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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.<\/p>\n
On the latest episode of FP Live, I looked back at the year that was with Peter Baker, the New York Times<\/em>\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n Ravi Agrawal:<\/strong> You\u2019ve 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?<\/p>\n Peter Baker:<\/strong> 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\u2014or tried but failed to do or was dissuaded from doing\u2014he\u2019s 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\u2014or illegal even. This term, he\u2019s 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\u2019s now pushing forward\u2014and with great intensity.<\/p>\n RA:<\/strong> In policy terms, which three or four issue areas have emerged as the key differentiators between Trump 1.0 and 2.0?<\/p>\n PB:<\/strong> The National Security Strategy drafted by former U.S. National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster in Trump\u2019s first term was a relatively conventional articulation of a great-power world in which we were in competition with Russia and China.<\/p>\n 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<\/a> in Europe is the real challenge, not Russian aggression or Chinese economic hegemony.<\/p>\n RA:<\/strong> 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.<\/p>\n PB:<\/strong> 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\u2019s return to office, that\u2019s one of them. I thought he would come back a bit more guns blazing at China because it\u2019s 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\u2019re not going to make China another United States by integrating them into the world economic community. That didn\u2019t 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\u2019t agree with everything he said or did or how he did it but agreed with his theory of the case.<\/p>\n Coming back this term and seeming to lay off China has been surprising. Obviously, they\u2019re 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.<\/p>\n RA:<\/strong> What else has surprised you covering the White House this year?<\/p>\n PB:<\/strong> Frankly, almost none of it should be a surprise. A lot of things that have been shocking are still not surprising. Trump\u2019s reprisals and retribution against his enemies, his hostility toward NATO and European allies, his prolific use of tariffs, his \u201cout there\u201d personality\u2014all those are things we shouldn\u2019t be surprised by.<\/p>\n People were surprised\u2014and I was a little surprised, I suppose\u2014by how intense and extreme it was at times and how successful it has been in a lot of ways. He\u2019s 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\u2019s not bother with Congress. Let\u2019s 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\u2019t like the idea of it and certainly criticize the substance of it, but as a matter of accomplishment, he\u2019s proved that he can do things that people thought a president couldn\u2019t do.<\/p>\n RA:<\/strong> 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.<\/p>\n 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?<\/p>\n PB:<\/strong> It was an extraordinary day. I was in the White House briefing room when it happened. We didn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s not really a country. He even told Petro Poroshenko, who was Zelensky\u2019s predecessor as president of Ukraine, once that his country\u2019s not really a country, which is Russian President Vladimir Putin\u2019s 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\u2019t do it in public, and they certainly didn\u2019t have the open disparagement and badgering and berating that we saw in the Oval Office<\/a> that day. I\u2019ve never seen anything like that with a president and a visiting foreign leader, and I\u2019ve been doing this since 1996.<\/p>\n RA:<\/strong> Right after that meeting, I wrote an article<\/a> about how we were witnessing a reality TV presidency.<\/p>\n Picking up on two other TV moments of world leaders coming to the White House\u2014one 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<\/a> alleging that there\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n PB:<\/strong> You\u2019re 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\u2019t bring you a plane, and Trump saying, well, I would have taken it\u2014referring to how Qatar gave him a plane<\/a> worth $200 million to $400 million. I don\u2019t know if that beats an invitation by King Charles to a state dinner, but it certainly is playing that game.<\/p>\n In the first term, there was a bit of one-upmanship with this. The Japanese created a \u201cPresident\u2019s Cup\u201d 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\u2019s also something that I hear ambassadors here in Washington talk to each other about, trading ideas and suggestions.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n RA:<\/strong> You\u2019ve covered so many presidents. How salient has foreign policy been in this presidency so far, vis-\u00e0-vis other presidencies, and why?<\/p>\n PB:<\/strong> It\u2019s 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\u2019s happening overseas and solving wars, even if that\u2019s distorted in a lot of ways\u2014he\u2019s definitely focused on getting the Nobel [Peace] Prize<\/a>. You\u2019d also have to include, on my list of five most surprising things, his territorial ambitions, even though he hasn\u2019t really followed through on them, in terms of Greenland, Canada, and the Panama Canal\u2014even suggesting that America would take over Gaza, which I can\u2019t 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<\/em><\/a>, said she wants him talking more about affordability and less about Saudi Arabia.<\/p>\n 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\u2019re 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\u2019s a limit to how much you can do without Congress participating. Frankly, Trump hasn\u2019t used Congress much at all this year to achieve domestic policy\u2014all 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.<\/p>\n RA:<\/strong> 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\u2019re entering an era of plutocracy<\/a> or even a kleptocracy<\/a>? Is it a race for critical minerals, Western hemispheric dominance, the Monroe Doctrine\u2014what animates Trump?<\/p>\n PB:<\/strong> There\u2019s 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\u2019s spending time in Russia knows we didn\u2019t have much of an economic relationship with them even when things were good.<\/p>\n There\u2019s also the profiteering off of the White House. We\u2019ve 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\u2019s family and friends are involved with. That\u2019s something we\u2019ve just never seen before.<\/p>\n But if you\u2019re looking for a larger overarching doctrine\u2014a Trump doctrine, if you will\u2014he doesn\u2019t think in those terms exactly. He\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019t seem to care too much about. Without trying to read his mind, it does feel as if we\u2019re in this new great-power moment.<\/p>\n RA:<\/strong> You covered Putin\u2019s rise in Moscow when you were a foreign correspondent there. Listening to you describe Trump\u2019s 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?<\/p>\n PB:<\/strong> This suits Putin because, in effect, Trump is saying that Russia matters and Ukraine doesn\u2019t. Russia\u2019s a major power; Ukraine is not important. It\u2019s their neighbor\u2014let them do what they want there.<\/p>\n Michael Hirsh wrote a piece for Foreign Policy<\/em> saying, in effect, Putin has already won<\/a>. Putin looks at Trump and sees a guy that he can do business with because Trump isn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n RA:<\/strong> You were also based in Jerusalem, and the U.S.-Israel relationship has been another big story this year. What is Trump\u2019s stance on the Israel-Gaza conflict net-net? He said so many outrageous things about Gaza, such as the Riviera plan<\/a> 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\u2019s 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\u2019s covering the White House day to day, what is your sense of what Trump means to the U.S.-Israel relationship?<\/p>\n PB:<\/strong> It\u2019s very complicated, obviously. In Trump\u2019s first term, he presented himself as Israel\u2019s best friend ever. He moved the embassy to Jerusalem, recognized Israel\u2019s 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\u2019t go anywhere but was certainly tilted in Israel\u2019s favor. The Abraham Accords at the very end moved Israel closer toward a more normal diplomatic relationship with its neighbors.<\/p>\n