Reporting the presidency of Donald Trump for the second time is a challenge for reporters, the London Bureau Chief of The New York Times has said.

Speaking at the Society’s Future of News conference on Tuesday (25 March 2025), Mark Landler, a former New York Times White House Correspondent, said that reporters faced difficulties, not only reporting on policy, but also getting sources to speak on record as well as navigating the “aggressive posture” of the administration towards the media.  

The Trump administration’s approach to policy was neither “consistent or particularly strategic”, Landler said, and often involved the President announcing policy decisions “very late at night” or “very early in the morning” on social media. 

He said: “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.”

Landler added that the often  “lack of details” and “blunt assertions” were extremely challenging for reporters to navigate. 

He added: “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”.

“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.”

Landler said that the second administration had also seen a  “much more aggressive posture towards the media”, evident in the White House’s recent decision to take control of the press pool and ban the Associated Press from the Oval Office.

Forthcoming challenges included 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, he said. 

He added: “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.”

Commenting on the revelation earlier this week that The Atlantic Editor-in-Chief Jeffrey Goldberg has accidently been added to a group chat in which administration officials discussed a forthcoming attack in Yemen, Landler said that it was clearly a “jaw-dropping violation of security protocols”.

He added: “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.”