Confidence in Trump and the US's reliability declines across Europe

The US is gearing up to celebrate 250 years of independence on 4 July, but across the Atlantic, European views of the country and its President, Donald Trump, are not particularly festive.

More than eight out of 10 citizens in Sweden, the Netherlands, France, Germany, and Italy lack confidence in Trump to do the right thing regarding world affairs, according to a new Pew Research Centre study.

Trump’s confidence ratings have significantly dropped in eight European countries since 2025, including drops of 15 percentage points in Greece and Italy.

Generally, the US president is more popular among Europeans with favourable views of right-wing populist parties. However, even their confidence has declined.

For instance, support for Trump among Greeks in the Greek Solution party dropped 29 percentage points between 2025 and 2026.

In addition, 49% of Italians with a positive view of Brothers of Italy had confidence in Trump in 2025, compared with only 30% this year.

Do Europeans think the US takes European interests into account?

A median of 85% of French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Dutch, Polish, Spanish, Swedish, and British respondents disapprove of the way the US President is handling Greenland and tariffs.

Trump has made repeated comments since 2025 about his desire to acquire the Danish autonomous territory of Greenland, as he said it was important for the US’s national security. This boiled into a diplomatic crisis when, in early 2026, he refused to rule out military force to take the island and threatened a tax on goods from European countries unless Denmark gave up control.

The president has since reversed course and dialled down his rhetoric on Greenland, but continues to threaten Europe with tariffs, most recently against any country that introduces a digital services tax on American technology giants.

These aren’t the only issues that Europeans think Trump is handling badly. According to the survey, 78% of respondents across the 10 countries studied do not approve of how he is dealing with the wars in Ukraine and in Iran.

The US is also no longer seen as reliable in many European nations.

Hungary and Poland are the only countries where a majority say the US is a dependable partner.

In fact, Hungarians are more likely to hold this view now than in the previous Pew Research survey in 2022, during the Biden administration.

However, in eight other nations, the share that thinks the US is reliable has fallen between 28 and 52 percentage points since 2022.

Europeans have also become less likely to think the US considers other countries’ interests when making foreign policy, with significant declines in Germany and the UK.

Between 2022 and 2026, this point of view halved in the UK, Germany, Poland, Spain, and France.

“In countries where we’ve asked this question many times over the years, attitudes resemble what we found in the early and mid-2000s, another period of trans-Atlantic tensions resulting from a war in the Middle East and other issues,” the study noted.

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