A 92-year-old Italian, fondly recalling the G.I.s who parachuted in to liberate his country from fascism, says he now sees the ghost of Mussolini in TV clips from the United States. In Iraq, people are sharing photos that compare President Trump holding up a Bible with Saddam Hussein clutching a Quran. In Mexico, no stranger to mayhem, a 36-year-old author worries about her relatives in New York.
With emotions that range from horror to hope, from schadenfreude to self-reflection, the world has been transfixed by the cascading crises in the United States — the coronavirus scourge, 40 million suddenly unemployed, the police killings of George Floyd and other African Americans, and President Trump’s threats of a military crackdown on protests that have convulsed dozens of cities.
In what amounts to a Dear America letter, people from around world offered The New York Times a taste of how they see what’s happening in the United States:
