At home, President Trump is ordering up investigations into his political opponents and finding creative ways to use his executive power to ruin the lives of even some of his milder critics.
Abroad, Mr. Trump has sent a different message: Let bygones be bygones. Even if those bygones involved trying to assassinate him or working with Al Qaeda.
In a series of speeches and off-the-cuff remarks during the first major foreign trip of his second term, Mr. Trump has told audiences in the Middle East that he is willing to set the past aside in the interests of peace and profit.
“I have never believed in having permanent enemies,” Mr. Trump said in a speech on Tuesday at the Saudi-U.S. Investment Forum in Riyadh. “I am different than a lot of people think.”
His statement about permanent enemies related to his outreach to Iran — a government accused of plotting to assassinate him after he left office. (Iran denies this.) But just a little while later, in the same speech, Mr. Trump offered a more surprising olive branch.
He announced he would lift U.S. sanctions on Syria, throwing an economic lifeline to a country ravaged by decades of repression, civil war, terrorism and poverty exacerbated by international isolation.
“The sanctions were brutal and crippling and served as an important — really, an important function, nevertheless, at the time,” Mr. Trump said of Syria. “But now it’s their time to shine.”
The next morning, on Wednesday, Mr. Trump met in Riyadh with Syria’s new president, Ahmed al-Shara. Mr. al-Shara, who led the rebel alliance that overthrew the dictator Bashar al-Assad in December, once had close ties with Al Qaeda, and his rebel group is designated by the U.S. government as a terrorist organization. (The United States has removed a $10 million bounty for his arrest.) The last meeting between the two countries’ leaders occurred 25 years ago.
Mr. Trump, who has a history of judging people based on their appearances, was impressed by Mr. al-Shara. He even cast his jihadist past in a positive light, calling attention to his strength and toughness.
“Young, attractive guy. Tough guy. Strong past. Very strong past. Fighter,” was Mr. Trump’s assessment, when a reporter asked him what he thought about Mr. al-Shara.
He said he had dropped the sanctions on Syria at the urging of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia and President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey — two authoritarian leaders whom he admires. After talking to them, he reversed, overnight, a quarter century of hostility between America and Syria.
That was unsurprising given Mr. Trump’s admiration for strongman leaders, like Presidents Xi Jinping of China and Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. He has made clear to them that he will be less interfering in their affairs and more willing to forgive their violations of their citizens’ human rights as the actions of “tough” and “smart” leaders.
But when it comes to domestic matters, Mr. Trump is less forgiving. His list of enemies at home is long and growing.
He has gone after previous political opponents; members of his first administration he views as disloyal; law firms that employed people who previously investigated him; universities he has condemned as “woke”; news organizations whose coverage he dislikes; the author of a critical op-ed and book; and even Chris Krebs, the former director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, who merely asserted factually that widespread fraud had not stolen the 2020 election from Mr. Trump.
He has also targeted former Biden administration officials. He has revoked their security clearances and indicated that he wanted his Justice Department to examine whether it would be possible to invalidate pre-emptive pardons that President Biden handed out to protect his family from potential prosecution by a Trump administration.
The White House did not provide a comment for this story.
While abroad, Mr. Trump’s more forgiving side shone through. He long ago cast aside differences with Qatar, which he described in his first term as a “funder of terrorism at a very high level.” On Wednesday, he described the emir, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, as an old friend, and he has publicly thanked Qatar for offering him the gift of a $400 million luxury jet to replace Air Force One. Qatar, like the other Gulf nations Mr. Trump has visited this week, is also in business with the Trump family.
With his approach toward Iran, Mr. Trump has surprised some of his advisers with how easily he has set aside what had become a deeply personal animus. Last year, a federal grand jury in Washington indicted three members of a cyberespionage unit associated with Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps for mounting wide-ranging attacks targeting politicians, officials and journalists that led to the hacking of the Trump campaign. Iran has denied those charges.
And last year the Justice Department charged an alleged Iranian asset for his involvement in a murder-for-hire scheme against Mr. Trump.
Late in the campaign, advisers often privately speculated that Iran would regret what it had done if Mr. Trump won the election. They pointed to how, in his first term, Mr. Trump didn’t hesitate to order the killing of the powerful Iranian commander, Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani.
But since taking office for the second time, Mr. Trump has been deeply reluctant to engage in conflict with Iran. He has so far resisted intense efforts from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel to join an Israeli bombing campaign to take out Iran’s nuclear sites.
Mr. Trump has said he wants a deal, and he has empowered his special envoy, Steve Witkoff, to negotiate with the Iranians to block their path to a bomb. Though he has made clear that he is not ruling out military force if negotiations fail, his advisers say he wants to do whatever he can to avoid war with Iran, which he believes would be disastrous for the United States.
“I am willing to end past conflicts and forge new partnerships for a better and more stable world, even if our differences may be very profound, which obviously they are in the case of Iran,” Mr. Trump told the business forum in Riyadh on Tuesday.
He added: “In fact, some of the closest friends of the United States of America are nations we fought wars against in generations past, and now they’re our friends and our allies.”
On Wednesday night, Mr. Trump stood at the head table in an opulent dining room inside the Lusail Palace in Doha and beseeched Qatar’s emir, a close ally of the Iranian government, to help him find a peaceful solution to the nuclear standoff.
“I hope you can help me with the Iran situation,” Mr. Trump told the emir, who was beside him. “Because it’s a perilous situation, and we want to do the right thing. We want to do something that’s going to save maybe millions of lives, because things like that get started, and they get out of control.”
Mr. Trump and his senior officials have at times offered differing statements about what they require from Iran to sign a deal. It’s unclear how close the two sides are to agreeing on the fine details, but Mr. Trump is serious enough about the diplomatic effort that he’s made Iran hawks nervous — in both the United States and Israel.
On Thursday, Mr. Trump shared on social media an article from NBC News, which reported that a top Iranian official had expressed Tehran’s openness to striking a deal. He claimed his team was “very close” to reaching an agreement.
“Iran has sort of agreed to the terms: They’re not going to make, I call it, in a friendly way, nuclear dust,” he said. “We’re not going to be making any nuclear dust in Iran.”
One idea that Iranian officials have discussed is the potential creation of a joint nuclear-enrichment venture that is an alternative to Washington’s demand that it dismantle its nuclear program.
But alongside his soothing talk of no permanent enemies and world peace and riches for all, Mr. Trump has also hinted at limits to his magnanimity. On the Air Force One flight from Riyadh to Doha, the president sent an ominous message to Tehran.
“Hopefully they’re going to make the right decision because something’s going to happen one way or the other,” he said. “They can’t have a nuclear weapon. So we’ll either do it friendly or we’ll do it very unfriendly and that won’t be pleasant.”
David E. Sanger contributed reporting.
Luke Broadwater covers the White House for The Times.
Jonathan Swan is a White House reporter for The Times, covering the administration of Donald J. Trump.
Vivian Nereim is the lead reporter for The Times covering the countries of the Arabian Peninsula. She is based in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
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