In Their Own Words

The polling tells one story. The editorial pages of the world’s serious newspapers tell another. From Toronto to Tokyo, from Johannesburg to Munich, here is what they are actually writing about us.

A poll is a snapshot of what 28,000 people will tell a stranger over the phone. An editorial is what the editorial board of a serious newspaper has decided is true after the morning meeting. The first kind of document is easier to dismiss; the second kind is harder. Both kinds, right now, are telling the United States the same thing. The polling came out in June 2025 and the numbers were ugly. The editorial pages came out before that, kept coming through the trade war, kept coming through the September UK state visit, kept coming through the Caracas raid in January and the Iran war that began on February 28, and they have not let up. What follows is a tour of eight of them. Eight outlets, eight regions, eight verdicts. They do not agree on everything. They agree on more than the State Department would like.

A note on what counts. The headline of an editorial-board piece is the considered view of a newsroom of professional adults who have been arguing about this for a year. A signed op-ed by a contributing columnist is one degree softer, but the paper still chose to run it. A statement made by a head of state and reported as the lead news in a paper of record is not the paper’s view, but it tells you what the paper’s readers wake up to. Where the distinction matters below, I have flagged it. None of the quotes here are fabricated. Several were translated. The fact-check accompanying this piece lists every primary and secondary source.

Canada — The Globe and Mail

“The most dangerous man on the planet.”

Debra Thompson • The Globe and Mail • March 2, 2026

Two days after the Iran war opened with the killing of Ali Khamenei, the Globe ran a contributing columnist’s op-ed under a headline that called the sitting American president the most dangerous man on the planet. Thompson, a political scientist, catalogues the receipts: military action initiated eight times in 2025 across seven countries; the Maduro capture; the Greenland threats; and now Iran. The argument is not that any single act is unprecedented but that the pattern is. Trump campaigned as the anti-war candidate, took office promising to measure success by the wars he never got into, and within thirteen months had run that promise through a shredder. The Globe is not a left-wing paper. It is the closest thing English Canada has to a paper of record. When its op-ed page calls a sitting American president the most dangerous man alive, that is a country’s establishment talking, not its fringe.

France — Le Monde

“Trump, engineer of disorder.”

Editorial Board • Le Monde • April 30, 2025

At the 100-day mark, Le Monde’s unsigned lead editorial ran under that headline: Trump, ingénieur du désordre. The front page that day carried the companion line about a world made uncertain and worried by his presidency. The editorial argues that Trump inherited a healthy economy and plunged it into uncertainty through a trade war that was as radical as it was incoherent, that he has damaged the image of his country, that he is unable to influence the ongoing conflicts he promised to end, and that his administration is mistreating American institutions and trampling the rule of law. Le Monde is the French paper of record. Its editorial board does not write this way casually. The headline is not a complaint about chaos. It is the diagnosis that the chaos is the policy.

Germany — Süddeutsche Zeitung

“He will stop at nothing in the authoritarian transformation of society.”

Joachim Käppner • Süddeutsche Zeitung • June 2025

Käppner is a veteran historian and SZ commentator. His column argues that American democracy has withstood authoritarian temptations for over two and a half centuries, but that each passing week makes it less certain the institutions can hold against an unfettered executive. The line above — about a president who will stop at nothing — is a specific accusation, not an emotional one. Käppner’s point is that German politicians and historians have spent eighty years arguing about how to recognize an authoritarian project before it becomes irreversible, and Germany is now watching one unfold in real time in the country that wrote the textbook on stopping them. The Süddeutsche commentary makes the parallel quietly and refuses to back away from it.

United Kingdom — The Guardian

“Operation Epic Facepalm rapidly unspools.”

Marina Hyde • The Guardian • March 20, 2026

Hyde is the Guardian’s most-read columnist and her register is satirical, which is the British way of being deadly serious. Her column of March 20 tracks what happened to the British political and media establishment between the first week of the Iran war and the third. Reform UK’s Robert Jenrick attacked Keir Starmer for not joining the operation. Nigel Farage flew to Mar-a-Lago to deliver foreign policy points to Trump in person, only to find Trump had relocated to another Florida resort to avoid him. Two weeks later, after Trump publicly humiliated Starmer and threatened to cut off the UK, the same figures were quietly distancing themselves from a president they had spent a decade praising. The piece is funny. It is also the closest thing London has produced to an autopsy of the British right’s ten-year bet on Donald Trump.

Spain — El País

“You can’t play Russian roulette with the destiny of millions.”

Pedro Sánchez, reported in El País • March 4, 2026

A flag of honesty here. This is not an El País editorial. It is the Spanish Prime Minister’s public response, delivered in a televised national address on March 4, 2026, the day after Trump threatened to cut off all trade with Spain over Madrid’s refusal to let the US use the Rota and Morón bases to attack Iran. El País carried it as the lead story; the European Commission and European Council President António Costa publicly backed Madrid. Sánchez summed up his government’s position bluntly — no to war — and rejected the premise that opposing the ayatollahs required supporting what he called an unjustified and dangerous military intervention, warning that great wars often begin with a chain of events spiralling out of control. A NATO member of the European Union told the United States in March of 2026 that it would not be complicit out of fear of retaliation. The Spanish paper of record put that on its front page.

Japan — The Asahi Shimbun

“Trampling upon international law, state sovereignty and long-held alliances.”

Editorial Board • The Asahi Shimbun • January 19, 2026

The Asahi is Japan’s second-largest newspaper and the most prominent center-left voice in the Japanese press. Its January editorial recommended, in its headline, that after a year of Trump, Japan should align itself with peaceful nations rather than warring ones. The editorial opens by stating that the United States, once the protector of the post-Cold War order, is now trampling on the things it used to protect. It then argues that Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party government cannot keep its instinctive alignment with Washington without becoming complicit in what Washington is now doing. The recommendation is concrete: stand with the peaceful nations, not the warring ones. In Japan, where postwar identity has been built around the American alliance, an editorial telling the government to start choosing other partners is not a small thing.

Brazil — Folha de S.Paulo

“Trump wants to run the world through Twitter.”

Lula da Silva, reported in Folha de S.Paulo • January 23, 2026

An honest flag. The pull quote is the Brazilian president, reported in Folha — Brazil’s largest serious newspaper — not Folha’s editorial board. But the editorial board is on the record too. When Trump announced his 50 percent tariff on Brazil in July 2025 in explicit retaliation for the Bolsonaro coup prosecution, Folha de S.Paulo joined the other two major Brazilian papers — O Globo and Estadão, both right-of-center — in running editorials condemning the tariffs as an unprecedented attack on Brazilian sovereignty. That right-wing alignment with a leftist president against an American president is the political event. Lula himself put it simply: he has described Trump as a man trying to run the planet through social media, and has stated that Brazil will not accept any form of foreign tutelage. The Brazilian press has covered all of it with the tone of a country watching a former friend lose his grip.

South Africa — Daily Maverick

“Alarming Putinesque imperialist tendencies.”

Peter Fabricius • Daily Maverick • January 12, 2025

South Africa’s leading independent investigative outlet ran that line eight days before Trump’s second inauguration, anticipating exactly what then unfolded across 2025: the executive order cutting off US aid to South Africa, the “Afrikaner refugee” designation, the threat to South Africa’s preferential trade access under AGOA, and the wider pattern of a tariff-wielding leader of the world’s greatest power treating other countries as personal property. Fabricius is the Maverick’s foreign affairs writer; his description was provocative when it ran. It looks, sixteen months later, like understatement. South Africa was the first country to take an Israeli genocide case to the International Court of Justice. The United States, in the same window, became the first country since the Cold War to threaten a NATO ally with a trade blockade for refusing to bomb a third country.

The Pattern Beneath the Quotes

Eight outlets across six regions, writing across sixteen months, using their own languages, their own histories, their own house styles, arriving at versions of the same sentence. The Canadian paper of record calls the American president the most dangerous man alive. The French paper of record names him the engineer of disorder. The German commentator describes an authoritarian transformation. The British satirist tracks the establishment’s panicked exit from a ten-year bet. The Spanish paper carries a NATO ally refusing to be a vassal. The Japanese paper tells its government to find new partners. The Brazilian paper carries a head of state describing the American president as a man trying to run the planet through social media. The South African paper, before any of it happened, named the imperial drift.

The thing those quotes share is not anti-Americanism. None of these outlets are anti-American by any working definition; several have spent decades being among the most pro-American institutions in their countries. The thing they share is the conviction that the country writing the rules has stopped following them. That is the diagnosis. It runs through Pew’s 24-country survey and it runs through the editorial pages, and the editorial pages came first.

This matters for one reason beyond hurt feelings. A nuclear-armed superpower is judged by how it uses the privileges of that status. When it uses them to bomb non-nuclear states into regime change, threaten allies with trade blockades for refusing to participate, and seize the territory of smaller neighbors by economic coercion, the world’s serious newspapers notice. They do not call a sitting American president the most dangerous man alive lightly. They do it because the evidence is in front of them every morning and they have decided to be honest about what they see. That is what the editorial pages of the rest of the world are doing in 2026. The American press, with a few exceptions, is still calibrating whether to call any of this by its name.

The polling told one story. The editorial pages tell another. They are the same story.