BERLIN » In the United States, Republican presidential candidate front-runner Donald Trump is a hero to some, a problem to others, but generally seen a force of nature and perhaps unstoppable.

The rest of the world is having a hard time digesting that he could well be the Republican standard-bearer, if not the leader of the free world. He’s described as evil, a cyberbully, a rich narcissist, even a sort of anti-Christ. His populist campaign promises must be theater, the thinking goes, and can’t be taken seriously.

The notion that Trump could actually be the president of the United States is seen as everything from inconceivable to creating a sort of nostalgia for the good old days of the disliked George W. Bush.

The word “clown” — favored by the New York Daily News, as well — tends to pop up quite a bit.

Consider a recent column on the People’s Daily newspaper website in China, which described Trump as ” a rich, narcissist and inflammatory candidate.”

“The clown is now the biggest dark horse,” the column asserts.

Tageszeitung, a leftist German newspaper, in a recent editorial that referred to Trump’s tactics as “cyberbullying” also called him the “angry clown, darling of the masses.”

The centrist German newspaper Die Welt notes simply, “The field of the Republican candidates is dominated by a clown.”

That public commentary reflects, analysts said, growing international concern about Trump’s rise.

“For Europeans there is a mixture of incredulity and anxiety,” said Richard G. Whitman, a European politics expert at the University of Kent. “The anxiety comes from what such a wild-card president might mean for the place of the United States in the world.”

As for Trump’s comments on immigration and questioning the value of NATO, “these have been viewed as offensive or creating uncertainty,” Whitman said.

One place that Europeans, especially Germans, have been unwilling to go in attacking Trump is comparisons to Adolf Hitler, the infamous German leader whose campaign of racial hatred killed 6 million Jews and as many members of other ethnic groups. Germans don’t make such comparisons, even if some of Trump’s harshest critics in the U.S. do. Hitler was Hitler, and the Holocaust is without comparison.

In a recent interview published in Welt am Sonntag, German Economic Minister Sigmar Gabriel put Trump in more contemporary company.

“Donald Trump, Marine Le Pen or Geert Wilders — all these right-wing populists — are not only a threat to peace and social cohesion, but also to economic development,” Gabriel said, referring to the leaders of nationalist political movements in France and the Netherlands.

Joerg Wolf, the editor in chief at the Atlantic Initiative research center in Berlin, said Trump himself wasn’t as concerning to Europeans as the fact that his support was so high.

“We thought he was promoting the Trump brand, and would be off the stage when the serious campaign began,” Wolf said. “People are realizing … it’s not just Trump we need to worry about. People, a lot of Americans apparently, back him. Europeans can no longer count on U.S. support.”

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©2016 McClatchy Washington Bureau