‘The US is seen as a joke’: American expats on Trump, Biden and the 2024 election

An election in which 1 in 6 Americans don’t like either candidate is new territory. And no one finds themselves more called upon to defend their country’s choices than the Americans who currently live abroad.

Studies show there are clear differences in how the US is seen by outsiders when Democrats are in the White House versus when Republicans are. Democrats have held the White House for 11 out of the last 15 years. And for those 11 years, international views of the US were generally quite positive.

Jacob Poushter, an associate director at Pew Research Center, tells The Independent that “in surveys that we conducted in 2017 around the world, we did see a precipitous decline in favourable views of the US”following the inauguration of President Donald Trump.

“In particular, confidence in President Trump’s ability to handle international affairs was drastically lower than [President Barack] Obama’s, across virtually all the countries surveyed,” he adds.

Haylee Pearson, 33, experienced this firsthand while living in Madrid, Spain.

“When Trump won, everybody wanted to hear my thoughts on Trump: ‘What do you think about Trump? What do your parents think about Trump? Do you own a gun? Does your parents own a gun?’” she says. As an American expat in western Europe, she experienced a frenzy of questions from interested people throughout Trump’s term.

“All of these taboo things would be in what seemed like a very trivial question [from] someone who I just met at a party or just met in a work setting,” she says. “Their genuine curiosity was actually incredibly difficult for me – [it was hard] to explain all the time because I felt like I had to caveat like, ‘Oh, I don’t support Trump. I don’t agree with Trump. Please don’t put me