Donald 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.
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 Duda on the social platform X shortly after The New York Times approached his office for comment.
It will be a reunion for Trump and Duda, who once proposed naming a military base after Trump and who now shares power in Poland with a rival whose politics are much more aligned with those of President Joe Biden.
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 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,” Haass said.
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 Biden’s policies, he said. “Then he is carrying out a foreign policy,” 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 Trump through their heads of state tend to be governments whose leaders have quarreled with Biden, or who had a relationship with Trump as president.
In late March, for example, Trump spoke by phone with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. The call was arranged by Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., who was visiting with the crown prince at the time, two people familiar with the call said.
As president, Trump had a warm relationship with Crown Prince Mohammed, and deflected outrage over the 2018 murder of Saudi dissident Jamal Khashoggi, in an operation U.S. intelligence officials assessed was conducted on the crown prince’s orders. Biden by contrast has condemned Crown Prince Mohammed for the killing, although they have since established a working relationship.
Earlier in March, Trump hosted Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary at Mar-a-Lago, his private club in Florida.
Orban is a right-wing nationalist who has been at odds with Biden and other European leaders over the war in Ukraine and his efforts to crack down on the Hungarian press and judiciary. Orban has often appeared — as Trump has — to be sympathetic to the goals of President Vladimir Putin of Russia and has endorsed Trump’s campaign for president. He did not meet with Biden during his U.S. visit.
The dinner with Duda on Wednesday also fits a similar pattern. Duda represents Poland’s powerful conservative nationalist party, which dominated the country for years until recently and — in ways similar to Orban — clamped down on the press and judiciary and feuded with the European Union.
Since national elections in 2023, Duda has shared power with a bitter political rival, Prime Minister Donald Tusk, a former senior EU official who casts himself in opposition to Duda and Duda’s Law and Justice Party as a defender of democracy.
In March 2023, Duda and Tusk set aside their differences and paid a joint visit to Biden at the White House to show a united front against Russia’s war in Ukraine. Unlike Orban, Duda is an unwavering critic of Russia’s invasion.
But Duda will be rekindling close ties with Trump, who hosted the Polish president at the White House in June 2020, just four days before Duda faced a closely contested reelection vote. Some analysts said the meeting amounted to an improper endorsement of 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 Sen. John McCain, agreed that 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,” Fontaine said. “In the case of Orban, at least, he has publicly thrown in with Trump.”
Nothing obliges Trump to coordinate his meetings with the U.S. State Department. Spokespeople for the agency did not respond when asked whether the department has had any communication with Trump’s team.
Other foreign outreach to Trump is less about defying Biden and more about building a personal relationship to put the country in a more favorable position should Trump retake the presidency.
President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine has publicly invited Trump to visit his country to see the war for himself.
A person close to Zelenskyy, 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 Trump who are ardent supporters of Ukraine have pushed a similar message to what Zelenskyy has said publicly.
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 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, Trump’s conversation with Crown Prince Mohammed was much more worrisome.
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 conflict in the Gaza Strip.
But some officials fear that Trump, whose real-estate company has a deal with a Saudi firm for a project in Oman, could try to persuade Crown Prince Mohammed to wait until after the November election, thus giving Trump an opportunity to preside over the deal as president.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
