Trump meets with more foreign leaders as GOP grapples with election losses and a shuttered government

By Kevin Liptak, CNN

West Palm Beach, Florida (CNN) — As Republicans were casting about for explanations for their party’s dismal showing in off-year elections last week, President Donald Trump had several other pieces of business to attend to.

He hosted Central Asian leaders for dinner at the White House on Thursday. A day later, the 38th day of the government shutdown, Hungary’s authoritarian prime minister came for lunch. On Monday, Syria’s president will make an historic visit to the White House.

Among the topics the president spent time in public discussing last week: migration policies in Europe, commercial activity on the Caspian Sea, South Africa’s position in the G20, and the energy limitations presented by Hungary’s geography (“They don’t have the advantage of having sea,” he explained). He hasn’t met with congressional leadership about the record-long shutdown or offered any constructive solutions, instead digging in on the filibuster elimination that’s a nonstarter on Capitol Hill.

Ten months into his new administration, Trump has placed much of his attention on foreign affairs as he works to end conflicts, secure trade agreements and burnish a presidential peacemaking legacy. World leaders pass through the White House weekly, and the president has made three foreign trips just since September.

It’s an approach that’s yielded successes, particularly in the Israel-Hamas ceasefire the president helped broker in Gaza. But as Republicans look to improve their prospects a year out from critical midterm elections, even some of Trump’s allies are beginning to wonder whether his attention abroad is obscuring the “America First” identity he’s spent years building.

“You’re not going to convince them to go to the polls and vote by bailing out Argentina. And you’re not going to convince them to go to the polls and vote by continuing to fund foreign wars and foreign countries and foreign causes,” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene said last week on CNN. “You’re going to get them to go to the polls and vote, when you show up to work, and actually fix the problems that they face every single day.”

The Georgia Republican has of late become more critical of some of Trump’s tactics, though she still describes herself as a stalwart supporter. Yet she is hardly alone in questioning whether his attention might be better focused at home, and in particular on the economy, rather than on his endeavors overseas.

“He’s having a lot of success with world leaders, and they all respect him,” one Trump adviser said. “He’s focusing where he’s successful. But people know it doesn’t motivate anyone to vote.”

Even Vice President JD Vance said last week that domestic matters should be a priority.

“We need to focus on the home front,” he wrote on X the day after the election, adding: “We’re going to keep on working to make a decent life affordable in this country, and that’s the metric by which we’ll ultimately be judged in 2026 and beyond.”

The White House said Trump remained focused on cost questions.

“Addressing Joe Biden’s inflation crisis has been a Day One priority for President Trump, who has already lowered prices for essentials like gas and eggs and cooled inflation to an annualized 2.5 percent rate — half the average inflation rate under Joe Biden,” White House spokesman Kush Desai said in a statement.

“As the Administration’s robust economic agenda continues taking effect, Americans can count on real wages continuing to increase, investments to make and hire in American continuing to flow in, and for Joe Biden’s lackluster economy to firmly become a distant memory.”

A CNN survey released last week found only 1% of adult Americans named foreign policy as the most important issue facing the country; 47% said the economy and cost of living. Trump’s international efforts also did not receive high marks: 56% of respondents said his foreign policy decisions have hurt America’s standing in the world.

Still, the world stage has become something of a welcome respite for the president from the humdrum realities of governing in Washington. Last month in Asia, the president was met with extravagant welcomes, gold gifts and rapid-pace announcement of new trade and peace deals. It was a stark contrast to the atmosphere he left and returned to: gridlocked discussions to reopen the shuttered federal government and growing voter anxiety about an uncertain economy.

The White House has argued Trump’s global efforts are intertwined with his domestic ambitions. His tariff regime, which forms the backbone of his foreign policy, is intended in part to restore American manufacturing and reduce the US trade deficit.

But in many ways, the criticism from the president’s allies is not about policy but about the impression Trump is spending far more time meeting foreign leaders or flying around the world than he is attending to economic problems at home.

“Keeping him on nonstop tours around the world and nonstop meetings with foreign countries’ leaders is not America First. It’s just not,” Greene said. “I think domestic policy should be the most important issue that the president and the Republican-controlled House and Senate are working on, and that showed up in the election on Tuesday.”

It is not uncommon for presidents, in their second terms, to turn attention to foreign policy. Without the burden of another reelection campaign, leaders often have a freer hand to focus on issues not necessarily front of mind for voters. Diplomacy can also be an easier occupation for a lame-duck commander in chief than sweeping domestic efforts, which often require congressional buy-in.

Presidential legacies are often forged in the drama of the world stage, such as Ronald Reagan demanding Mikhail Gorbachev tear down the Berlin Wall or Barack Obama making a historic visit to Cuba. Trump, too, views his peacemaking efforts as critical to his place in the history books, according to aides, and he openly jockeys for a Nobel Peace Price.

For Trump, however, the dynamics of his second term are different. He ran for president last year not as an incumbent, but as a challenger seeking to oust the sitting commander in chief. His campaign focused heavily on promises of an economic turnaround for struggling Americans, not the pursuit of a Nobel prize.

When the candidate did make promises about foreign affairs, he often set the bar unattainably high. His pledge to end the war in Ukraine within a day of taking office proved impossible to meet, and he later claimed it was made facetiously.

Since returning to office in January, Trump has hosted at the White House the leaders of Hungary, Ukraine, Argentina, Finland, Canada, Israel, Turkey, Poland, Korea, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Philippines, Bahrain, Congo, Rwanda, Pakistan, Germany, South Africa, Norway, Italy, El Salvador, Ireland, the United Kingdom, France, India, Jordan and Japan. Some have visited multiple times.

He’s also convened summits of leaders from Europe, Africa and Central Asia, and gathered Arab and Muslim leaders at the United Nations.

This year, he’s traveled abroad to Italy, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Canada, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Israel, Egypt, Malaysia, Japan and South Korea.

While the pace of meetings and travel is steady, it does not put Trump on a more rapid pace than his predecessors, or even himself. During his first year in office in 2017, Trump received 35 heads of state for official visits. In 2013, the first year of Obama’s second term, 34 foreign leaders came to the United States for official visits.

Trump visited 13 countries in 2017. And Obama visited 12 in 2013.

President Joe Biden traveled at a slower pace during his first year in office, as the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic lingered, and in his final year, as he tried to turn attention to his reelection campaign. But the intervening years saw him visit roughly the same number of countries as Trump.

Biden, too, struggled to balance domestic matters with the two foreign conflicts that came to consume the end of his presidency. And one point in 2023, he estimated 75% of his job was spent dealing with foreign leaders and traveling the world. Aides later blamed intensive foreign travel for the disastrous debate performance that precipitated his withdrawal from the race.

Other presidents have also found that focusing abroad — at the expense of addressing Americans’ economic pain — yields little political return. George H.W. Bush oversaw the end of the Cold War and the first Gulf War, but voters were more concerned with high unemployment and inflation — a disparity his rival Democratic Bill Clinton seized upon when he ran and defeated him.

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