Americans have a lower view of President Joe Biden’s leadership than any other nation surveyed in a recent global poll. People living in Europe, Asia, and Canada all have a higher opinion of Biden’s leadership than the citizens of the United States, it found.
“Americans are the least confident in Biden out of all publics [nations] surveyed,” reported the Pew Research Center survey of how much trust different countries put in global leaders.
Pew asked people in 17 nations how much confidence they had in different world leaders “to do the right thing regarding world affairs.”
Pollsters found that American trust in Biden fell 14 percentage points below the global average. In all, 60% of Americans said they believed in Biden’s intellectual competence, a more negative response than any other country, and well below the global average of 74%. Citizens of The Netherlands showed the greatest support for Biden, at 86%.
The Pew poll results also revealed a lopsided, if unsurprising, partisan disagreement: 88% of Democrats backed Biden’s decision-making ability, while only 27% of Republicans did so.
That 61-point confidence gap is a larger disagreement than Americans have over any other national leader, including Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Democrats are 8% more likely to trust Xi Jinping, who eliminated the two-term limit placed on presidents from the Chinese Communist Party’s constitution, something critics say clears the way for him to become president for life. Republicans were 8% more likely than Democrats to support Putin.
There are a few possible takeaways from this survey. European nations may be happy to be rid of President Donald Trump, whose “America First” agenda offered the first real critique in decades of unfair U.S.-EU trade arrangements and demanded that fellow NATO members shoulder their share of the common defense. Or perhaps EU member nations support Joe Biden, because he accepts a more “Eurosocialist” view of an ever-expanding entitlement and welfare state; at heart, EU elites see Biden as one of their own. Then again, maybe they simply see him as offering them better deals and making fewer demands of them, like the grandfather who freely opens his wallet at each visit.
An important lesson from this poll is that it proves the U.S. media’s tilt toward the left. Nations around the world rely on the U.S. media to accurately portray the American political situation. Foreign citizens, including foreign news outlets, imbibe U.S. legacy media bias, having their views of the United States shaped and molded by American journalists’ subtle and not-so-subtle political motivations. Since foreigners don’t know they cannot take stories in CNN or The New York Times at face value, as many Americans do, they believe its view of the White House.
And as another recent Pew poll found, the U.S. media have given Joe Biden less negative media coverage than any president in modern history. (Biden nevertheless remains fixated on “negative” questions from reporters at his rare press conferences.)
A related point is that world leaders typically got the lowest marks from those with the most information. The nations closest to leaders, who presumably have the greatest knowledge about them, paint the most unflattering portrait:
- Japan had the least regard for Xi Jinping;
- Sweden gave Putin his worst reviews;
- Italy held the lowest confidence in French President Emanuel Macron; and
- Americans, who know Joe Biden the best, had the most negative view of the Biden-Harris administration.
Knowledge of an individual’s failures and limitations creates skepticism and the desire to limit the amount of power they can yield over their fellow citizens. That’s a lesson worth learning in any nation.