Trump Holds Series of Meetings With Foreign Leaders

Donald J. Trump plans to meet with the right-wing president of Poland this week, the latest in a series of his private interactions with leaders or emissaries from countries from the Persian Gulf to Eastern Europe, many of whom share an affinity with his brand of politics.

Mr. Trump is expected to have dinner in New York with Poland's president, Andrzej Duda, on Wednesday, his one day off from court this week, according to two people briefed on the arrangements who were not authorized to discuss them publicly. The meeting was mentioned as a possibility by Mr. Duda on X shortly after The New York Times approached his office for comment.

It will be a reunion for Mr. Trump and Mr. Duda, who once proposed naming a military base after Mr. Trump and who now shares power in Poland with a rival whose politics are much more aligned with those of President Biden.

Mr. Trump's other recent interactions with foreign leaders and their representatives include a phone call he had last month with King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa of Bahrain, which was previously undisclosed. A senior Bahraini official described it as "a social call."

The quickening tempo of this foreign outreach is in one sense unsurprising. Foreign leaders read the polls and understand that Mr. Trump could return to power.

Richard Haass, a former diplomat and the president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations, said there was nothing inherently wrong with such interactions. "There's nothing unusual — or to put it positively, there's everything usual — about foreign leaders meeting with the American equivalent of the leader of the opposition," Mr. Haass said.

Mr. Trump would cross a red line, however, with any attempt to influence the words or actions of foreign leaders — for instance, by asking for expressions of support or that they take steps to undermine Mr. Biden's policies, he said. "Then he is carrying out a foreign policy," Mr. Haass said, adding, "This is all fine in principle. It just depends on the actual content in practice."

The meetings nevertheless carry political sensitivities. Many foreign embassies are conducting their outreach quietly, through emissaries, to avoid angering the Biden administration. And countries that have connected directly with Mr. Trump through their heads of state tend to be governments whose leaders have quarreled with Mr. Biden, or who had a relationship with Mr. Trump as president.

In late March, for example, Mr. Trump spoke by phone with the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman. The call was arranged by Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who was visiting with Prince Mohammed at the time, two people familiar with the call said.

As president, Mr. Trump had a warm relationship with Prince Mohammed, and deflected outrage over the 2018 murder of the Saudi dissident Jamal Khashoggi, in an operation U.S. intelligence officials assessed was conducted on the crown prince's orders. Mr. Biden by contrast has condemned Prince Mohammed for the killing, although they have since established a working relationship.

Image

Earlier in March, Mr. Trump hosted Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary at Mar-a-Lago, his private club in Florida.

Mr. Orban is a right-wing nationalist who has been at odds with Mr. Biden and other European leaders over the war in Ukraine and his efforts to crack down on the Hungarian press and judiciary. Mr. Orban has often appeared — as Mr. Trump has — to be sympathetic to the goals of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and has endorsed Mr. Trump's campaign for president. He did not meet with Mr. Biden during his U.S. visit.

The dinner with Mr. Duda on Wednesday also fits a similar pattern. Mr. Duda represents Poland's powerful conservative nationalist party, which dominated the country for years until recently and — in ways similar to Mr. Orban — clamped down on the press and judiciary and feuded with the European Union.

Since national elections in 2023, Mr. Duda has shared power with a bitter political rival, Prime Minister Donald Tusk, a former senior E.U. official who casts himself in opposition to Mr. Duda and Mr. Duda's Law and Justice Party as a defender of democracy.

In March of last year, Mr. Duda and Mr. Tusk set aside their differences and paid a joint visit to Mr. Biden at the White House to show a united front against Russia's war in Ukraine. Unlike Mr. Orban, Mr. Duda is an unwavering critic of Russia's invasion.

But Mr. Duda will be rekindling close ties with Mr. Trump, who hosted the Polish president at the White House in June 2020, just four days before Mr. Duda faced a closely contested re-election vote. Some analysts said the meeting amounted to an improper endorsement of Mr. Duda, who during the visit proposed naming a planned U.S. military base in Poland "Fort Trump."

Brian Hughes, a senior adviser to the Trump campaign, said the meetings and calls from world leaders "reflect the recognition of what we already know here at home. When President Trump is sworn in as the 47th president of the United States, the world will be more secure and America will be prosperous."

Richard Fontaine, a former foreign policy adviser to Senator John McCain, agreed that Mr. Trump's meetings were not extraordinary. But he said it was unusual for a foreign leader to overtly side with the chief opponent of the U.S. president.

"What's unusual here is that heads of state generally remain studiously neutral in their outreach," Mr. Fontaine said. "In the case of Orban, at least, he has publicly thrown in with Trump."

Nothing obliges Mr. Trump to coordinate his meetings with the U.S. State Department. Spokesmen for the agency did not respond when asked whether the department has had any communication with Mr. Trump's team.

Other foreign outreach to Mr. Trump is less about defying Mr. Biden and more about building a personal relationship to put the country in a more favorable position should Mr. Trump retake the presidency.

President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine has publicly invited Mr. Trump to visit his country to see the war for himself.

A person close to Mr. Zelensky, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters, said the Ukrainian president appreciated that the Trump administration was the first to give lethal aid to Ukraine — something the Obama administration had not done. This person said that several people close to Mr. Trump who are ardent supporters of Ukraine have pushed a similar message to what Mr. Zelensky has said publicly.

Image

Mr. Trump has made various statements about Ukraine since the invasion that have offered little clarity about his thinking about the conflict, but he has raised concerns by saying that he would encourage Russian aggression against NATO members who fail to meet their financial commitments to the organization.

Current and former representatives of the British government have also been in touch with Mr. Trump. Finland's ambassador to the U.S., Mikko Hautala, has reached out directly to him and sought to persuade him of his country's value to NATO as a new member, according to two people familiar with the conversations.

For U.S. officials, Mr. Trump's conversation with Prince Mohammed was much more worrisome.

Mr. Biden is negotiating a delicate security agreement with Saudi Arabia that could form part of a grander deal — one in which Riyadh establishes formal diplomatic relations with Israel for the first time. Because such a deal could include new steps toward a Palestinian state, Biden officials see it as a critical exit ramp from the Gaza conflict.

But some officials fear that Mr. Trump, whose real-estate company has a deal with a Saudi firm for a project in Oman, could try to persuade Prince Mohammed to wait until after the November election, thus giving Mr. Trump an opportunity to preside over the deal as president.

Maggie Haberman is a senior political correspondent reporting on the 2024 presidential campaign, down ballot races across the country and the investigations into former President Donald J. Trump. More about Maggie Haberman

Michael Crowley covers the State Department and U.S. foreign policy for The Times. He has reported from nearly three dozen countries and often travels with the secretary of state. More about Michael Crowley

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section

A

, Page

14

of the New York edition

with the headline:

Trump Conducts Meetings With Foreign Leaders. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe