Speaking of laughing stocks, here is are two views from Americans traveling in Europe, from quora.
Is the USA more respected now (with Trump) than when Obama was President?
Misty Wineland, Business Owner/Designer (2007-present)
Updated Sun
My husband and I recently traveled to Europe and visited Ireland, Scotland, England, and Italy over the course of a month. Every…single…person we met was disgusted by trump. The street artists drew his likeness in ways that mocked him, bookstores sold books that made fun of him, and the people that met us made a face as soon as they recognized us as American and instantly asked if we liked trump. Once we made it clear that we would never vote for him, their demeanor towards us softened and they welcomed us. Most feel sorry for us. Embarrassed for us. Every walk of life, 4 different countries, all the same response.
The day he backed out of the Paris accord, we were in Italy and the entire day even the very friendly bus drivers shunned us like a plague. If we spoke English, we had glares bearing down on us from every corner of the room, even from the teenagers. Luckily for me I spoke some Italian!
I also speak with people from all over the world in my day to day life and I have yet to meet anyone who thought highly of trump.
So no, we are NOT more respected. In fact we are a laughing stock. An untrustworthy ally. A country that once was considered great that has regressed. A country so selfish that we have installed a sexist, vile, dishonest con artist in our white house all for the sake of money and greed who manages to alienate our allies while boosting our enemies' ego.
Peter Brabeck
Sep 10 · 228 upvotes including Misty Wineland
I spent a month before our 2016 election touring Canada by rail from Vancouver to Halifax and back. On board and in Nova Scotia, I met many wonderful Canadians, and many great foreign visitors as well.
During two weeks aboard the train, I enjoyed interesting discussions with different people from a broad variety of life and many different countries. To a person, each was aghast at the idea that the world’s bastion of freedom and democracy ever would allow an aberration of the human species like Donald Trump on any American national ticket let alone our highest office. Yet, here we are.
Keeping abreast of responsible media sources, rather than the real fake news, I’m aware that unfortunately, Misty is not 100% correct in stating that Europeans uniformly are disgusted by Trump and his obsequious far right sycophants; I only wish that was true. Misty, possibly like myself, may have interacted primarily with like-minded people.
The ugliness which has dominated Poland and Hungary, and threatens Italy and Germany, as well as other West European countries such as Britain and Sweden, is a stark image of that which already has established a stranglehold in America in the form of Trump and his Republican enablers (or is it the other way around?)
I admire Misty’s optimism, but if we repeat our 2016 mistakes of apathy, complacency, and lack of being reliably informed in 2018, and again in 2020, then we’ve only ourselves to blame for the loss of the America which we inherited through the unprecedented efforts and sacrifices of the Greatest Generation in preserving our heritage through our time of greatest national peril of the Great Depression and World War Two, and the America which we’ve prided ourselves in bequeathing to our children and grandchildren.
Our peril today stands at the cusp of being more sinister than theirs, for its source is within rather than without. It’s good to know that Misty has found that sanity still rules the day throughout most of the world, but it’s hanging on by a progressively thinner margin.
The good news is that Misty got it right. It’s not too late to salvage ourselves from the oppression and insanity of right wing Trumpianism. But the time when it will become too late is approaching sooner rather than later. Only we can take things into our own hands and rescue America’s nearly 250-year-old ship of state, and with it our long tradition of proving to the world that a noble experiment in self-governing democracy not only works, it survives.
more comments at quora.com |
