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.

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........

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