(President Donald Trump at the G-20 summit.Pool/Getty Images)

Whether Donald Trump’s presidency collapses under its own weight or goes on to last two terms, his administration is doing such sustained damage to America’s image and global leadership that it may be hard to repair any time soon.

The United States has descended from being the world’s beacon of freedom and democracy, even a deeply flawed and often hypocritical one, to becoming a banana-republic laughing stock.

As Trump lands in Paris for a high-profile meeting with the new President Emanuel Macron, he has fresh memories of his last trip to Europe for the G20 meeting which, to put it mildly, didn’t go swimmingly.

I talked to Thomas Bernes, a veteran of Canadian trade diplomacy and former International Monetary Fund senior official, who attended last week’s closely-scrutinized meeting. His description of the events in Hamburg should serve as a cautionary tale of just how much Trump’s rise to power has eroded global trust in the United States.

Asked to describe the general sentiment regarding the current US administration in Hamburg, Bernen, now a distinguished fellow at the Center for International Governance Innovation said: “Bewilderment.

"There’s a real sense that the US has stepped back," he said.

"There’s a hope that this is a temporary withdrawal from the framework that has largely been built by US leadership," he told me. "But there’s a sense there’s no guarantee on that."

Now that the seal of global US leadership, which arguably dates back to Woodrow Wilson, has been broken once, there’s a sense that it could easily happen again. It’s as if the world had lost its faith in the US electorate to make the right call on a fundamental level, with global repercussions. This was reflected in a recent Pew Research survey that showed precipitous drop in overseas sentiment toward the US president.

Making matters worse, Bernes said Trump stunned his global peers further by having his daughter replace him at the table during head-of-state level G20 discussions.

Trump has taken to Twitter to defend this unprecedented move.

Bernes’ response, after decades of attending such meetings? “No I have never seen it, I have never heard of it.”

Lawrence Summers, who was Treasury Secretary under Bill Clinton and head of President Barack Obama’s National Economic Council, did not mince words either, responding harshly — and also via Twitter — to Trump’s assertion that having his daughter replace him at the table with heads of states was somehow normal.