Christopher Luxon’s successful cameo in the Trump show
Thursday, 30 October 2025
Gyeongju, South Korea | OPINION: As he spoke to journalists after his first ever one-on-one meeting with Donald Trump last night, Christopher Luxon was wise enough to avoid calling it a “win”.
He was just doing his job as the leader of New Zealand, Luxon said, filled with energy and enthusiasm despite spending the night prior on a very bumpy plane from Malaysia, and much of the day rushing around APEC events in Korea.
Luxon is not usually such a modest man, so the fact that this win was self-evident probably helped.
Was it a full bilateral, a sudden trade deal, a White House visit? Of course not. But it was also far from the bare minimum, far from a quick word in the corridor of some foreign convention centre.
Instead, Luxon was invited to a very intimate hour-long dinner with Trump and six other world leaders, and had about 10 minutes one-on-one with him prior, all on the eve of the US President’s much-anticipated showdown with Chinese President Xi Jinping on Thursday morning (local time).
Better than just this proximity to the most powerful person in the world, just before his meeting with the only man who rivals him for personal power, was the fact that the two did appear to get along.
We only saw snippets of the top and bottom of the meeting, and Trump has the ability to be very personable with almost anyone, but going in talking about golf for several minutes seems to have worked a treat. Trump even said “I like your man from New Zealand” just as he sat down for dinner.
It seems unlikely that Luxon directly challenged Trump on his boneheaded tariff regime, which punishes New Zealand for the crime of selling the United States the wine and beef its consumers clearly want. Luxon declined to give a “blow-by-blow” of the conversation, instead repeating his standard line that the administration was well aware of the Government’s general position.
He said his goal in this first meeting with Trump was to build rapport and a relationship, and this makes some sense. Trump is a guy who sees the world in terms of personal relationships and abhors the kind of slow institution-to-institution work that usually goes into diplomacy. Instead of that boring C-SPAN stuff he has a prime time TV show, one with recurring gags for home audiences, cool shots of military hardware or his motorcade, and big characters fawning over its lead.
We are never going to be much more than a cameo on a TV show like that. This slow shift away from multilateral institutions is a disaster for a country like New Zealand that trades with everyone and will never be big enough to bully any decent-sized state. Yet given it is the situation we find ourselves in, having some level of personal relationship with the guy causing all this chaos makes a lot of sense.
Part of the trick seems to be arriving for international summits early, as that’s when Trump likes to get busy, thumbing his nose at the usefulness of the big international meetings but making use of the leaders gathered for them.
The US President did most of his big moves at Malaysia earlier this week before Luxon had even arrived, but thanks to a late change to the programme Luxon flew into Korea about half a day sooner than planned, giving him plenty of time to get to the dinner.
Trump is deeply unpopular in New Zealand, and nothing achieved at the dinner is going to immediately salve the economic pain Kiwis are going through. But he remains the most powerful person in the world, and a deeply erratic one at that. Becoming a face to him, not just the leader of a tiny country a world away, is a solid win for a prime minister who hasn’t seen many of those lately.