The global populist-authoritarian alliance that Donald Trump has cultivated is contracting. In the span of days, voters in Serbia and Brazil rejected the leaders Trump had personally courted, leaving his international network thinner than at any point since he returned to the White House. The defeats are structurally significant — not because foreign elections move American voters, but because they reveal the fragility of personality-driven geopolitical alignment. In Serbia, Aleksandar Vucic — who had ruled since 2017 and positioned himself as Trump's closest European ideological partner — lost parliamentary elections to the Student List, a left-wing coalition. The personal ties were deep: Donald Trump Jr. visited Vucic in Belgrade before and after the 2024 US presidential election. The Conservative Political Action Conference had planned a Belgrade summit with Vucic as keynote speaker. That infrastructure of alignment is now orphaned. Vucic's defeat carries a second cost for Trump: the loss of a European leader who shared his posture toward Vladimir Putin. Serbia under Vucic refused to join EU sanctions against Russia, continued purchasing Russian raw materials, and ran state media favorable to Moscow. For Trump — whose envoy Steve Witkoff recently called Putin a "humanitarian" and who has publicly stated he gets along better with Putin than with Zelenskyy — Vucic was useful diplomatic cover in a continent largely hostile to that stance. In Brazil, the story is different but the outcome is the same. Flavio Bolsonaro, son of former president Jair Bolsonaro and Trump's preferred candidate, lost his election. Trump had been a strong supporter of both father and son. After losing, Flavio Bolsonaro fled to Florida under US State Department entry visas, despite pending corruption and money-laundering investigations in Brazil. Trump's response was to call the election "another rigged election, frankly" — recycling the same delegitimization playbook he used after his own 2020 loss. Lula da Silva's continued presidency means the Western Hemisphere's largest economy remains governed by a leader Trump views with open hostility. Lawrence Haas, a senior fellow at the American Foreign Policy Council, described relations as "cool at best." The pattern is consistent: Trump's international alliances depend on specific strongman personalities, not institutional relationships. When those personalities lose elections, there is no fallback. Israel offers a partial exception. With more than 96% of votes counted, Netanyahu's right-wing bloc leads but has lost its majority, facing difficult coalition negotiations. The Trump-Netanyahu relationship predates this term — Trump moved the US embassy to Jerusalem in 2018, and the two launched a war against Iran in February 2025. If Netanyahu survives coalition talks, this remains Trump's most durable international partnership. If he doesn't, Trump's global alliance network faces its most significant contraction yet. None of this will register at the ballot box on November 3. Haas is direct about why: "Americans will be voting on the basis of issues that affect them, and how they feel about the party in power." On that front, Trump enters the midterms with the lowest approval rating of any president on the eve of a midterm election since Harry Truman in 1946, with voters focused on affordability and opposition to the US-Iran war. The global losses are a symptom, not a cause — of a political model built on personal loyalty rather than structural resilience.
