‘Trump 2.0 is Trump 1.0 on Steroids’: NYT’s Peter Baker Breaks Down Trump’s Chaotic First Weeks in Office

Peter Baker, chief White House correspondent for The New York Times, has chronicled the highs and lows of American politics through six presidential administrations. The second term of President Donald Trump is more unbridled than any of them — including even the two-time president’s first term.

“What I think has shocked people is not just that he followed through, but that he followed through so far with such intensity, velocity, and aggression,” Baker said of Trump’s campaign promises — in an interview with Mediaite editor Aidan McLaughlin on this week’s episode of Press Club. “Trump 2.0 is Trump 1.0 on steroids.”

In Trump’s first term, said Baker, members of the administration—then-chief of staff John Kelly, for example— tried hard to control him. This time around, he says chief of staff Susie Wiles has realized there is no controlling the sitting president.

“Part of what looks like a more buttoned-down administration is simply that they’re not fighting to stop him from doing what he wants—either because they believe in it or because they’ve realized he’s going to do it anyway, so there’s no point in getting in front of the train.”

Last week’s press conference with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is a good example. Trump suggested that the U.S. should take over Gaza and turn it into a “resort town”— relocating two million Palestinians in the process.

Baker, a veteran politics reporter and foreign correspondent who briefly served as Jerusalem bureau chief for the Times in 2016, sees more than one flaw in Trump’s proposal, which reportedly caught members of the administration off guard. “It’s a pretty fraught idea to clean out an entire population from a territory they have fought so many years to control,” he said. “Trump either doesn’t understand that, or he’s playing with fire and does understand it. It makes the Iraq War look almost like a picnic by comparison.”

Thinking about the next four years, Baker said the political environment in Washington has fundamentally shifted. “There is no John McCain anymore. There’s not even a Mitt Romney. Without Republican opposition—and with them controlling Congress—Trump gets a pretty free ride. The real tension will be in the courts.”

Beyond policy, Baker also weighed in on the shifting media landscape and what it means for coverage of Trump. “We’re not the filter anymore,” he said of traditional media. While he says the pros of information democratization outweigh the cons, social media gives Trump unprecedented power in shaping his own narrative, often through information that is just “totally crackpot.”

Baker has heard the criticism that the press covers the Trump administration with insufficient alarm. “It’s a hard challenge for mainstream media to find a way to convey the significance of what’s happening without crossing the lines of journalistic rules that we still believe are important—that it actually still matters that we remain independent-minded,” he said.

He also gives insights into his reporting process, reflects on the difficulty of covering the Israel-Palestine conflict independently and accurately, and sorting noise from substance when covering a president who often just says “whatever happens to flip through his mind”.

Mediaite’s Press Club airs in full Saturdays at 10 a.m. on Sirius XM’s POTUS Channel 124. You can also subscribe to Press Club on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify. Read a transcript of the conversation below, edited for length and clarity.

We are now a few weeks into the second coming of President Donald Trump. What are your takeaways?

Well, on the one hand, I think everything he’s been doing—or a lot of what he’s been doing anyway—shouldn’t surprise anybody. We heard him talk about many of these things he’s doing for years, certainly on the campaign trail. Not all of them, a few of them have been a little novel. But much of what he’s talked about doing is what he’s doing. What I think has shocked people was not just that he followed through, but that he followed through so far with such intensity, velocity, and aggression. He has managed to hit on all cylinders at the same time. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. He’s hitting on foreign policy, domestic policy, economic policy, retribution—all the different goals he’s had. He is moving fast and furious.

I’ve had a few people on this show who have said “I think there’s a chance that Trump will govern more moderately than he campaigned.” It’s pretty clear from the first couple of weeks that that is not the case—that he is doing things he wished he could have done in the first term but, for whatever reason, was cowed from doing, whether it was people in the administration stopping him or feeling pressure from the media when he had a bad idea. That doesn’t seem to be applying now at all.

I think you’re exactly right. Trump 2.0 is Trump 1.0 on steroids. It’s everything he wanted to do but couldn’t, for all the reasons you just rightly said—because he was surrounded by more establishment Republicans, military officers, or people who said, “No, sir, that’s not a good idea,” or “That may actually be illegal,” or “That may be unconstitutional.” He doesn’t care about that anymore. Let’s think about it this way: When he first took office, he didn’t know what he was doing. By his own admission, he didn’t know what he was doing. He was the first president in our history who had never spent a single day in public office or the military. So it was all new to him, and he was trying to figure it out. There was an executive order he signed in the first few days where they were literally scribbling on it in pen at the last second, still rewriting and updating it before he signed. They didn’t know how to write an executive order. This time around, he has four years of experience in the presidency and four years in which he and his team have had time to prepare, to draft these orders, and to think through what they want to do. That doesn’t mean it’s not chaotic—it’s still chaotic in its own way—but he is far more certain about what he wants to do and how to go about doing it this time. He’s not going to be discouraged or deterred.

We had Jim VandeHei from Axios on the show last week, and he said one of the biggest changes he’s seen in the second term is that the White House, with Susie Wiles at the helm, is just way more professional. Is that the biggest difference between Trump 1.0 and Trump 2.0? That this is simply a far more buttoned-up administration?

I don’t know that buttoned-up is quite the right word. I think it implies a discipline that he doesn’t naturally have. And I don’t think Susie Wiles can control him. Look at what happened just this week—on the fly, he essentially proposed the most extraordinary assertion of American power and treasure overseas, basically on a whim, by saying he’s going to have the United States take over Gaza and turn it into some sort of resort town. That makes the Iraq War look almost like a picnic by comparison if you really think about it.

And I don’t know what Susie Wiles was thinking, but obviously, a lot of pictures were spread on the internet of her face when he was making these comments. Not that he hadn’t made these comments in private or even hinted at them in public, but she clearly didn’t expect him to do it at that moment. That said, she is a survivor—she’s figured out how to work with him. She understands that she’s not going to control him, so she’s not trying to. John Kelly tried to control him, and it didn’t work. Other aides have tried to control him, and it didn’t work. So part of what looks like a more buttoned-down administration is simply that they’re not fighting to stop him from doing what he wants—either because they believe in it or because they’ve realized he’s going to do it anyway, so there’s no point in getting in front of the train.

Have you changed the way you report on this White House versus the first term?

It’s a good question. I actually don’t know the current crew of people nearly as well as I had gotten to know the last crew. So that’s still a new thing for me. I didn’t cover the campaign, so I wasn’t out there with Susie Wiles and all these other folks who are now surrounding him. For me as a reporter, my task is to get to know some of them better and start to source up. But we have Maggie Haberman, we have Jonathan Swan, and we have a lot of other people who did cover the campaign and know the inside people much better than I do. So my role so far has been more to step back and put things in the perspective of the presidency writ large or Washington writ large—how does what he’s doing fit historical patterns, what’s new, what’s not new, what’s within norms and what’s not.

And what’s funny is, you mentioned having covered six administrations—that’s true. I got to the point where I started thinking that presidents were really more alike than not, regardless of being Republican or Democrat. It didn’t matter that much. They made different choices, obviously, but the dynamics often felt very similar. The choices, the range of options, the types of challenges, the way they were structured—all of these things felt very familiar from one presidency to the next.

And Trump is the one guy who comes along and disproves that entirely. Everything he does—in terms of style, substance, and everything—is different than any other president. As a reporter, that’s really interesting. It’s intriguing to cover because you’re doing something different. Reporters like to do things that are different, not the same every day. But it also means that you’re trying to keep up with a very improvisational and unpredictable president. On any given day, you wake up thinking you know what the story will be, but you’re probably wrong.

You’re looking at this from a broader, more analytical view. One of the big challenges in covering the Trump White House is it’s always quite hard to distinguish what’s real and what’s just him throwing out some half-baked pronouncement. I remember in the first term, for example, he woke up one day and tweeted about white South African farmers, and the press corps spent the week figuring out what the hell he was talking about. By the end of the week he moved on. As someone who looks at these stories analytically, how do you sort the noise from the substance?

I think that’s a great question. It really goes to the heart of the tension of this White House and this president, because he will say any number of wild things over the course of the day. And it’s easy to go down a rabbit hole exploring it. I think that’s one thing we’ve learned from the last time. The last time, you’d wake up in the morning, and you’d write three stories before 8:30 a.m., still in your pajamas before you’d even had your Wheaties because he’d fire off these blasts on Twitter. And it was worthwhile on some level. But I think you’re right that we’ve learned to try to make a distinction between the things that are stray voltage and the things that really matter. It’s a hard thing. He says so many things on so many topics, whatever happens to flip through his mind at any given time.

Our goal isn’t to let these things distract us from what really matters. So figuring out what really matters is important. But there’s also a risk of airing on the other side of not taking some of this stuff seriously enough. For instance, when he said about two years ago on his social media site that he was for the termination of the Constitution so that Joe Biden could be removed immediately and Trump could be reinstalled as president without a new election, people didn’t take it seriously at first, thinking, “It’s not going to happen.” Obviously, he can’t terminate the Constitution. But in some ways, it’s a mistake to take that too literally and say, “Well, since it can’t happen, it’s not important.” Actually, it is important because it reveals a mindset. It tells you something about a former president who wants to be president again and his commitment to a constitutional order. If he simply says, “I’m for termination of the Constitution,” he may have meant it cavalierly, provocatively, or just to rile people up. But on some level, it’s still important.

There’s also a drastically different information ecosystem now. News is totally decentralized. The gatekeepers that previously controlled the flow of information are weaker than they’ve ever been, for better or worse. And you have platforms like X, which really pump a massive amount of false information into the world. For the first time, Trump has fuel for falsehoods and insulation from criticism in a way that he never had in his first term. Does that information ecosystem worry you?

Yeah, absolutely. Because you’re right. We’re not the filter anymore. I’m old enough to have grown up in an era when there were really only a handful of newspapers, a handful of networks, the wires, and news magazines—and that was pretty much it. If we decided not to run a story because we didn’t think it was worth people’s time, that was the end of the matter. There was no other way for them to get that information. In one sense, what’s happened since then has been good. The democratization of information means that it’s not just a handful of editors and producers in New York deciding what people should know. The flip side is that people are deciding to share things that aren’t true, and that’s a real problem.

We had this struggle at The Times and other mainstream newspapers and news organizations: when do you weigh in on something that’s completely crackpot? Let’s say there’s all kinds of stuff on the Internet saying X or Y, and it’s totally off-base and conspiratorial nonsense. Is it our job to write about that? On the one hand, we don’t want to promote it. We don’t want to spread misinformation, even by just addressing it or fact-checking it. But on the other hand, our readers are looking to us to help explain what they should trust and what they shouldn’t. They’ve seen this on the Internet, so it’s not like you can put it back in the box. They’re looking to us to say, “Okay, here’s what you may have seen, what the president may have said, and here’s what really is true—the facts.”

It may be that the president has said something, but don’t take it seriously because, in fact, it’s not true. And that happens a lot. So, do we fact-check every single thing the president says? He says a lot of stuff that’s just not true, and we could spend all day fact-checking it. It’s about finding the right balance: making sure we fact-check appropriately, rigorously, and aggressively for our readers without getting lost in the noise.

This reminds me of a criticism of The Times that’s common among liberal readers: That it doesn’t use language that is appropriately alarmist about the times we find ourselves in. There’s not a massive headline on the cover of every paper screaming that this is the end of democracy and we’re backsliding toward dictatorship. What do you make of that complaint?

I get that, and I hear it a lot. I appreciate the feedback we get, and I understand it. It’s a hard challenge for mainstream media to find a way to convey the significance of what’s happening without crossing the lines of journalistic rules that we still believe are important—that it actually still matters that we remain independent-minded. We don’t use the word “objective” as much anymore because it’s a difficult concept; there’s no such thing as genuine objectivity. We’re all human beings, and we all bring something to the table. But it is our job to remain independent. I think that’s a better word—independent, fact-based, and information-based. We have columnists, and certainly on TV, there are plenty of pundits who can raise alarms in ways that news beat reporters are not supposed to. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t convey the sense of importance. Finding a way to do that within our boundaries is a challenge, and I understand the people who are frustrated with us.

However, it doesn’t help to be oppositional. Some people want us to be the opposition. Guess who else wants us to be the opposition? Trump wants us to be the opposition—he has called us that in the past. But we are not the opposition. Falling into that trap would allow people to dismiss our work. Remember what Trump once said to Lesley Stahl? She asked him why he attacks the media so much, why he attacks reporters. He said—and I’m paraphrasing—he does it to discredit us so that when we write something he doesn’t like, people won’t believe us. Our job is to prevent that from happening. With appropriately serious language, we can convey the importance of what’s going on, but we have to be careful not to veer into shrill, oppositional pieces. Otherwise, we lose credibility with people who might not already share one point of view or another.

I think it’s a bit of a red herring. There are very few readers of The New York Times, let’s say, who are under any illusions about the threat of Trump or what’s happening in his administration. Reporting the information that readers need about an administration is important. But beating them over the head by saying, this is bad, doesn’t necessarily serve anyone. So I find the criticism, in general, to be a little tedious.

I get it. We have this conversation all the time. People should know that we do discuss this and try to find the right balance. There are moments when I feel we need to do more to convey just how significant what we’re seeing really is—to make sure people understand that it’s not normal, that it’s not something we’ve seen before, and that it has an impact. At the same time, we have to do that within certain bounds. Otherwise, we’ve lost who we are.

One of the first things Trump did when he came into office, which underscores this problem with media coverage, was pardoning the January 6th rioters, including those who beat cops violently. People in his own administration said he would never do it because they didn’t think it was even a possibility. It’s also something that, in his first term, would have had serious consequences for his administration. There would have been a major media backlash, I can imagine Republicans on the Hill condemning it, and his approval ratings plummeting. Now, there don’t seem to be any consequences. That may be because it’s been such a crazy few weeks that people are struggling to keep up. But do you think there are political consequences for Trump in America anymore in his second term?

It’s a good question. Part of it is the “flood the zone” effect you mentioned. He pushes out so many things at once that it’s hard for anyone—whether political opposition, the media, or the broader political environment—to focus on a single decision and scrutinize it. By the time he finished pardoning the January 6th rioters, he had already moved on to withholding up to $3 trillion in federal grants, dismantling the entire U.S. foreign aid structure, and talking about literally taking over other countries. Do you say, ‘I’m not going to cover him trying to take over the Panama Canal because I want to focus on January 6’? But it’s also important that he is saber-rattling with an ally in Central America. Another key difference is the political environment. Washington has changed. There is no John McCain anymore. There’s not even a Mitt Romney. There is no Republican opposition to him like there was at the beginning of his first term. Back then, Bob Corker, Jeff Flake, and even Mitch McConnell would, from time to time, push back and say, “Wait a second, you’re going too far.” None of them are doing that anymore. Mitch McConnell is slightly more oppositional now that he’s no longer the leader, but overall, there’s very little Republican resistance. Without Republican opposition—and with them controlling Congress—Trump gets a pretty free ride. Democrats, who don’t have power, are easily dismissed. The real tension will be in the courts. We’ll see what they do with some of these decisions he’s trying to make. But you’re right—everything feels ephemeral. Even the most controversial, arguably outrageous, decisions pass within 24 hours because there’s always something else happening.

I forgot about the Panama Canal. It’s going to be a long four years. You were Moscow bureau chief for The Washington Post a while back. Do you see any similarities between the way things are going here and what you saw there?

My wife, Susan Glasser, and I were in Moscow during Vladimir Putin’s first term. What we took away from that experience is how quickly things can change if people aren’t paying attention. We saw how Putin, in a very short time and in a systematic way, eliminated pockets of opposition and dissent while consolidating power in the Kremlin. First, he went after the media, taking over independent outlets. Then he turned parliament into a rubber stamp. He abolished the election of governors so he could appoint them himself. He intimidated and forced the oligarchs of his era to bow down to him. As we enter this era with a president who has clearly demonstrated authoritarian instincts, we have history not far behind us to look back at, to consider whether his actions fit that pattern.

One key difference is that Russian democracy was never fully rooted. They never developed a fully functional, credible, and sustained democracy. In fact, the failures of the 1990s led to Putin’s rise because people associated democracy with chaos—the loss of their life savings and the disappearance of the stability they had known. We have a different system and history, with over two centuries of democratic governance. So it’s not the same in that sense. But authoritarians tend to follow a certain playbook, and Putin has been a model for many of them. It’ll be interesting to see where this one goes.

I wanted to talk about Trump’s Gaza proposal, which you’ve been covering this week. Trump announced at a press conference with Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu that he wants the U.S. to take over the Gaza Strip. It seems very half-baked and obviously a reckless idea. It runs counter to what Trump has campaigned on in every election he’s run in and certainly to what his base wants—ostensibly withdrawing from foreign conflicts, not nation-building in the Middle East. The administration initially walked it back, then Trump walked back the walk-back. Where does that stand now? And does it tell us anything about how Trump is going to approach the Israeli-Palestinian conflict?

Look, it’s hard to imagine a world where this happens, at least as Trump has described it. The idea that you could go to Gaza, which is a devastated—he’s not wrong about Gaza being devastated and there being a genuine humanitarian crisis regarding what to do with two million people there and how to rebuild in a way that allows them to live meaningfully. He couches his conversation in that humanitarian framework, which is actually kind of interesting. It does suggest a certain degree of empathy from a guy we don’t normally hear a lot of empathy from. But his solution is: do what I say. He didn’t ask the Palestinians, ‘Would you want to leave Gaza so we can reconstruct it?’ He’s saying, “You will leave Gaza.” And “I don’t think they’ll tell me no,” he says. Well, actually, they are telling him no.

They don’t want to leave their home. It’s a pretty fraught idea to clean out an entire population from a territory they have fought so many years to control. Trump either doesn’t understand that, or he’s playing with fire and does understand it. But it’s a very volatile and provocative thing to say, even if it’s never going anywhere, because it gets everybody in the region worked up. It tells us, though, that his version of America First isolationism from the first term has given way to an America First imperialism in the second term. Greenland, Canada, the Panama Canal, and now Gaza. The idea that America is not just focusing inside its borders the way he talked about last time but is now actually discussing taking over territory around the world. And that’s a very different style of America First foreign policy.

He genuinely doesn’t seem to understand that the last thing Palestinians want to do is leave their land, for obvious reasons. He was talking like it was a matter of moving people from Bayside to Mill Basin, like it was nothing, which betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of the Palestinian people. You served as Jerusalem bureau chief for The Times back in 2016, and you’ve covered this conflict for years. The press gets a lot of criticism for how it covers it, particularly in the last year. Do you think there are any legitimate criticisms of how the American media covers it?

Any given day, I’m sure we screw up in some way or another, and everybody can reasonably read any of our articles and say, ‘Well, you should have done this or you should have done that.’ Fair. We want constructive criticism because we’re always trying to make our stories better. Broadly, though, we’re never going to satisfy the most passionate people on either side of this conflict because they want us to be something we’re not. As bureau chief in Jerusalem—though I was only there for five months—and covering it from Washington, you’re always going to trip over some words, some language, some version of history that triggers someone to say, ‘Well, you didn’t mention this’, or ‘You didn’t mention that’. And they may be right because you can’t include the entire history of the conflict in every article. But by leaving out one thing or selecting another, you’re going to seem to someone who cares very strongly as if you’re putting your foot on the scale, when in fact, you’re trying very hard not to. You’re trying very hard to be balanced.

We get criticized for being both pro-Israeli and pro-Palestinian, or conversely, anti-Israeli and anti-Palestinian. The truth is, I don’t think we’re either. We are committed to covering this as even-handedly, independently, and factually as we can. Some stories may be seen as tilted toward one side or the other simply because the facts themselves may be tilted. But if you look at the totality of our coverage, we have reported on the horror of October 7th repeatedly, correctly, and extensively, as we should. We have also covered the horrors faced by people living in Gaza extensively, comprehensively, and movingly, as we should. Not every single article can capture everything, but I hope that the totality of our coverage has given readers at least some sense of what’s going on there so they can make their own judgments.

Could you walk me through, to the extent that you can, your reporting and writing process? How do you approach stories, and how do you bring them to completion?

That’s a great question, and I don’t have a good answer. A lot of struggling, a lot of torture. Look, it depends. If we’re talking about a straight news story—something happened, Trump says this, Congress votes that—you just bang it out. But something that hopefully gets a little more elevated, a little more analytical, can take more time. It’s a struggle to find a way to convey the story to readers in a more accessible way, without getting lost in the weeds or the details, which we’re by definition supposed to focus on. My personal process? I pace a lot. I find myself pacing around until the lede hits me.

The lede is the most important thing from my point of view; I can’t go anywhere until I have it. Once I have the lede, everything else usually follows from there because it’s logical. But you have to find that perfect first sentence or paragraph or two paragraphs that convey what you’re trying to say in a way that’s grabbing for the reader, while also being fair to the facts and the sensitivity you just talked about with language. Can we do that in a way that doesn’t cross into opinion, but isn’t just staid or boring? This is a very dramatic moment in history. My wife, when she ran Foreign Policy magazine, came up with the slogan, “Because the world is not a boring place.” It’s true; the world isn’t boring, and our stories shouldn’t be either. They should captivate and capture this extraordinary moment. So, I pace a lot, struggling with that first sentence or paragraph until the wording is exactly right. Then, like the rest of the thousand or 1,500 words, will come pretty quickly once I feel really good about the top.

It’s going to be another four years of frantic pacing. I hope you don’t have downstairs neighbors. Peter Baker, chief White House correspondent for The New York Times, thanks so much for coming on Press Club. I really appreciate it.

Thanks for having me.