2025 was a year of geopolitical tumult, and one person seemed at the center of it all: U.S. President Donald Trump. From tariffs and the trade war to attempting to play peacemaker in several global conflicts, Trump was ubiquitous in the headlines and in the minds of foreign leaders trying to figure out how to navigate a very different White House.
On the latest episode of FP Live, I looked back at the year that was with Peter Baker, the New York Times’s chief White House correspondent. Subscribers can watch the full discussion on the video box atop this page or download the FP Live podcast. What follows here is a lightly edited and condensed transcript.
Ravi Agrawal: You’ve covered six U.S. presidents, including Trump in his first term. But almost one year in, this second term really feels different. As someone who covers the White House every day, how much of an outlier has 2025 been?
Peter Baker: Trump 2.0 is Trump 1.0 in some ways but on steroids. A lot of the things that he talked about doing or exploring in the first term—or tried but failed to do or was dissuaded from doing—he’s now doing and in spades. One of the things he learned was that it matters who is around you. Many of the people he surrounded himself with in his first term viewed their jobs as keeping him from going off the rails, from doing things they thought were reckless—or illegal even. This term, he’s surrounded by people who not only agree with him but are egging him on, enabling him, and empowering him and want to serve his desires. So all the things that they toy with, he’s now pushing forward—and with great intensity.
RA: In policy terms, which three or four issue areas have emerged as the key differentiators between Trump 1.0 and 2.0?
PB: The National Security Strategy drafted by former U.S. National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster in Trump’s first term was a relatively conventional articulation of a great-power world in which we were in competition with Russia and China.
This National Security Strategy, which just came out a few weeks ago, is radically different and yet much more in tune with how Trump thinks, which is that Russia and China are our peers or friends and Europe is the real bad guy and that civilizational erasure in Europe is the real challenge, not Russian aggression or Chinese economic hegemony.
RA: The strange thing there, Peter, is that back when Trump first became president in 2017, there was a sense that Trump was recalibrating U.S. policy toward China. He saw Obama as too much of a dove on China and wanted to correct that. It seems as if, after several years of hawkishness in D.C. toward China, Trump in 2025 is appearing much more dovish than many of us expected.
PB: I would agree with you. If you had me put together a list of the top five things that surprised me this year about Trump’s return to office, that’s one of them. I thought he would come back a bit more guns blazing at China because it’s been a useful target for him in a lot of ways. And in some ways, he helped forge that bipartisan recalibration in Washington, the notion that we’re not going to make China another United States by integrating them into the world economic community. That didn’t turn out to be a successful strategy in terms of moderating their behavior and democratizing their country, and Trump led the way, and a lot of people on both sides of the aisle didn’t agree with everything he said or did or how he did it but agreed with his theory of the case.
Coming back this term and seeming to lay off China has been surprising. Obviously, they’re still fighting about tariffs. There is still some tension in the relationship. But he just undid some of the controls that former President Joe Biden put in place on technology, which surprised people, and he has not been using China as the target of his outrage in the same way he did in the first term.
RA: What else has surprised you covering the White House this year?
PB: Frankly, almost none of it should be a surprise. A lot of things that have been shocking are still not surprising. Trump’s reprisals and retribution against his enemies, his hostility toward NATO and European allies, his prolific use of tariffs, his “out there” personality—all those are things we shouldn’t be surprised by.
People were surprised—and I was a little surprised, I suppose—by how intense and extreme it was at times and how successful it has been in a lot of ways. He’s done more to accomplish the things he wanted to do than many people imagined he would be able to: demolishing the U.S. Agency for International Development, cutting off NPR and PBS, getting rid of Voice of America and Radio Liberty. Conservatives have talked about doing these things for years and never really did. Trump comes in and decides, let’s not bother with Congress. Let’s just snap our fingers, sign a few documents, and tell people to get out of their offices. And it was successful. A lot of people don’t like the idea of it and certainly criticize the substance of it, but as a matter of accomplishment, he’s proved that he can do things that people thought a president couldn’t do.
RA: Around about this time last year, Ukrainians were not particularly downbeat about Trump coming to office, partly because they had gotten a bit tired of Biden. They felt as if Biden was giving them enough to just about survive but not win the war. They felt that Trump 1.0 gave them javelins and that Trump 2.0 would be more decisive in their direction.
One of the key moments that defined 2025 was in February, when Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky came to the White House and got into an argument with Trump on live television. What was it like covering that, and how much of an outlier was it?
PB: It was an extraordinary day. I was in the White House briefing room when it happened. We didn’t see it live because they pretaped it, so when the pool reporters came back to the briefing room, their heads were exploding. They were whispering to us, wait till you see what just happened because it was so extraordinary.
Again, in some ways everything is shocking and not surprising with Trump. We knew that his fixation with Ukraine went back to his first term. It got him impeached in some ways because he had this idea that Ukraine was against him. And he bought into the Russian idea that Ukraine’s not really a country. He even told Petro Poroshenko, who was Zelensky’s predecessor as president of Ukraine, once that his country’s not really a country, which is Russian President Vladimir Putin’s line. We also knew that Zelensky has an edgy personality and that Biden and his people were also at times irritated by Zelensky for not being grateful enough. But they didn’t do it in public, and they certainly didn’t have the open disparagement and badgering and berating that we saw in the Oval Office that day. I’ve never seen anything like that with a president and a visiting foreign leader, and I’ve been doing this since 1996.
RA: Right after that meeting, I wrote an article about how we were witnessing a reality TV presidency.
Picking up on two other TV moments of world leaders coming to the White House—one is British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who played it really well by flattering Trump with a letter from the king inviting him to yet another state visit to the U.K., saying he would be the first-ever person to come to two state visits. Trump was visibly pleased. Another leader, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, thought he would be able to game Trump. Reportedly, ahead of the meeting, he talked up how he had studied Trump and would be able to deal with him as someone who had dealt with all kinds of situations in South Africa and in the region. But he was shocked by Trump, who played a video alleging that there’s a white genocide in South Africa, and that really upended that relationship. So leaders have a mixed record in trying to figure out how to deal with Trump.
PB: You’re absolutely right. If you put together a mixtape of all these foreign leader visits, you have to include the scene of Ramaphosa saying, hey, I didn’t bring you a plane, and Trump saying, well, I would have taken it—referring to how Qatar gave him a plane worth $200 million to $400 million. I don’t know if that beats an invitation by King Charles to a state dinner, but it certainly is playing that game.
In the first term, there was a bit of one-upmanship with this. The Japanese created a “President’s Cup” that he could preside over and deliver when he came to visit, South Korea took him to the Demilitarized Zone, and French President Emmanuel Macron took him to the Bastille Day military parade. Each world leader tried to think what they could do for Trump that would appeal to his showman instinct, his ego, his vanity. That’s also something that I hear ambassadors here in Washington talk to each other about, trading ideas and suggestions.
RA: You’ve covered so many presidents. How salient has foreign policy been in this presidency so far, vis-à-vis other presidencies, and why?
PB: It’s been a little bit more than people expected in this first year of his second term. For an America First guy, he seems to be focused a lot on what’s happening overseas and solving wars, even if that’s distorted in a lot of ways—he’s definitely focused on getting the Nobel [Peace] Prize. You’d also have to include, on my list of five most surprising things, his territorial ambitions, even though he hasn’t really followed through on them, in terms of Greenland, Canada, and the Panama Canal—even suggesting that America would take over Gaza, which I can’t imagine any American president wanting to have responsibility for. His focus overseas has been a little surprising for people. Even his chief of staff, Susie Wiles, in a now famous set of interviews with Vanity Fair, said she wants him talking more about affordability and less about Saudi Arabia.
But a lot of second-term presidents, maybe not quite this early, get lured into the foreign-policy area because it feels more historic. These are world affairs. This makes you a giant if you’re striding across the international stage, making peace, and dealing with other foreign leaders. You also have much more latitude than in the domestic front. There’s a limit to how much you can do without Congress participating. Frankly, Trump hasn’t used Congress much at all this year to achieve domestic policy—all of his domestic policy has been through executive orders. So foreign policy is naturally appealing for a second-term president, and he seems to have gotten there faster than a lot of them.
RA: If you had to come up with an animating principle for this presidency and what it means for the world, what would that be? Is it a sense that Trump really cares about his legacy? Is it that we’re entering an era of plutocracy or even a kleptocracy? Is it a race for critical minerals, Western hemispheric dominance, the Monroe Doctrine—what animates Trump?
PB: There’s no question that economics is right there at the top of the list, both for the country and for his own personal family. Certainly, when he talks about Ukraine, he talks about it in terms of rare minerals and restoring economic relations with Russia. The idea that by somehow restoring economic relations, Russia is going to be transformative or meaningful to the United States economy is laughable. Anybody who’s spending time in Russia knows we didn’t have much of an economic relationship with them even when things were good.
There’s also the profiteering off of the White House. We’ve never seen anything quite like it. His family is running around the world, making millions of, billions of dollars through crypto and deals with the Saudis, the Qataris, and so forth. They pardoned Changpeng Zhao, the founder of Binance, who had been charged with crimes here in the United States. He happens to be in business with the firm that the president’s family and friends are involved with. That’s something we’ve just never seen before.
But if you’re looking for a larger overarching doctrine—a Trump doctrine, if you will—he doesn’t think in those terms exactly. He’s not an intellectual. But he seems to have a 19th-century Congress of Vienna view of the world: Big players and big powers decide big issues, and everybody else is secondary. In his view, that’s the United States, Russia, and China. It seems as if he believes in the spheres of influences, in the sense that China can be all the things it wants to be in Asia; Russia could be what it wants to be in Europe, at least Eastern Europe; and the United States will be in charge of the Western Hemisphere. His approach to Venezuela suggests a more aggressive and assertive American dominance than he plays in other parts of the world that he doesn’t seem to care too much about. Without trying to read his mind, it does feel as if we’re in this new great-power moment.
RA: You covered Putin’s rise in Moscow when you were a foreign correspondent there. Listening to you describe Trump’s view of the world, and carving it up the way great powers did and maybe will do, how do you think someone like Putin watches that from afar, and what is his takeaway?
PB: This suits Putin because, in effect, Trump is saying that Russia matters and Ukraine doesn’t. Russia’s a major power; Ukraine is not important. It’s their neighbor—let them do what they want there.
Michael Hirsh wrote a piece for Foreign Policy saying, in effect, Putin has already won. Putin looks at Trump and sees a guy that he can do business with because Trump isn’t going to give him grief about democracy, human rights, or asserting himself in Eastern Europe. Trump is volatile and unpredictable, which is not something Putin necessarily likes, but I think Putin feels as if time is on his side.
RA: You were also based in Jerusalem, and the U.S.-Israel relationship has been another big story this year. What is Trump’s stance on the Israel-Gaza conflict net-net? He said so many outrageous things about Gaza, such as the Riviera plan you mentioned, but he also was instrumental in pushing through the hostage-prisoner exchange and the peace deal, and getting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to apologize to Qatar’s prime minister for the attack on Sept. 9. All of this comes amid a real shift in American attitudes toward Israel and Palestine. As someone who’s covering the White House day to day, what is your sense of what Trump means to the U.S.-Israel relationship?
PB: It’s very complicated, obviously. In Trump’s first term, he presented himself as Israel’s best friend ever. He moved the embassy to Jerusalem, recognized Israel’s control over Golan Heights, closed down the Palestinian office in Washington, cut off aid to the Palestinians, and basically produced, through [son-in-law] Jared Kushner, a peace plan that didn’t go anywhere but was certainly tilted in Israel’s favor. The Abraham Accords at the very end moved Israel closer toward a more normal diplomatic relationship with its neighbors.
In the second term, it’s not quite as simple. I think he got tired of Netanyahu by the end of his first term and was really angry at Netanyahu when he congratulated Joe Biden after he was elected. That was a no-no in Trump’s book. He has been willing, in this first year of his second term, to put pressure on Netanyahu occasionally to do things that Netanyahu might not want to do or might not have had the flexibility to do with his right-wing coalition without Trump’s pressure. The question is how far Trump is willing to take it. He did broker that Gaza cease-fire. He said on national television that he’s brokered peace for the first time in 3,000 years in the Middle East. Obviously, this is not true and overstates the meaning of the cease-fire, but the cease-fire was important after two years of awful warfare and got the last of the hostages out.
The question is where he takes it from here. Is there a “Nixon in China” scenario in which Trump, who does have credibility with the pro-Israeli community, can push forward a more sustainable peace plan that can actually get the Palestinian-Israeli conflict closer to resolution, if not all the way there? I don’t know if he wants to or not, and his own staff is pulling it back a little bit—Susie Wiles in the Vanity Fair interview said that she thinks he doesn’t understand that his own people, meaning MAGA, aren’t really happy when they see him standing next to Netanyahu. So that’s a new tension that didn’t exist in the first term.
