'Dark undertone': For some overseas, Trump policies put a dent in Lady Liberty's promise

USA Today

06-04-2025

'Dark undertone': For some overseas, Trump policies put a dent in Lady Liberty's promise
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French politician wants Statue of Liberty back, White House says no
White House said it would not return the Statue of Liberty, a gift from France, after a French politician asked for it back.
It was partly a joke. Sarcastic, mocking, not without irony. As the crowd cheered him on, Raphaël Glucksmann said the U.S. should give France its statue back.
"We gave it to you as a gift, but apparently you despise it. So it will be just fine here at home," Glucksmann, a 45-year-old co-president of a small left-wing party in France, said with a big smile on his face to applause and whistles at a political rally in mid-March.
Glucksmann was referring to the Statue of Liberty, given to the U.S. by France as an emblem of friendship in 1884. The statue was the brainchild of an anti-slavery activist. It is recognized as a symbol of welcome, freedom and democracy.
President Donald Trump has dramatically shifted the U.S.'s foreign and domestic policy. Tourists are detained at the border and college students taken and held in detention centers. Sweeping tariffs on trading partners. Threats to annex allies, casting doubts on the NATO security alliance and U.S. support for Ukraine against Russia.
Glucksmann was suggesting the U.S. no longer lives up to the values the gift represents.
"From Europe, what we are seeing is not only that Trump is dumping us and dumping Ukraine," Glucksmann said in an interview with USA TODAY. "But that there is a total change of alliance."
For some people overseas, Trump has dented Lady Liberty's promise.
Almost three months into Trump's second term, his administration has introduced a flood of new policies and rhetoric it says will make the U.S. safer, more competitive, and richer, and help it preserve American culture and values. But these changes have caused some foreign travelers, students, academics, business leaders and lawmakers to question whether the America they knew and admired has lost some of its shine.
'President Trump is Making America Great Again. He is fulfilling his promise to eliminate the radical left-wing ideology that has poisoned our nation over the last four years," said National Security Council spokesperson Brian Hughes. "We do not pay attention to the opinions of backbenchers from foreign countries," he said, referring to Glucksmann.
A drop in travel to the U.S.
Still, the anxiety this is fueling is already showing up in projected foreign traveler arrivals for the U.S. for 2025. They are expected to decline by 5.1% compared to last year, and against a previously projected increase of 8.8%, according to a recent report by Tourism Economics, a global travel consultancy.
What's more, according to YouGov, a U.K.-based digital research firm, favorable attitudes toward the U.S. have slumped in Western Europe since Trump's election. More than half of people in Britain (53%), Germany (56%), Sweden (63%) and Denmark (74%) now have a poor opinion of the U.S. That's the lowest percentages since 2016, when Trump took office for the first time.
Among the reasons cited by those surveyed: Trump's tariffs, his vow to seize Greenland, and his willingness to negotiate with Russia over the conflict in Ukraine, including a highly public Oval Office spat with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy that looked to some like bullying a world leader who has spent the last three years watching tens of thousands of Ukrainian civilians be killed by Russia, the war's aggressor.
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In love with the U.S.
One of the new doubters is Sheldon Miller.
He is the founder of an English startup that buys pre-owned products and refurbishes them before selling them on the Internet. Miller describes himself as an enthusiastic and regular visitor to the U.S. He has visited over half of the U.S. states. He even proposed to his wife on New York's Brooklyn Bridge.
Miller is not a public figure or expert in foreign policy or U.S. domestic affairs. But he is a big fan of the U.S. He has long been captivated by its culture, from its politics to its movies. For years he's experienced the country as a "warm and friendly" place where, unlike his native England, he says, "you can strike up a conversation with anyone." He relishes its "can-do attitude."
He doesn't necessarily think all of that has changed under Trump.
Yet observing from afar how the Trump administration has aggressively cracked down on immigration, detained tourists and alienated European allies while praising adversaries like Russian President Vladimir Putin, now Miller says he isn't so sure what to make of the U.S. He has also put on hold an ambition to relocate his family there.
"I absolutely love the U.S.," Miller, 50, said, in a phone interview. "It just seems there's such a dark undertone to it now," he added, citing examples of U.S. border officials who in recent weeks have targeted legal immigrants who expressed views the government believes threaten national security and undermine foreign policy.
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U.S. officials have justified expelling Venezuelans to a notorious prison in El Salvador because of their tattoos. Others have faced harsh consequences for what appear to some people to involve minor visa infractions or mix-ups.
Rebecca Burke, 28, a graphic artist from Wales, was on a four-month backpacking trip around North America when she was detained by ICE and held for 10 days after trying to enter the country via the Canadian border. Burke had previously stayed with a host family in Portland, Oregon, where she carried out chores in exchange for lodging.
For part of Burke's detention she was moved around in chains, her family said.
Two German tourists, Jessica Brösche, 29, and Lucas Sielaff, 25, were held for 46 days and 16 days, respectively, after being stopped by immigration authorities, separately, at the San Ysidro border crossing between San Diego and Tijuana, Mexico.
German media reported that Sielaff was denied a translator and didn't always understand what was happening to him. Brösche, a tattoo artist from Berlin, was kept in solitary confinement for nine days. Both were subjected to aggressive interrogation and later deported back to Germany. Both remain unsure why they were held.
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In one case that took place on March 9, a French scientist who was traveling to Houston for a conference was denied entry to the country after immigration officers searched his phone. They found messages in which he, according to the French government, had expressed criticism of the Trump administration.
Philippe Baptiste, the French minister for higher education, said the scientist, who has not been publicly identified and who specializes in research about outer space, was expressing a "personal opinion" in those messages on his phone and that the case amounted to a violation of academic freedom.
The Department of Homeland Security rejected that characterization, saying the French researcher possessed confidential information on his phone from New Mexico's Los Alamos National Laboratory, in violation of a nondisclosure agreement.
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Whatever the case, a growing number of incidents has led Canada and multiple European countries including France, Germany, Norway and the U.K. to update their travel advisories for the U.S. They cite tightened border policies or specific Trump executive orders, such as one about gender recognition that risks some travelers running afoul of new rules that require male or female to be marked on passports.
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In recent days, at least two German lawmakers have told their nation's media that they aren't sure whether the U.S. can still be trusted to hold its gold reserves. Germany has the world's second-largest cache of gold reserves. It keeps about a third of them − some 1,300 tons − in the vaults of the New York Federal Reserve.
How much of this unease can be directly attributed to Trump 2.0 is hard to say.
But not in every case.
"I've been to the U.S. about a dozen times, but have no interest in visiting again until Trump is gone. And that's not a boycott: I'm actually quite afraid to go," Gordon Ingram, a Vietnam-based academic, wrote in a post on X in late March. "My wife and daughter are going to Florida next month and I'm pretty worried about what might happen." In a separate post, a Danish writer said he knew of many of his fellow citizens who were cancelling their U.S. vacations.
Thinking twice about whether he really needs to travel to conferences in the U.S.
Andris Banka is one of those whose confidence in the U.S. has been shaken.
Banka is a Latvian-born professor of international politics at the University of Greifswald in Germany. He said that after the incident with the French space researcher whose phone was used to prevent him from U.S. entry he is "thinking twice" about whether he really needs to travel to the U.S. for conferences. Banka has also observed a growing chorus of voices in his professional network who are reflecting more deeply on this question as well.
He said that, as an eastern European who grew up in the shadow of Russia's authoritarian state, he has found it puzzling to watch the Trump administration defund or tear down "soft power" programs like USAID and media outlets like Radio Free Europe that for the most part spread "knowledge" and "goodwill."
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Glucksmann, the French lawmaker who made the quip about the Statue of Liberty, was less constrained.
"We are all shocked by the behavior of this U.S. administration," he said in a phone interview.
He added: "It's clear he feels closer to Putin than he does to Zelenskyy."
Glucksmann said that he can't claim to speak for all of his compatriots or Europeans more widely, but he believes that there is a "strong sense of betrayal" by Trump in Europe and "that everything that the U.S. has stood for, for decades and decades and even centuries, has been spit in our face."
He said that his comments about France taking back the Statue of Liberty were never intended to be understood literally. Instead, they were meant to be a "wake-up call," for Europeans and others, aimed at articulating the belief that the "American administration does not appear interested in leading the free world any longer."
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The White House has broadly rejected this logic, saying it simply wants Europe to finance its own security needs. And British lawmaker Nigel Farage, a close Trump ally known for his anti-immigration views and for championing Britain's exit from the European Union, said in a phone interview that he thinks Trump's various policy moves and talk, whether on immigration or NATO, simply reflect an attempt to "honor the U.S. Constitution."
He said Glucksmann's arguments about American values not being respected by Trump were false. "I don't think allowing illegal immigration through the southern border is in accord with American values."
Glucksmann's claim about the Statue of Liberty didn't go unnoticed by the White House.
"My advice to that unnamed low-level French politician would be to remind them that it's only because of the United States of America that the French are not speaking German right now," White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters when asked about Glucksmann's remarks in mid-March.
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Leavitt appeared to be referencing when the U.S. fought alongside France and others with Allied powers during World War II to free Europe from Nazi occupation, as well as its fight alongside France during World War I.
"They should be very grateful," she added.
France, Leavitt made clear, was not getting its statue back no matter what.
Yet even if it did, for some the picture of America has already changed.
"We used to say that 'the path to heaven runs through America,'" said Bijaya Khadka, who emigrated to the U.S. from Nepal when he was 17. Khadka arrived in the U.S. after living in a refugee camp there. His family are from Bhutan, a tiny Buddhist kingdom on the eastern edge of the Himalayas, from where they were expelled in the 1990s because of a conflict over ethnicity and politics, sparked by resurgent Bhutanese nationalists.
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Khadka, now 30 and a naturalized U.S. citizen, works with refugees and asylum seekers in Rochester, N.Y.
"Now everything is different," he said. "America used to fight for human rights. Now the people I work with feel their freedom is being taken away. They don't feel they can openly express themselves. They are scared to go outside because they worry they will be detained, jailed and deported."
Twelve members of the Bhutanese community in his area already have, Khadka said.
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Measuring American democracy
Staffan Lindberg is the director of the V-Dem Institute at the University of Gothenburg, a unit that analyzes political frameworks all over the world and produces highly regarded reports that chart democracy's global trajectory.
In its latest report, published in early March, V-Dem concluded that U.S. democracy under Trump "took a beating in his first term" when measured by the average level of democracy enjoyed by the average U.S. citizen. V-Dem assesses democracies by assessing quality of elections, individual rights, freed of expression, and in terms of checks and balances on executive officer power by lawmakers and the courts. American democracy was effectively brought back to 1976-levels during Trump's first term using these gauges, according to V-Dem's methodology.
The global average for the average level of democracy enjoyed by a notional world citizen during this time, according to the V-Dem report, was a 1985-level; by country averages, it was at a 1996-level. Today, the V-Dem report said, U.S. democracy "is being attacked a lot more than before."
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No problems at the U.S. border, but a feeling of disquiet
Lindberg had his own personal cautionary tale to share.
He had recently returned from Washington, D.C., where he gave a series of presentations about democratic backsliding that included slides about the U.S. Lindberg has been studying democracy for decades. He has given lectures and talks in Russia and Turkey and other places widely considered to have authoritarian governments.
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Lindberg said that prior to traveling to the U.S., he read up on his rights at the border by visiting the American Civil Liberties Union website. He shut off his computer and phone and put the latter in his pocket, so it was on his body, a tactic that may not prevent border authorities from reading its contents but could offer a measure of legal protection. He said he was prepared to be "turned away" at the border or heckled at one of his presentations.
He wasn't.
No one stopped him. No one complained about his research. The trip came and went.
But Lindberg still left the U.S. feeling "shocked."
On several occasions he met up with colleagues and friends − fellow academics he'd "known for years" − in coffee shops, hotel lounges and other places around Washington. They were Americans, some born there, others not. Senior professors with tenure. Others who had served in the U.S. military in wars in Afghanistan and elsewhere.
"Many, not all, but many felt fear about openly expressing themselves in public," he said.
He said they were worried someone might be recording their conversations or listening in somehow because they weren't saying that could be viewed as critical of the Trump administration.
"It was very palpable," Lindberg said.
He noted that the next large gathering of the American Political Science Association, a professional body, was due to take place in Canada. Lindberg said that many people he spoke to were feeling grateful about that.