized that "the rest of the world isn't just seeing Trump," but seeing American businesses "capitulate" to the administration, tech CEOs "become lackeys of Trump," law firms "fold" for the sake of profit and American universities "get rolled." He concluded that the international community is still "waiting to see whether there's a different America" than the one that elected Trump twice.
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Watch the full segment below, or by clicking this link.