Foreign Policy

This event was part of the 2025 CFR Local Journalists Workshop, which is made possible through the generous support of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. TRANSCRIPT FROMAN: Well, good evening, everybody, and welcome. Just walking around the reception out there it’s just great to have you and all the energy here. It’s one of the events we look forward to the most all year and I hope you guys all get a lot out of it. It’s a great pleasure to have one of our longstanding and most active members of the Council here with us, David Sanger, who you all have his bio. I’m not going to spend a half hour going through it. But you know he’s been part of three teams that have won Pulitzer Prizes, most recently on Russia’s role in the 2016 election. He’s the author of four books, one of which you will get a signed copy of tonight as you leave, his newest book New Cold Wars: China’s Rise, Russia’s Invasion, and America’s Struggle to Save the West. And, of course, this being a conference full of journalism this is an on-the-record discussion. So we’ll try and make it both interesting and, as somebody said, people use the word Chatham House rules. I hate Chatham House. Like, why do they get to, like, own this think tank space on attribution rules? So we came up with at CFR— SANGER: If it’s on the record I’ll just say no comment and that’s off the record, right? Yeah. FROMAN: That’s it. That’s it. Exactly. That’s exactly right. Or somebody told me the other day the Council rules is you can’t be quoted but you can be fired. (Laughter.) So that’s somewhat of a higher standard than Chatham and the Chatham House. Let me get started by first just talking about how you got started in this business, you know, what your origin story is as a journalist, and we were in the Dillon Room beforehand and I learned for the first time that actually it’s in your blood. I mean, your family has a long history in the media empire world. SANGER: Well, I’m not sure I would call it an empire. Well, first, thanks very much. I’m delighted to be here. You guys are the incredible vanguard. I get the pleasure and occasional burdens of working at the New York Times but you guys are, like, the last bastion these days, and local journalism has had a really tough time. So I am just really delighted to be here and particularly delighted to be here with my friend Mike. We’ve known each other for what now, thirty years? FROMAN: Thirty years. Thirty-plus years. SANGER: Yeah. And he won’t tell you this because he’s too modest but the other day he got the Order of the Rising Sun from the Japanese emperor. So I now have to actually treat him with respect after all these years. (Laughter.) FROMAN: And bow a little lower. SANGER: And bow, yeah. I did that before. Yeah. He didn’t think I went down low enough. But anyway so it’s terrific to be here and I really look forward to the conversation with all of you. My origin story is really boring. Family did—was in—early on in journalism. My grandfather was the co-founder of WQXR which, for any New Yorkers around here you will know was the first classical FM station in the country. And he founded that in the middle of the Depression and they basically did it from a transmitter sitting in New Jersey right by where the Hindenburg blew up actually and all that. And they had this crazy idea that they could actually extend the reach of WQXR across the country with a series of transmitters that would run it all the way to the West Coast. It was incredibly expensive and completely failed but the station stayed on and it was bought by the Times in 1945 and in what was the biggest electronic media purchase at that time—I think it was about a million dollars—of which the family got absolutely zero because they were—the whole thing was so in debt. But he kept running it, and the first job I ever had at the New York Times and probably the last one I was qualified for was sitting quietly in the announcer’s booth, because they had this crazy vacuum tube system in the old Times building where they would put news bulletins into these tubes and shoot them through the vacuum tubes to WQXR, and my job was to open them up and unfold them for the announcer, and then I’d draw a picture and put it back in and send it back down. So that was my first newsroom job. FROMAN: How old were you at the time? SANGER: Oh, six or so, something like that. (Laughter.) FROMAN: Child labor— SANGER: Yes. FROMAN: —in the years of the Depression. SANGER: We’re not paid a whole lot better than we were then. So anyway, he had long retired by the time I came back to the Times. But I had done, you know, high school journalism and college journalism and all that and was planning to go to law school like Mike did but decided I really wanted to try out life in the Times. So I got a job as a news clerk there, and it happened to be the summer of the Son of Sam murders. Do you remember those? FROMAN: Sure. Sure. SANGER: And all that, so that was my first taste of it. And then I worked in the business section of the Times writing about technology. I was—kicked around New York with Steve Jobs the week that they were bringing out the Macintosh, which really dates me, right? And then ended up being put on the team that investigated the causes of the Challenger crash on the day that the Challenger went down because we thought it had been computer errors and I was covering computer technology and all that for the business section. And we ended up finding the guys long before the Presidential Commission even was formed who basically said it was too cold to launch, and was able to sort of prove that NASA knew that this space shuttle was a flawed machine and had nearly had an accident fourteen times previously. So this was more like manslaughter than it was like an accident, and that won a Pulitzer in 1986 or ’87 for work done in ’86 and I used that as a moment to get to Japan. So that’s the story. FROMAN: Excellent, and now chief national security correspondent and White House correspondent. SANGER: White House correspondent, and yeah, I’ve had lots of different jobs in the Washington bureau, and they just keep making up titles but I’m essentially doing the same thing. (Laughter.) FROMAN: So one of the challenges over the next day or so is to really try and connect these foreign policy issues, the complex issues that we cover here at the Council, with how do you cover it locally, and some of them lend themselves probably more to local connectivity than others—trade, cyber, maybe some of the issues around military—military families, et cetera. What’s your thoughts about how to take the big, complex issues and for them to go talk to their editors or the editors who are in here and say this is why we need to write about it for our paper or our meeting? SANGER: So this is a tough challenge. As I needn’t tell everybody in this room, it’s hard for you guys working in local journalism to make the Iranian nuclear program or North Korea or even the war in Ukraine, although I think there are some ways to go do that, seem deeply relevant. I think it’s a lot easier on immigration, certainly on trade. I mean, the tariff story is, you know, and was until last night something that I think was going to show up on the shelves of Wal-Mart and may yet, actually, you know, that these tariff levels could well. Cyber, certainly, and I’ve spent a lot of time on cyber in my book— FROMAN: You wrote a book. SANGER: —just before this. It was called The Perfect Weapon, and it’s also a HBO documentary about the rise of cyber as a short-of-war weapon. But think of all of the municipalities from Baltimore, to Atlanta, to small towns in Texas, to hospitals across the country that have been shut down in ransomware attacks, to banks that have gotten caught up in cyber incidents that have cleared them out or at least shut them down. And frequently these have been Russia-based, less China, some Iranian-based operations. FROMAN: North Korea. SANGER: And so those are all places where you can, I think, do some really great investigative work and really great just civics work on all of that, and also in the cyber arena the fact that we now have China through two separate attacks—one into the utility grid, not only electricity but gas, water networks, and one into the telecommunications networks—Salt Typhoon—that affects each and every person. I mean, the Chinese are doing this through routers that are sitting on your desks and in your newsrooms. There’s a reason Pete Hegseth and everybody was on Signal, because everybody in the U.S. government was basically told stay off the commercial phone lines. So, you know, there are opportunities in each of those and we can go in deeper on those, I think, to make those incredibly relevant local stories. FROMAN: I think one of the most impactful things over the last couple weeks has been on the issue of trade, how stories have emerged with regard to how the tariffs are affecting local businesses—small businesses—and you see it in many different outlets but those stories and, again, these journalists probably are closer to many of those small businesses having to make decisions. SANGER: Yeah. FROMAN: Do they stay open? Do they hire or fire people? Are they able to get access to the parts that they need to continue. Than folks sitting in the New York Times or the Washington Post. It creates a real texture behind how policy affects individuals. So my humble suggestion is to keep writing it because it actually is having an effect. I think it’s when the White House and Treasury heard how many small businesses were being adversely affected by this that there is a view we need to kind of pull back and really rethink some of these issues. SANGER: I think that’s right. And you know, I shouldn’t—Mike should be discussing. This is like a fingerpainter telling Picasso here how to paint. FROMAN: Just bow. It’s OK. Just bow. SANGER: Right, yeah. (Laughter.) But, you know, everything I can tell from our White House coverage is that President Trump and many of those around him had no concept of how complex the supply chain was, say, to auto manufacturers. And the very idea that a part would go over the border and come back half a dozen or a dozen times, and what it would mean to be putting a tariff on it each time, I think had to be driven home by the carmakers themselves. So particularly on the Canada side, Canada and Mexico part of that, I think that’s an incredibly dramatic story. I agree with you on the local suppliers and small businesses, but also the retailers—I mean, just the crazy distortions that are going to come out of this. And you know, one of the things that struck me the most about the Trump administration in doing this is this has been an obsession of Donald Trump since 1987 or thereabouts, when you first heard him discussing this topic. But he also has, when you talk to him, an image in his mind of an American economy that is sort of like 1957, you know? I mean, he’s interested in manufactured goods, but not at all in services. He doesn’t really count the many services that are exported from places that you’re all covering. He, you know, complains endlessly about Canada. But if we just stop buying oil and gas from Canada, we’d be in surplus with them, I think, right? So it’s a really interesting thing, because he is sort of perpetuating this old concept. And I think you saw a little bit of that when the Commerce secretary, Mr. Lutnick, got on TV and talked about screwing together the circuit boards for iPhones in the United States. Is this really what Americans want to raise their kids to be doing? So I think there’s, you know, a lot of opportunity to go find the local example and then match it up with the national debate. FROMAN: That’s right. You know, on the national security side, you said those are sometimes harder issues beyond cyber. SANGER: Yep. FROMAN: Let’s talk about Ukraine war or other wars going on around the world, or even the military competition with China. How do we—how should local journalists think about making those relatable? Is it the fact that they’ve got military bases, perhaps in their state or in their locality, or their military families that are home while their soldiers and sailors are away, Marines are away? How do you try and link those issues back home? SANGER: So during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, it was fairly easy to go do I think the bases issues, because one of the odd things about an all-volunteer force is that it’s fallen incredibly heavily on communities, really, in the middle of the country that have had a long tradition of contributing to the military, and very little in New York and California and so forth. Frequently, people are going into the military for the job opportunity. But Ukraine’s been a little bit different. Ukraine has exposed the fact that after the Cold War, we basically shut down building many of our most conventional weapons, and we ended up building instead weapons that have extraordinary capabilities, that are designed for thinking about war with Russia or China, but ignored the technologies that we needed to be working on for a war like Ukraine. And one thing that I was struck writing “New Cold Wars” about is the degree to which Ukraine has been a real testing ground for the United States of technologies that we have built here, frequently by small startups, not by the big defense contractors. And in some cases, we’ve discovered things that work spectacularly well. In other cases, we’ve discovered complete disasters. And there was a drone company that was selling to the Pentagon on sort of an experimental basis. They put a couple hundred of their drones into the hands of the Ukrainians, and the Russians took them all out within about two weeks. And that was a case where we were spending tens of thousands of dollars per drone, and here are the Ukrainians sitting in old schoolhouses and abandoned warehouses building unmanned aerial vehicles that are basically 300 (dollars), 500 (dollars), $700 each, some larger ones that are beginning to carry sophisticated weapons, and last week, one of which took out a manned Russian fighter, which we had not seen happen in some time. And we’ve been having a hard time getting details of the incident, but we are fairly confident it happened. So these are technologies that I think you can probably trace back to startups in, you know, many of your districts. You know, this is not something where Northrop Grumman or Boeing has owned the day, and certainly places where you can go back to university research done in your districts, which raises the next one, which is the slashing of basic science university funding and the effects that’s going to have not only on the military but on competition with China and in the semiconductor arena is pretty high. FROMAN: The president’s on his way, I guess, now to the Middle East. SANGER: Yep, he should land in about eight or nine hours. FROMAN: Saudi Arabia, UAE, and Qatar. SANGER: Yep. FROMAN: What do you expect to come out of this trip? SANGER: So we wrote a piece this morning that went up on the Times site that described the degree to which the president has built this trip around deals—this will not shock you—rather than around a vision of foreign policy. And in some ways, this makes it easier for you guys to write about Trump and his foreign policy, because when you are so focused on the deals, it’s the economic impact of those deals that become the issue. But at times, it is completely distorted from the question of what you’re trying to encourage these countries to go do. Democratization is off the table as a discussion. Even joining an alliance is off the table. The president’s concept of how you conduct foreign policy is very much a United States is the biggest military and economic power, and we are at the peak of our power when negotiating individually with states, and we lose when they gang up together in The European Union, even in the successor to NAFTA, which the president himself negotiated in the first term and called one of the great trade accomplishments of all time, because he was probably thinking about what you were doing the previous time—right?—and now has dismissed as sort of an interim deal, right? So these all give you opportunities. When you have a president who’s this transactional, the transactions are going to be happening where you’re reporting. FROMAN: Yeah, in fact, one of his officials was at the Council a couple months ago and said everyone knows and talks about the president as being transactional. But for him, the transaction begins with economics, and it’s the how much are they going to pay us, or it’s the mineral deal in in Ukraine, it’s how much are they going to invest in the U.S.—which, by the way, seems to be working. You know, even on the trade side, the tariffs got China to the table. SANGER: Yeah. FROMAN: We now have a negotiation underway. It’s going to be ninety days. We’ll see what the what they come up with. But I think there a willingness to use U.S. leverage to get other countries to come to the table, one has to say, at least at first glance, appears to bring them. Now what the long-term consequences of that remain to be seen. SANGER: So, you know, this is a question I’ve been trying to figure out how to go write about. I mean, the approach Trump takes is to come in with this maximalist demand. And as you say, it got the attention of the Chinese this time. But at what cost? In other words, you know, they agreed to come down to something that’s just outrageous, 30 percent, that will be inflationary, presumably, if it goes on for very long. But the mystery out of this is, if your problems with China are so much broader—the fastest developing nuclear program around, their interest in the South China Sea or Taiwan—and we should come back to Taiwan, because that’s an interesting local story for you as well—do you distort the entire discussion by making it all about tariffs at the beginning? FROMAN: Tariffs. That’s a good question. David, let’s talk about Taiwan. SANGER: Yeah. FROMAN: That’s an interesting local, global story. SANGER: So you’ll see in the book that we’re giving you, there’s a chapter on Taiwan Semiconductor, which is, to my mind, one of the most interesting global companies around these days, because they make virtually all, about 95 percent, of the advanced chips that go into your iPhone. So if China moves in on Taiwan, do not break your iPhone, because they don’t have an alternative right now as a place to build the product. FROMAN: Is there anybody here from Arizona, by the way? Yes? Raise your hand. There you go. OK. SANGER: They are building their facility in Arizona. They’ve got a lot more that they’re getting ready to build here. And yet, the president has opposed what came out of the CHIPS Act during the Biden administration, which is a program to help finance the building of new fabs, semiconductor fabs in places around the country. Anybody here from Ohio? The New Albany plant, which you all know, it’s an Intel plant. It’s running now, what, three or four years behind schedule, something like that? But it’s a really critical facility to all this. Now, to my mind, and what I argued in the book, and I’ve argued in the paper, what we spend, whether it’s in private sector or public, building fabs is probably more important than what we’re spending building aircraft carriers and the like. And it’s interesting because they cost roughly the same. The last big aircraft carrier the U.S. built was the Gerald R. Ford. After all the cost overruns, it came in about $15 billion for one big aircraft carrier. And 15 to 20 billion (dollars) is about what one truly sophisticated semiconductor fabrication plant costs, and you build them in two packs. So if you went to Congress today and you said, oh, my God, the Chinese have a bigger navy than we do, or they’re building a bigger navy than we do. I think you could get the money for ten more aircraft carriers, although they’re big sitting ducks. I’m not sure you can get the money for ten fabs right now. In fact, almost certainly you could not. And yet, for our own sense of independence, national defense, having those fabs in the United States so that you are not completely reliant on getting your chips from an island that’s a hundred miles off of the Chinese coast—Trump always says five miles off the coast—but a hundred miles off the coast that the Chinese want back, that’s a pretty wild story. And why the Intel plant is three or four years behind after all the US has poured into this is also a pretty interesting story. FROM: You cover the world. You’ve been around for a while. You’ve seen the ups and downs. What currently—I’ll ask a two-part question—what currently keeps you up at night and what gives you hope? SANGER: What keeps me up at night is that our greatest adversary right now is us. You know, it’s not only the divisions within the country which you’re seeing in your own communities, but it’s an inability to sort of develop a sense of national mission. It doesn’t strike me as particularly hard to come up with a strategy that a lot of Americans could get behind, to build those semiconductor fabs, to pour that money into basic research, because we know what that did after World War II, and we know what that did at the beginning of the personal computer age, and we know that, you know, Google was the product of Russian immigrants and a local culture around Stanford that enabled the company to truly grow. And yet, what are we doing? We’re cutting that basic research money, and we are downgrading the instruments of our soft power to use the phrase that Joe Nye, who passed away last week, but the great Harvard professor used so well. So what worries me is we’re wasting a lot of time while the Chinese have a pretty directed investment program. The second thing that bothers me is we have lost a sort of core agreement that democracy promotion, along our allies and as a way to attract other countries to a Western alliance—not a democracy that looks just like the United States—is being lost, and that we’re closing down things like Voice of America and Radio Free Asia that were so critical. I mean, when I was traveling around Asia, people were listening to Voice of America, partly to learn English, and partly because it was the only decent news source that they had access to. So that’s what worries me. What gives me hope is I still see among students, my students—I teach a national security course—but others as well, the term members here at the council, folks like you, are really deep interest in making sure that America does not just pull behind walls. You know, a strategy that has a perfect record of never working to keep us out of conflict, right? So the fact that, you know, I think there are people who are beginning to sort of think about the world more broadly—no one thinks about it more broadly than farmers, right? And when USAID closed, who were the first people to complain? It was the farmers who had huge USAID contracts. And you watch, the administration is going to end up paying off those farmers for what they would have sold to USAID when we could have turned that produce to great soft power use. FROMAN: Great. Let’s open it up. This shouldn’t be a shy audience unaccustomed to asking questions, so let’s open it up for about a half hour of questions been and then we’ll head to dinner. Oh, come on. This has got to be—there we go, right here in front. One second, the microphone’s making its way. SANGER: And please tell us who you are. FROMAN: Please stand, tell us who you are, where you work, what state you’re from, favorite color. Q: Blue. FROMAN: And make it a question. Q: That blue. I’m Janet Wilson from the Desert Sun in Palm Springs, which is part of the USA Today network. (Applause, laughter.) FROMAN: You can clap. That’s good. Q: And I actually—do I need to stand while I ask the question? FROMAN: Yes. Q: OK. (Laughter.) So I would like to ask about something a little different. You are a White House correspondent, and the White House has been pretty cavalier in terms of the White House press corps. SANGER: That’s a polite way to put it, yeah. (Laughter.) Q: Yeah. So granted, I’m not right there, but you know, in the old days, when I was a very young reporter, if a mayor, a corrupt mayor, tried to diss a member of the press corps, everybody would get up and walk out. You know, they would not get the media attention. And I’m just wondering why there hasn’t been a stronger response, a more direct response from, yes, they insulted the quote, “fake media” or whatever, but the traditional, really hardworking, really knowledgeable journalists like yourself to what’s happening in the White House? SANGER: Great question. So the issue that really brought this to a head was when they banned the AP for not using the phrase Gulf of Mexico. First of all— FROMAN: Gulf of America. SANGER: Gulf of America and instead saying Gulf of Mexico. And then I think the AP style was to say, “which President Trump is trying to call Gulf of America.” First of all, it’s interesting that they picked them out, because the Times uses Gulf of Mexico, you know? And we will also say, which the president is trying to rename, and on this trip you may see him try to rename the Persian Gulf, which I understand from geographers we do not abut, to be the Arabian Gulf, an idea that came up a number of decades ago. It’s been the Persian Gulf, it looks sounds like, since about 350 BC, but anyway. To this, raise the question, if they’re banning the AP, do we all walk out? It’s very tempting to go do, right? Because Donald Trump obviously lives for the media attention. He did a press conference today based around his announcement on prescription drugs that I think went on for more than an hour and made him late to his airplane to leave, because he just kept going on and on. And you see this now, you know, a few times a week. The problem with doing that is two-fold. First of all, the groups that would leave would be the real reporters likely to ask really tough questions, and the groups that would stay would be the conservative influencers who they’ve brought in who start their questions like, isn’t it terrible that the mainstream media covers you by focusing on X? So the first question was, would we be falling down on our primary responsibility to ask really hard questions to all kinds of—to presidents and others? And then I think the second question came, what happened if the media didn’t all come to the same answer on that question? If you’re the networks, or you’re doing any kind of video, you need the video of the president speaking. And so, you know, you might have been in a situation where print journalists or just wire journalists left or something. So instead, people were feeding material from the pool directly to AP and so forth. But it’s not a solution I’m particularly happy with. And on the trip that the president is on now, he is flying on Air Force One in the first presidential trip I can remember with no wire service reporter aboard. FROMAN: Interesting. Q: Can I have a follow-up? FROMAN: Let’s go to somebody else, and if there’s time, we’ll come back. Yes, in the back. Q: I’m Ella. I’m from Fort Wayne, Indiana. There’s also like—especially with Americans right now—there’s burnout, and there’s also this culture of individualism and sort of an apathy towards politics, especially in the Midwest, in countries—or areas where we don’t see how federal policies really start to affect us. How do you write in a way—how do you go about telling these heavy policy stories in a way that intrigue and interest Joe Schmo, who doesn’t know why that affects him or doesn’t seem to care because it doesn’t affect him? FROMAN: Good question. SANGER: Well, if we started off by saying some of them, like the Iranian nuclear program, not likely to affect their lives—and you saw that, you know, Trump got elected because he focused in on a story about the economy that resonated with people, even if, statistically, it looked like the economy was doing about as strongly as it could go do. But my guess is that when they closed post offices or Social Security offices or stop buying from the farmers because AID has been shut down, it becomes a pretty rapid direct interest. When the tariffs make it hard and the reaction to the tariffs equal tariffs being put on by buyers make it hard for local businesses, it will come home. And you know, we’ve always been in these cycles of American history between isolationism and engagement, between thinking that we could tune out the news and then discovering the war sweeps over us, or just government policy sweeps over you. I think people were pretty tuned out in the 1920s. They paid a lot of attention in the 1930s. People were tuned out after World War II because they wanted to bring everybody home and focus on that. But when the Cold War came along, it seemed pretty existential. So I think you have to view this as something of a cycle in American history. Sam Huntington wrote brilliantly about this—actually, wrote a book about the cycles of American history. And you could argue about whether this goes in seventy-year cycles or some other metric, but we happen to be right now, I think, in a sort of isolationist dip. And my guess is that the man who’s going to bring us out of it is Donald Trump as the effects of some of these policies become clear. FROMAN: When you say isolationist, yet this is the first president in a while who’s wanted to acquire more territory. SANGER: That is really fascinating, and he is—I think the public has something of an isolationist element. I do not believe Donald Trump is an isolationist. FROMAN: I agree with you. Not an isolationist trying to take over Greenland, Panama, and Canada. SANGER: You forgot Gaza. FROMAN: And Gaza, excuse me, that’s right. SANGER: There’s going to be a great, great resort there. (Laughter.) No, I mean, you know, that is really a fascinating element. And you know, for any of you who are operating near the Canadian border, the most fascinating conversation that Trump had with Trudeau—I don’t know if he brought it up again with Carney—is rewriting the, I think, 1908 border treaty that established the border between Canada and which Trump is now referring to as sort of an arbitrary straight line. It’s anything but as you get to it. I was going to propose that story to the Times right around fishing season, this summer to try to map out the— FROMAN: You could go up and do a little field work. SANGER: Yeah, right. FROMAN: Yes, this gentleman. Q: Bill Dorman from Hawaii Public Radio. Military families, as one area, when it comes to Japan, South Korea, the United States, biggest overseas presence of U.S. forces, that triangulation of relationships, and given Trump in first term, very personal, transactional, but relations with Shinzo Abe, with the head of South Korea, helped get him to the border and the photo op and all of that, different political situations in both places now, how do you see that playing out? SANGER: So it’s really fascinating. In the first term, Maggie Haberman and I went off to go interview the president when he was running in 2016, and that was the interview in which he declared that he wanted to pull back all of our troops from any country that we were running big trade deficits with—a connection I can’t remember any other president sort of making. I mean, the troop presence is there for us more than it’s there for the local country, but you could argue there for both, but in any case, somewhat distended from the trade relationship. And then I asked him at one point during the course of that interview, if we pull back our troops, do you mind if they get their own nuclear weapons? Because they’re no longer going to rely on us. And he thought about it for a while and said, no, no, that was fine. And then that led to an uproar, as you can imagine. But this all began to go away a little bit as he developed a relationship particularly with Abe. And what’s interesting to me is he has not brought that threat back. He has brought it back a little bit with Europe, but I have not heard him talk about pulling troops back in Asia. FROMAN: And I think it’s more shifted to burden sharing. SANGER: Yeah. FROMAN: And the fact that the Europeans are now—I think he’s been quite effective in getting the Europeans to commit to a higher level of defense spending, and the Germans to do something they never thought they would, which was just to take on more debt in order to invest it in national security. SANGER: Yeah. FROMAN: But you’re right. It’s been less about pulling troops back and more about making sure that the others are paying their fair share. SANGER: By the way, I have a journalistic confession to make coming out of that interview. It was a Friday afternoon. We knew we were writing for the Sunday paper. How many of you have been in this? We’re doing this interview, and of course, it’s Trump, so he’s all over the map. And I’m thinking to myself, I need a theme out of this, OK? So finally, I turned to him, and I said—because he had never used this phrase yet, although it’s hard to believe now—and I said, you know, what you’re describing to me sounds like the old America First movement. You can look up the transcript. We have it on the Times site. FROMAN: So it’s your fault. SANGER: And he looks at me and he said, you know, I kind of like that phrase. (Laughter.) Like what leader would not want their country to be first? And I’m like, oh, right? So we move on. I barely mentioned. He goes on about America First some. I barely mentioned it at the end of the story. And that next Sunday—I think he was in Dallas; I may have the city wrong—and he was doing a rally, and apparently, for the first time, he starts yelling, “America first.” Now I think he would have gotten there anyway, or so I tell my friends. But anyway, he starts doing this. So the next morning I come down, I’m making coffee in the morning, and the TV’s on, it’s CNN, or Morning Joe or something. And my wife, Sherill—and Mike knows well—comes down and she watches Trump yelling America first, takes a sip of coffee, and in that biting phrase that only a spouse can deliver, says, “I hope you’re really proud of yourself.” (Laughter.) FROMAN: That’s a better origin story. Yes, over here at the edge. Q: Hi. Megan Ulu-Lani Boyanton, immigration reporter at the Denver Post. You said that immigration is a beat that’s easy to localize, and I agree. But what do you think existing coverage is missing right now? FROMAN: Great question. SANGER: That’s a really great question. So the first question that comes to my mind that I’m still trying to figure out, is, what has stopped the flows across the border? Is it just the president talking about this increased—because we don’t have that many more troops on the border, and he has not actually managed to deport many more people than got deported during the Biden period, you know, if you look at the overall numbers. FROMAN: He’s deported them to interesting places. SANGER: He’s deported them to interesting places in some cases, but even the numbers to El Salvador, you’d measure in the hundreds, right? Then, there have been these extremely high-profile but very inefficient ways to deport people, which is, you know, go find out what somebody wrote in the Columbia Spectator, or in the Boston College papers, and go after them one by one. But there’s no less efficient way to go deport people. That’s all symbolism. So is this spigot actually turned off? Is it sort of a temporary thing? Is it a fear level he has created? What is it? And then the second part, which I think has been reported really well at the local level and at the national level, is the legal basis for some of these deportations, particularly those without process. And you know, when you’ve got pretty clear Supreme Court interpretations that anybody in the country has at least some due process rights—it may not be the full rights that that U.S. citizens have—watching that play out place by place, you know, having the judge in Vermont say, no, you bring her back to this jurisdiction for—you know, I mean, this is the most basic constitutional clash, and it’s playing out in very local, fascinating ways. FROMAN: Interesting. Yes, right there. Q: Hi, Erika Slife with the Chicago Tribune. I have a question that really defined for me when I saw the coverage the difference between local and national news was during the helicopter and plane crash over the Potomac River, when somebody asked President Trump if he was going to be visiting the site, and he answered very callously, “What am I going to do, go swimming?” If Mayor Brandon Johnson in Chicago had answered that way, that would have been our headline. Like, this is how he’s answering to the victim question. So I just wondered on a national level, like the New York Times, how that quote just gets buried sort of in the article and not that emotional response to this is how I respond to my constituents. SANGER: Well, maybe because it was the second most outrageous thing he said that day. I happened to be in the press room that day. It’s a rare day, but we rotate weeks where we go to the press briefing. And so I asked him the question that followed that one, which was he basically charged with no evidence while people were still in the river and bodies were still in the river, that this was a—that the pilot had been a DEI hire, right? And he had no way of knowing. You know, turned out she was a quite experienced pilot, and was not the only one flying the helicopter that day. May have made some big errors, but that didn’t prove the DEI part. But you raise a really interesting question, because Trump has managed, over the years, to sort of have a different standard about him. I mean, I was thinking of the same issue today in this morning’s talk, when he was asked, well, don’t you think it is ethically inappropriate to take a $400 million aircraft from a foreign state? They didn’t even go into the emoluments clause, right? And he said, well, if somebody’s going to offer you that aircraft for free, what are you going to do? Turn around and say, I want to pay you a billion dollars for it, or something like that? He said, of course not. Of course we’d take it for free. In a different presidency, I think that would have been covered quite—I think we’re all a little bit inured to what this president says. FROMAN: But do you think that’s a step change forever, or do you think it’s particular to this president? Have our standards basically changed? SANGER: So you’re asking the really fundamental question about this administration. Has our standards for presidents changed? I mean, ten years ago, it was considered to be a scandal that Barack Obama showed up in a tan suit, right? I mean, we’ve gone a long way from there, OK? And I think on the foreign policy changes, and even on the domestic policy changes, the things he’s dismantled, are they permanent, or do they bounce back? I think it’s really hard to go recreate the Consumer Protection Agency that he closed down, or change the nature—you know, rebuild USAID. And he tore down in a matter of weeks, stuff that took decades to put together. But your question is, has Trump forever changed the presidency? And I don’t know. We asked that question after the first term, and Biden managed to sort of restore it to, you know, something that seemed more meaty and if a little bit sleepier, right? And I’m not sure that’s possible after the second term. FROMAN: Yes, this gentleman. There’s a microphone. Q: Ben Kieffer from Iowa Public Radio. And I wanted to shift a little bit because the last few answers have been sort of like Trump the all-powerful when we know he has backing of many members of Congress. Iowa, a former purple state, now the deep red state. And I wanted you to speak, David, to the position of GOP members of Congress vis-à-vis Trump on foreign policy, because on a lot of areas—not just Greenland, Panama Canal, and so forth—it’s been a 180. SANGER: Yeah. Q: And we haven’t heard a lot of resistance there. Just, well, they don’t like to be asked by it. So what is going on there? And how do we report with our members of Congress? And we know how the Republican Party was traditionally in international relations and security around the world, and now it’s a completely different world according to Donald Trump, and our GOP members of Congress are like, right? SANGER: Well, first of all, if I was contending here that he was all-powerful, I’m not sure that’s right. I mean, there will be a moment that he will—where his power will peak out, and I’m not sure whether we’ve hit that yet or not, but you’re certainly seeing more resistance to him now from the courts and from the townhall meetings and so forth. But you’re raising a really interesting question, which is, how do you explain the fact that even in the first term there were members of Congress who were consistently voting for aid to Ukraine who stopped doing so as Trump entered the campaign period, including Marco Rubio, who had been one of the strongest supporters, and the only ones who stuck to that position are people like former Leader McConnell, who’s not running for re-election? And you know, I think you folks have done a really great job of putting the individual congressmen on the griddle on this question, because it gets to fundamental Republican orthodoxy that if you allow the Russians to do this to Ukraine, they’re coming after democracies in NATO next. That used to be what they said when Zelensky would visit, and he was treated like, you know, Churchill in a T-shirt. FROMAN: Did you make that up, Churchill in a T-shirt? SANGER: No. Many others have used that. You’re welcome to it. FROMAN: That’s good. SANGER: That’s good. And so, you know, they’re scared. I mean, you heard this from Lisa Murkowski. FROMAN: Can I ask, maybe if you could bring the microphone back, when you’re interviewing your members of Congress, what do they say? Q: Well, when we get to interview them—and I’ve been around doing a daily public talk show in Iowa back—you know, Iowa voted for Obama twice and then went for Trump three times. OK? So I watched this evolution from purple to red. And it used to be that we would, of course, have all members of our Congress agree to be on public radio. And now—and this is another question, how the media structure has changed?—they have friendlier media, or they just don’t need us, because they get elected anyway without appealing to more of a middle cross section of the state so— SANGER: And can be in favor of defunding you as well, right? Q: Yeah. And what do they say? They often don’t say anything, because they aren’t—they don’t have the time to be on the show. SANGER: No, I think it’s fascinating. Looks, one of the things we have to sort of admit that that President Trump and the Republicans did very well was trying to isolate and identify real journalistic organizations as somehow left-wing bias, whatever, even if they were doing real investigative work. And the president in his first term admitted at various moments that he does this because if they write something bad about him, he wants to be able to establish that, you know, they’re not credible. I thought it was really interesting he went after AP, because what else does AP do? They collate the vote on election night—right?—for both midterm elections and presidential elections. And so attacking their credibility, attacking the credibility of an NPR affiliate, is all part of the strategy. And that strategy has spread, and all you have to do is walk inside the White House press room now to see it. It’s not that they have thrown any of the traditional media out. It’s that they have invited in these influencers and treated them as if they were real media organizations. And certainly, they have audiences. Some of them have bigger audiences than we do, but most of them are not news gatherers. FROMAN: You know, one more question. Sorry, I was going to add on a homily here, but we’ll do a question in a sec. Q: I’m standing up even though I’m right in front of you. My name is Peyton. I work for the Fargo Forum, but I cover kind of statewide North Dakota politics. I cover the State House. I’m that correspondent. So kind of speaking to what you were saying, and kind of that sentiment that media is left wing all of a sudden, I have sources in the State House, in the Capitol, off record saying, I don’t agree with this. This is bad. A lot of the things, from the cuts—domestic cuts to, let’s say, AmeriCorps, to the tariffs, to all sorts of things like that. But they’re saying that off the record. They’re saying, well, I can’t say that to anyone, because no one will believe me. No one will understand, and I don’t have enough sway to actually make any change. But these are traditional, for lack of a better term, conservatives, self-identified Republicans that have been there for decades. So do you run into that? And if so, how do you go about those interviews and covering those people? SANGER: It’s frustrating because obviously they’re not going to go on the record with that. I hear it in things like President Trump’s apparent desire to normalize relations with Russia, something that most Republicans I know have a hard time with. And some of them say, look, I can’t oppose him in public. You see what happens? You get one bad tweet, and then you get primaried. Others say, look, it’s not going to go anywhere. You don’t need my voice in this one. Where I think you will begin to hear that crack is when they close down facilities, like I said, Social Security or whatever, in individual districts and people are stuck without getting, you know, on long hold lines, which you get anyway, yeah. FROMAN: We are incredibly fortunate at the Council. It’s a membership organization. We have 5,300 members. About 500 of them are leading journalists and media executives, and none more thoughtful and insightful than David Sanger. So please join me in thanking him for being with us. (Applause.) SANGER: Thanks, Michael. FROMAN: Tomorrow morning, at 8:45, we’re going to demystify tariff trade and the economy, but now you get to demystify dinner upstairs, or downstairs, somewhere, and enjoy the evening. It’s great to have you here. Look forward to a really great day tomorrow as well. Thanks. (END)

Margaret MacMillan discusses how history helps us to understand the present, how the past affects the decisions nations make about their interests and strategies, and why alliances matter in a changing world order. The Leslie H. Gelb Memorial Event honors the memory of Leslie H. Gelb, CFR’s president from 1993 to 2003 and a dedicated member for forty-six years. Gelb modernized the institution to reflect the changing realities of the post-Cold War era, and was a passionate advocate of common sense and strategy in U.S. foreign policy. For those attending virtually, log-in information and instructions on how to participate during the question and answer portion will be provided the evening before the event to those who register. Please note the audio, video, and transcript of this hybrid meeting will be posted on the CFR website.