What ‘special relationship’? U.S. image sours in Britain and Europe.

LONDON – For 15 straight years, Veronica Clarke has made a “sacred pilgrimage” to honor the King – at Graceland.

But not this year. The London-based writer canceled her annual August trip to mark Elvis Presley’s death in Memphis because, honestly, she just doesn’t feel so great about the United States right now. The usually pro-American Elvis superfan says the onslaught of upheaval flowing from Washington – the tariffs, the mass deportations – is taking a toll.

“We’re all feeling a little bit hurt by our American cousins,” said Clarke, 67. “It breaks my heart.”

A growing number of polls, pop-up boycotts and satirical web campaigns suggest that Clarke is not alone in downgrading the United States’ once-loftier status in the tumultuous months since President Donald Trump’s second inauguration.

Some travelers have taken the U.S. off their summer travel plans. Grocery stores in Denmark and Sweden are marking European products with stars or other emblems, while some shoppers are turning American goods upside down, in a collision of nationalism and protest. Influencers are trying to wean themselves from U.S. social media platforms. Demonstrators have burned Teslas in Germany and Italy and sabotaged a Tesla robot in London, in flares of anger at Trump adviser Elon Musk.

Attitudes are shifting in ways that pollsters say they haven’t seen before.

Forty-one percent of Britons think the U.S. uses its superpower influence “for bad” in the world instead of “for good,” climbing from 16% when the question was asked a year ago, according to a poll this month by Ipsos. And the proportion of British respondents saying there isn’t a “special relationship” with the U.S. anymore has doubled in one year, with 40% of respondents saying they don’t believe in a special relationship, compared with 30% who do.

“There has been a clear change,” said Gideon Skinner, Ipsos’s senior director of politics and the poll’s research director. “It’s not a majority, but we’re definitely seeing more negative views of America overall.”

The Ipsos poll of 1,008 British adults was conducted April 4 to 7 using a volunteer online survey panel matched to population demographics.

The shift began early in Trump’s second term, Skinner said, after what many here viewed as Euro-bashing campaigns by Vice President JD Vance and other senior officials. Trump’s embrace of Russian President Vladimir Putin while calling Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy a “dictator” stunned many in Europe, who view Russian aggression as a major threat.

Now, Trump’s sweeping global tariffs – 10% on British goods and 20% across much of Europe – seem to be corroding not just the president’s standing, but his country’s, Skinner said.

“We know that Donald Trump is not the most popular person in the U.K., and people thought he was treating Ukraine very unfairly,” he said. “But the tariffs have created a lot of economic concern, and that is feeding through to conceptions of the broader relationship between the U.K. and the U.S.”

In Germany, even before Trump’s latest tariffs, 70% of Germans feared his trade policies would damage their economy, according to a Feb. 26 poll by ARD’s DeutschlandTrend. Sixteen percent of respondents considered the U.S. to still be a trustworthy partner, down 38 percentage points from October. Three-quarters of Germans believe their country cannot trust the United States.

That skeptical view of one of Germany’s oldest allies is lower even than during Trump’s first term in office, when the proportion of those who didn’t trust the U.S. bounced between 19 and 29%.

“We always thought we could depend on the United States as a partner,” said Claudia Schmucker, head of the Center for Geoeconomics at the German Council on Foreign Relations. “Especially the people who grew up after World War II, the older generation, they feel such a huge sense of loss. They would never have expected the U.S. to turn against Europe.”

The ARD-DeutschlandTrend poll was conducted March 4 to 5 among a random sample of 1,325 German eligible voters interviewed by phone or online.

Trump has pledged to stay the course on his global tariffs as needed “medicine” for a trade system he sees as stacked against the U.S. There has been little evidence that eroding goodwill in Britain and Europe causes many in his administration much concern.

The growing disdain seems to go both ways, as Europe learned in leaked excerpts from a private chat about U.S. airstrikes on Yemen involving Trump’s senior team. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth expressed his loathing for European “freeloading,” and Vance bemoaned “bailing out” Europe again, according to excerpts published by the Atlantic, whose top editor was accidentally added to the chat.

“The hatred that you see concerning Europe is so high,” Schmucker said.

The sting felt by Europeans means that tourism to the United States is likely to take a hit. International travel to the U.S. could drop by almost 13%, a loss of $22 billion, according to projections by the travel analytics firm Tourism Economics.

The United States is having an image crisis, said James Kirkham, a London-based brand consultant. Britons and Europeans who grew up on a diet of the U.S. as a beacon of freedom and a reliable ally have been shaken by the dissonance of Trump’s “America First” policies and stories of immigrants being deported, by design or by mistake, along with academics who have been prevented from entering at all.

“People are being fully deported, what are the next red lines?” Kirkham asked. “Is it a meme about Trump I posted five years ago? I don’t think it is, but even if it’s crossing your mind, that old brand now feels quite a bit off.”

Clarke, the London writer, said she might suspend her yearly trip to Tennessee at least until Trump is out of office. She hopes her fondness for America will recover, but admits to being uncertain.

“We know the difference between Trump and the American people,” she said. “I think the hurt comes from so many Americans having voted for him.”