The poll shows Powell’s approval rating at 44 percent, compared with Trump’s second-term low of 36 percent. The president’s current approval is only slightly above his all-time low of 34 percent, recorded in the wake of the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol in 2021.

The Daily Beast has contacted the White House for comment.

Why presidents pretend they don’t play politics abroad

American presidents have traditionally balked at being seen to overtly interfere in the politics of foreign nations. To start with, it’s bad manners. And few presidents would enjoy the favor being returned to help their political opponents.

It’s also a fundamental principle of democracy that voters get to decide who leads them. (This is one value Trump seems not to share, given his refusal to accept his 2020 election loss). And there’s always the possibility that endorsing a particular leader in a country could backfire — either by creating an anti-American backlash over the perception of meddling or by alienating new presidents and prime ministers before they take office.

The Trump administration, however, rarely stops trying to shape foreign politics for its own gain.

Last week, for instance, Honduras announced that the conservative National Party candidate Nasry Asfura had won a tight presidential election. Trump had warned there’d be “hell to pay” if Asfura didn’t emerge from a prolonged counting process as the winner.

Supporters of the National Party celebrate as the National Electoral Council declares Nasry Asfura the presidential election winner in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, on December 24, 2025.

Fernando Destephen/AP

Defeated center-right candidate Salvador Nasralla claimed that Trump’s interventions — which including the pardoning of a former Honduran president serving a 45-year-US jail term for drug trafficking — had damaged his chances of winning.

Trump has repeatedly sought to use US power to shape the politics of the Western Hemisphere in his populist image.

He slapped a 50% tariff on Brazilian imports over the criminal prosecution of his friend and former President Jair Bolsonaro for an alleged coup. The maneuver showed how Trump uses import taxes as a foreign policy weapon in addition to a trade tool.

Trump is currently using massive US power — in the form of a naval armada off Venezuela — to try to prompt the ouster or resignation of President Nicolás Maduro. The ostensible justification is to shut down the narcotics trade.

Millions of Venezuelans could benefit from the exit of leader who has impoverished their nation. But many analysts also believe Trump hopes to enhance his power by installing a more ideologically friendly regime in Caracas. Perhaps he also hopes to trigger a domino effect that ends the communist regime in Cuba.

The president already seems to have an eye on Colombia’s presidential election next year. He warned over the Christmas holiday that President Gustavo Petro needed to “watch his a**.” Petro told CNN this month that he believed Trump’s pressure on Venezuela was about oil, not restoring democracy.

Trump also used America’s economic power to try to dictate politics in Argentina by warning that a $20 billion economic bailout was contingent on his friend Argentine President and MAGA hero Javier Milei remaining in power. “If he doesn’t win, we’re gone,” Trump said.

Trump’s global reach

But Trump’s political chess-playing isn’t confined to the Western Hemisphere. When South African President Cyril Ramaphosa visited the Oval Office in May, the president sought to undermine him domestically with a video suggesting that White South Africans were faced genocide.

In August, President Lee Jae Myung faced a curveball just before Oval Office talks when Trump posted an incendiary message on social media about alleged church raids in South Korea. The visiting president smoothed things over by presenting Trump with two “Make America Great Again” cowboy hats and a personalized golf putter. But the episode was a reminder that almost nothing is off-limits for Trump when he’s seeking to knock other leaders off balance.

The Trump administration now seems determined to destabilize centrist and left-of-center governments in Europe. The new national security strategy argues that European culture is threatened by “civilizational erasure” because of waves of Muslim immigration. It endorses “the growing influence of patriotic European parties” and says US policy should prioritize “cultivating resistance to Europe’s current trajectory within European nations.”

Leaders of France, Germany and Britain argue that far-right parties that support Trump, such as the National Rally, Alternative for Germany and Reform UK, respectively, threaten the fabric of liberal democracies. None can have expected the United States, the guarantor of their freedoms for 80 years, to emerge as a direct threat to their political stability.

Alternative for Germany MPs with Tino Chrupalla (front, second from right), AfD federal and parliamentary group leader, raise their hands for a vote in the plenary chamber of the Bundestag on December 19, 2025, in Berlin.

Kay Nietfeld/Picture Alliance/dpa/Getty Images

Of course, Trump is far from the only US president to meddle in foreign politics. It’s been happening for decades, even if such efforts were often covert or took place under another guise. And Trump supporters can point to plenty of friendly relations between Democratic and Republican presidents in Western nations with compatible liberal and conservative leaders in Western nations. President Ronald Reagan and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher were seen as joint heralds of a conservative revival in the 1980s, for instance.

There have also been many more sinister US meddling attempts.

A CIA-backed coup in Iran in 1953 set off a cascade of events that led to today’s standoff with the Islamic republic. President John F. Kennedy’s disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion failed to topple Fidel Castro’s Cuban revolution in 1961. Several US administrations staged regime-change operations in Latin America — including Chile, Nicaragua, Panama and Guatemala — over the years, some of which ended in military dictatorships.

And when US forces didn’t find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the catastrophic invasion was recast as part of a “Freedom Agenda” to spread democracy around the world.

In one of the clumsiest recent examples of a US president playing politics in another country, Barack Obama warned in 2016 that Britain would find itself at “the back of the queue” in negotiating trade deals with the US if it quit the European Union. The Leave campaign seized on the comment to claim political interference in favor of British Prime Minister David Cameron’s Remain campaign.

Obama’s move backfired when the UK voted for Brexit anyway, in a harbinger of Trump’s shock populist win in the 2016 presidential election a few months later.

Obama was part of a long line of presidents who’ve dabbled in politics overseas with dubious success. But few have been as overt as Trump. As he often does, he’s taken actions pioneered by past presidents to extremes. His everywhere, all at once strategy reflects his domineering character and the global ambitions of his political movement.

Nancy Pelosi predicts Dems win House gavel back in ‘26, reflects on career and Jan. 6 attack

Former Speaker Nancy Pelosi is confident that Democrats will re-take the House of Representatives in the 2026 midterms and that Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries will hold the speaker’s gavel.

“Hakeem Jeffries is ready, he’s eloquent, he’s respected by the members, he is a unifier,” Pelosi told ABC News’ Jonathan Karl during a new interview that aired Sunday on “This Week.”

“You have no doubt it’ll be Hakeem Jeffries?” Karl asked.

“None,” Pelosi said.

The California Democrat, who stepped down from the party’s House leadership in November 2022, announced in November that she would not run for reelection in 2026. With about year left in her term, the longtime Democratic leader and first female speaker of the House spoke to Karl in Washington about her career, her relationship with President Donald Trump, and offered advice for Democrats going forward.

Pelosi said that “when” Democrats win back the House, they need to reclaim Congress’ powers, which she argues the current Republican-led Congress has essentially handed over to Trump.

“Right now, the Republicans in the Congress have abolished the Congress. They just do what the president insists that they do. That will be over,” Pelosi said. “That ends as soon as we have the gavel.”

But on the question of whether to pursue a third impeachment of Trump, Pelosi said it depends on the president’s actions.

“I’ve said to people, the one person who was responsible for the impeachments of Donald Trump is Donald Trump. It’s not something you decide to do – it’s what violation of the Constitution he engages in,” she told Karl. “So that’s not something you say, ‘Oh, we’re gonna impeach him.’ But you can have the power of subpoena to get information from these agencies of government who are not supplying any information now.”

When she first ran for Congress in 1987, Pelosi’s campaign slogan was “Nancy Pelosi: A voice that will be heard.”

“It’s funny, isn’t it? Isn’t it funny that I would become speaker of the House and, of course, my voice would be heard, but I never thought of that,” she reflected.

One of only 23 women in the House when she won, Pelosi went on to make history as the first woman chosen to be a party’s whip, the first woman to be minority leader and, in 2007, the first woman to be speaker of the House, making her third in line to the presidency.

“I actually never intended to run for leadership. That’s what’s so funny about this because I got to – I loved my committees, appropriations, intelligence,” Pelosi told ABC News. “But we lost in ’94, ’96, ’98, and then it’s coming up to 2000. I said, you know, being a [former] party chair, I know how to win elections. And I’m just tired of losing.”

As speaker, Pelosi helped shepherd historic legislation under President Barack Obama, including the Affordable Care Act, for which Pelosi said she hopes she’ll be remembered.

“I am very proud of the Affordable Care Act. I think that it was – it just made a big change in terms of what working families need for their health and their financial health. We’ll continue to have that fight,” she said. “The health care bill was a way of not only meeting health needs, but financial needs of families. So if I were to be remembered for one thing, it would be the Affordable Care Act.”

But her contentious relationship with Trump will be a defining part of her legacy, too. That includes the viral footage of her tearing up his final State of the Union address during his first term – something Pelosi said she hadn’t planned.

“I didn’t intend to go to the speech to tear it up. But I just – the first part of it, I tore a page because it was lying. And then the next page, and then the next page. And I thought it was a manifesto of lies all throughout, so I better just tear up the whole speech,” Pelosi said. “But I had no intention of doing it. I thought my staff was going to die.”

Pelosi said that the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol by a mob of Trump supporters seeking to block formal certification of President Joe Biden’s election victory was “absolutely” the darkest day of her speakership.

Her daughter, Alexandra Pelosi, was with Pelosi on Capitol Hill that day, filming her as she was evacuated to a secure facility where she and the rest of congressional leadership then spent hours trying to return to the Capitol to finish the proceedings. The harrowing footage was featured in the 2022 HBO documentary, “Pelosi in the House.”

“What’s going through your head? I mean, we see the pictures, we see the anguish, we see what’s happening to the Capitol – what’s going through your head?” Karl asked Pelosi.

“Well, it was clear that the president of the United States had incited an insurrection. And we begged him to send the National Guard,” Pelosi said. “Even Mitch McConnell was on the phone with us saying, get them here right away. But they never sent them.”

“The sorrow of it also springs from the fact that this president is trying to rewrite history, have a different narrative of what happened that day,” Pelosi added.

“What happened that day was horrible. It was an assault on the Capitol, the symbol of democracy to the world. It was an assault on the Congress, the day we honored our responsibility under the Constitution to certify the Electoral College, who was elected president, as an assault on the Constitution of the United States,” she said. “It was horrible.”

In the HBO documentary, Pelosi says Trump must “pay a price” for the Capitol attack.

“Has he paid a price for it?” Karl asked.

“No, he’s president of the United States now. But history will, he’ll pay a price in history.”

After Trump won the presidential election in 2024, the two federal cases against Trump, including the charges related to his actions leading up to and on the day of the Capitol attack, were dismissed. Jack Smith, the special counsel appointed to investigate Trump, filed a motion to dismiss the charges because of the Justice Department’s presidential immunity policy. Trump pleaded not guilty to all federal charges levied against him.

With a year left in Congress, Pelosi said her priority is returning the gavel to House Democrats.

“I’m busy, and focused on winning the House for the Democrats, making Hakeem Jeffries the Speaker of the House, and to take us to a better place,” she said.

“By and large, the American people are good people. And I would like to see us take us back to a place where governance and politics understand that,” she added. “So what’s next for me is whatever I do in addition to winning the House for the Democrats is that we try to take the discussion to a place that believes in the goodness of the American people, that gives them hope.”