You're An American In Another Land? Prepare To Talk About The Why And How Of Trump 2.0

The urgent care doctor cocked an eyebrow at Mari Santos and her American accent.

It was four days after President Donald Trump's inauguration , and Santos was a student with a stomach bug in the first weeks of an overseas semester in Glasgow, Scotland. A doctor arrived to see her after a six-hour wait. But before asking what ailed her, he said this: "Interesting time to be an American, I suppose."

Until then, Santos, 20, had not been thinking about Trump - just her 104-degree fever and concern about being sick while abroad. But the president and his triumphant return to the White House, she says, were on her physician's mind, giving the American University student an instant education in geopolitics. The lesson, as she sees it: "There's a kind of chilling in the air."

"I knew that maybe that Europe is not in general big fan of American politics," Santos said, "but I didn't expect it to be such like a personal thing."

The United States and its center of gravity occupy a unique space in the international conversation. People the world over talk about America - its policies, its proclivities, its place in the world. They have for generations. They did it during the Iraq War. They did it during the first Trump administration.