Former New York Times White House Correspondent Mark Landler has said there are “considerably greater” challenges covering the second Trump administration compared with his first.
Speaking at the Society of Editors Media Freedom conference in London on Tuesday, Landler, who is now the London bureau chief for the newspaper, argued that everything from securing sources to the risk of lawfare had become a greater issue during Donald Trump’s second term.
A New York Times journalist for almost his entire career, Landler spent eight years as a White House correspondent during which period he covered the previous presidencies of Barack Obama and Trump.
[Read more: Donald Trump versus the press: His ‘campaign of legal intimidation’ tracked]
‘It’s very difficult with Trump to know which policy pronouncements are genuinely lasting and consequential’
Landler told the journalists gathered on Tuesday: “In this very fraught political environment in the United States I almost feel like I need to put a health warning on myself whenever I speak publicly – which is that New York Times correspondents have to watch their words very carefully.
“I’m a newspaper reporter, I’m not a news executive, I’m not a commentator, I’m not a columnist. So I’ll try to be informational and descriptive without slipping into editorial judgments.”
Landler argued “the first challenge” for journalists was Trump’s approach to policy, which he said was not necessarily “consistent or particularly strategic”.
“Rather than rolling out new policies through a presidential speech, followed by briefings with reporters conducted by the president’s advisors – which is basically how policy has been introduced in the United States for decades – Trump tends to make his most important policy announcements on social media.”
These announcements are often made “very late at night, very early in the morning or on Saturday and Sunday.
“So aside from the ruinous effect that has on the personal lives of White House reporters, it also often leaves you in exactly a place you don’t want to be when you’re suddenly grappling with a historic change to China policy or some very big overture to a foreign leader.”
In addition, Landler said, “the lack of details, the blunt assertions, but most of all, the head-spinning reversals are extremely challenging. Because it’s very difficult with Trump to know which policy pronouncements are genuinely lasting and consequential, which are just trial balloons and which are just Trump thinking out loud”.
He cited Trump’s “overtures to Putin on Ukraine” as something that “seems real”, but contrasted it with the suggestion that the US take over the Gaza Strip, which Landler said “doesn’t feel remotely realistic” but nonetheless meant the NYT had “devoted acres of newsprint to analysing what this means”.
Trump’s repeated claims that he wants to annex Greenland, similarly, “cost our paper thousands of dollars and we’ve devoted loads and loads of time to something that may or may not ever happen”.
Sources less willing to engage with journalists under second Trump administration, says NYT’s Mark Landler
Landler suggested that during the first Trump administration the president had not “really expected he was going to win” and so “defaulted to a fairly traditional cast of characters” to staff his cabinet.
Those people, Landler said, “viewed their role as really acting as a kind of guardrail, keeping the president and the administration from breaking the law, going too far off course, trashing America’s relationship with its allies and so on”.
In the second administration, however, Landler argued Trump had instead hired “loyalists and true believers”, which meant that “the guardrails from the first Trump administration no longer exist”.
“It also means that for journalists, covering the White House is much, much more difficult, because there are fewer administration officials who are willing to speak off the record to White House reporters, and fewer who are willing to signal any disagreement with the president or point out any problems or legal issues.”
Trump’s second administration had also brought a “much more aggressive posture towards the media”, Landler said, which was exemplified by the exclusion of the Associated Press from the Oval Office and the government establishing direct control of the press pool rotation.
But he said there were “much bigger challenges that loom down the road”, for example “whether the administration will use the FBI under director [Kash] Patel and the Justice Department under the DOJ leader Pam Bondi to go after reporters and news organisations whose coverage they don’t like.
“And that could take the form of libel suits against individuals or newspapers, and it could also lead into more sinister areas like surveillance, or subpoenaing phone records, or putting reporters on the stand and forcing them to disclose confidential sources at the pain of going to jail if they refuse.”
Trump administration inclusion of Atlantic editor in Houthi attack group chat ‘a jaw-dropping violation of security protocols’
Landler also spoke about the revelation a day earlier that editor-in-chief of The Atlantic Jeffrey Goldberg had seemingly been accidentally added to a group chat in which administration officials shared information about a forthcoming attack against Houthis in Yemen.
“By any yardstick, this is a jaw-dropping violation of security protocols,” he said.
“In any other administration – and I would put Trump 1.0 in this category – this would have raised a storm of questions and probably resulted in the resignation or firing of multiple officials, starting with [national security advisor] Michael Waltz…
“It’s clear, when we look at this episode, that we’ve left the guardrails far behind, and we’re in a completely new era of journalism and the White House.”
He added that the messages had offered “an amazing insight into the contempt which [vice president JD] Vance, [defence secretary Pete] Hegseth and others hold Europe and our European allies, because one of the things that came clear in the messages was this discussion of how frustrated they were that bombing the Houthis would bail out the Europeans, and how the last thing they wanted to do was help European freeloaders.
“So for those in Britain who still believe that this is salvageable, I would point them to some of those messages.”
Asked what he would have done had he been added into the group chat, Landler said: “I don’t think I would have stayed in it and lurked [for longer], which I know some people have criticised Jeff over – that he should have stayed because he might have been in the group for the next six months and found out 50 more outrageous things.
“But I think that Jeff probably recognised that the breach of security here was so profound that he really owed it to the country to get off that chat group and alert the government to what had happened.
“And I think Jeff probably felt he didn’t want the next operation to be compromised and American troops to be killed or if something else happened because he was hoping to get a juicy story out. I’m sure that’s where he landed, and I would probably have landed in a similar place.”
Asked whether the NYT had changed its approach around editorialising and Trump between the two terms, Landler said there had been “no edict”.
“In the first term we struggled with whether we needed to establish new standards for dealing with things that were simply obvious.
“We had never said a president had lied before – and by the way, I think that’s even true of Richard Nixon. It was just not a word we used in reference to the president.
“But we did start to do it – not regularly, but infrequently – about Trump. And when we did do that a lot of people said ‘you’re editorialising’, because we were going much farther than we had gone before…
“I do think that the Trump 1.0 presidency caused us to rethink some of our standards,” he said, but they have since had “a lot of time to think through where the line is… I think we, at the moment, feel reasonably comfortable about where we are”.
Landler said Trump was “really the same person at the age of 78 that he was at 46,” when the journalist first met him.
“The braggadocio, the salesmanship, the historical revisionism, the self-promotion, the relaxed relationship to the truth – none of this has changed at all in all the decades that Donald Trump has been in the public eye. He always says the quiet part out loud, and he generally always does what he says he’s going to do.
“Which is why I’m always puzzled when people say that Trump has surprised them in the second term – that he’s so much more radical and extreme than they expected.
“I would argue that with very, very few exceptions, he is doing everything he said he was going to do in his presidential campaign, and if people had listened carefully, they wouldn’t really be surprised by much of anything.”
Landler said Trump had been open that he intended to deport undocumented migrants en masse, that he would impose tariffs on neighbours and allies and that he would fire thousands of civil servants.
“He didn’t tell us he was thinking of paving over the White House Rose Garden to put in a patio like he has at Mar-a-Lago, that’s true.”
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