It was Nov. 7, only two days after Donald J. Trump had become the president-elect, when he is said to have spoken by phone to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.
During the call, Trump urged the Russian president not to escalate the war with Ukraine and noted the presence of the United States’ military in Europe, according to an account that first appeared in The Washington Post, which cited several sources familiar with the conversation.
The Kremlin, however, denied that the meeting had happened at all. “Total fiction,” said the Kremlin’s main spokesman, Dmitry Peskov.
Normally, the U.S. would have a record showing that the call took place. But not this time. That’s because Trump has excluded the State Department — which has traditionally helped coordinate phone calls between incoming presidents and world leaders — from Trump’s calls with foreign dignitaries.
That meant the conversations were not conducted over secure phone lines, no State Department staff was standing by to provide guidance on the subtleties of foreign policy, and there were no official interpreters on hand to bridge language gaps, which can sometimes open the door to misinterpretation or misunderstanding of precisely what was said.
For analysts of U.S. foreign policy, Trump’s calls with Putin and world leaders thereafter —
there’s a good chance that after beating Vice President Kamala Harris on Nov. 5, the president-elect will get on the phone with them to discuss how to make America great again — are alarming.
“We are now going to be in a really dangerous game of telephone, where Trump is going to meet privately with foreign leaders, and they are going to be telling their teams one thing, and Trump is going to be telling our national security team something different,” said Brett Bruen, a former diplomat who served in the White House under President Barack Obama.
Various interpretations of private conversations resulting from translation problems or misunderstanding could not only lead to confusion, Bruen said, but also could lead to international crises.
The Trump transition team did not respond to questions about why he has excluded the State Department from actions he has taken with foreign leaders.
Trump waited three weeks after winning a second term as president before signing some of the legal materials necessary to formally initiate the transition of power from President Joe Biden’s administration. The last-minute submission of the papers — which are typically filed a minimum of a month ahead of presidential elections — prevented the government from providing security clearances, briefings, and other resources to Trump’s incoming staff.
Trump’s transition team announced on Tuesday that it had finally signed one set of documents that will allow it to access nonpublic information held by the government, receive government briefings on matters under discussion at the agencies and departments it will soon take control of, and deploy personnel inside the agencies and departments.
It was unclear whether Trump would draw on the State Department’s resources for his next round of calls with foreign leaders.
In the past, the State Department has assisted in coordinating phone calls between incoming presidents and foreign leaders because, during a transition, it’s important to “make sure the government continues to be talking with one voice, especially on national security and foreign policy issues,” said David Marchick, the director of the nonpartisan Center for Presidential Transition.
But Trump has vocally embraced suspicion and resentment of what he derisively calls “the Deep State,” the government bureaucrats who he said had been conspiring behind the scenes to undermine his agenda since his first term in office.
Trump’s voluminous distrust of government employees was cemented by a phone call in 2019 with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. During the call, Trump pressured Zelenskyy to conduct investigations of then-former Vice President Biden and his son, Hunter Biden, and threatened to withhold U.S. aid to Ukraine to achieve that goal. A transcript of the conversation, released by Trump’s Justice Department and drafted by a government aide allowed to listen to the call, helped drive Trump’s first impeachment.
Trump has promised to fire bureaucrats who would be in the way of his agenda in a second term.
All presidents field phone calls from foreign leaders upon winning office — and not all of those calls were politely arranged for proper Department of State coordination. Biden conducted some of his phone calls with foreign leaders following the 2020 election without the presence of State Department officials because Trump refused to concede that he had lost, said Daniel Fried, a former diplomat who was key to implementing U.S. policy in Europe following the fall of the Soviet Union.
Within hours of his beating Harris, Trump began taking phone calls from world leaders. The callers included Zelenskyy, along with British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, French President Emmanuel Macron, and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, all of whom publicly welcomed the opportunity to connect with the president-elect. Telling reporters two days after the election that he had already talked to more than 70 world leaders, Trump proclaimed that his administration would be the best ever.
Calls between a president-elect and a foreign head of state normally feature only congratulatory comments and promises of working with the incoming administration. But several of Trump’s conversations with world leaders seem to have crossed over from the routine into the realm of policy discussions.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu posted a pair of messages on the social media platform X on Nov. 10 saying he had discussed the election with Trump three times since the election. “We are on the same page regarding the Iranian threat in all its aspects, and the dangers that this threat reflects,” said Netanyahu. “We also see the great opportunities ahead of Israel, in the context of peace and its expansion and in other contexts.”
Trump’s statement to Putin not to escalate the war against Ukraine spurred questions, as it is a crime under federal law for an unauthorized American citizen to negotiate a controversy between the United States and a foreign government.
“There can only be one foreign policy at a time,” Bruen said. “What Trump is doing is saying ‘you must do X or Y,’ even when he is not sworn in, even when he doesn’t control U.S. foreign policy as a practice at this moment.”
Russia’s denial that the call even happened similarly illustrates why it’s “problematic” for Trump to speak privately with foreign leaders as he has, without the State Department, its official interpreters, or other support staff, said Fried, who worked under both Democratic and Republican administrations and is now a fellow at the Atlantic Council.
“Somebody’s not being honest,” he said. “If the Trump people had involved the State Department, the Kremlin wouldn’t have been able to deny that the call happened, or at least there wouldn’t be any doubt.”
Fried said private conversations with foreign leaders are not always conducted over secure phone lines because some leaders simply may not have them available at their disposal. Phone conversations over unsecured lines, though still a little risky.
“Most of our adversaries can access these calls, which in and of itself is problematic, in that it allows the Russians to listen in to the conversations he’s having with Europe and the Middle East, and have the Chinese listening to the same,” Bruen said. “These are sensitive discussions. They help the leader of countries know where there is potential for compromise or places of vulnerability.”
And when Zelenskyy called Trump at this Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida to congratulate him on winning the presidency, Trump handed his phone to Elon Musk, the billionaire business titan who has turned into one of his advisers and the ever-present shadow at his side. Musk, who has government contracts, has offered his Starlink satellite network to help Ukraine communicate amid its war with Russia.
Musk also met Nov. 11 with the Iranian ambassador to the United States in an attempt to help bring down tensions between the two nations, according to several reports. Iran subsequently denied the meeting had occurred.
It is deeply concerning that Musk would be allowed to participate in a private call with Zelenskyy, Bruen said, particularly since “Musk doesn’t have an official role in government.” He does not have a security clearance. He does have a great deal of interest in the outcome of what’s happening in Ukraine” due to his business interests in that country.
Concerns about Trump’s conversations with foreign leaders are exacerbated by concerns about how he has dealt with classified documents before, Bruen said.
Amid questions over how Hillary Clinton, his opponent in the 2016 election, handled classified information, Trump called for Clinton to be jailed and barred from office. Seven years later, after leaving office, a federal grand jury in Florida indicted Trump on 40 counts of mishandling classified documents, some of which had been stored in a bathroom at Mar-a-Lago. The special prosecutor, Jack Smith, all but killed the case Monday, when he withdrew his appeal of a judge’s ruling that the charges had been dismissed.