Polish president rejects government offer to join Trump White House meeting

Sep 2, 2025 | Defence, Politics

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Notes from Poland is run by a small editorial team and is published by an independent, non-profit foundation that is funded through donations from our readers. We cannot do what we do without your support.

President Karol Nawrocki, who is aligned with Poland’s right-wing opposition, is heading to the White House for a meeting with Donald Trump without any government representatives in his delegation.

Poland’s foreign ministry says this breaks with the previous practice of presidents, who are not part of the government, to include someone from the ministry in visits to Washington, given that the government is responsible for foreign policy.

However, the head of Nawrocki’s chancellery, Zbigniew Bogucki, denies that this has always happened in the past. He says that no one from the foreign ministry was invited because the government has poor relations with Washington and has “disgraced itself” with critical comments about Trump in the past.

Nawrocki, who took office early last month, will be in Washington on Wednesday for his first foreign trip as president. During his election campaign, he was supported by Trump, who met him in the Oval Office (pictured above) and whose national security advisor visited Poland to call on Poles to vote for Nawrocki.

On Monday, Wirtualna Polska, a leading news website, was the first to report that Nawrocki, who has regularly clashed with the more liberal and pro-European Union government, was breaking with tradition by not inviting anyone from the foreign ministry to join his delegation.

“The practice so far has been for a representative of the foreign ministry to participate in the president’s meetings,” the ministry told Wirtualna Polska, saying that this had also been the case when Nawrocki’s predecessor, Andrzej Duda, who was also aligned with the opposition, was in office.

The ministry said that it had offered to send someone to join Nawrocki in Washington, even suggesting foreign minister Radosław Sikorski himself, “but the president’s office has not responded”.

 

On Wednesday, Bogucki confirmed to Polskie Radio that no one from the government would join the trip. This, he said, is because Nawrocki wants to “restore good relations with the US, which this government lacks”.

“These people disgraced themselves,” he added, referring to critical comments about Trump made by figures including Sikorski and Prime Minister Donald Tusk before the US president returned to office this year.

Bogucki added that there “is no such custom” for presidents to bring someone from the government with them to the White House. He claimed that, in the past, sometimes “someone from the [foreign] ministry was there, but just as often they were not”.

Sikorski will in fact be in the US at the same time as Nawrocki, visiting Miami for talks with his American counterpart, Marco Rubio, with whom he will jointly present the Lech Wałęsa Solidarity Award to a Cuban opposition figure.

Bogucki today also criticised a recent letter sent by the foreign ministry to Nawrocki, in which it advised him on how to approach the talks with Trump. The contents of the letter were leaked to media outlet Kanał Zero last week.

In the document, the ministry advised the president to avoid making any commitments to further Polish arms purchases from the US, not to declare support for a US company to be the contractor for a planned second nuclear power plant in Poland, and to avoid discussing the government’s plans for a new digital tax.

Bogucki said it was “bizarre” for a government that had such bad relations with Washington to “try to dictate what the president should and should not say”. Nawrocki’s spokesman, Rafał Leśkiewicz, likewise said that the letter should “be treated as a joke”.

“If the American side raises this issue [of a digital tax], the president [Nawrocki] will certainly respond appropriately,” added Bogucki. Trump has threatened punitive sanctions against countries that introduce such taxes, which would particularly impact US tech firms.

In response to the dispute, the spokesman for the foreign ministry, Paweł Wroński, warned that “there cannot be two foreign policies serving one country”. However, he added that “we wish President Nawrocki success during his visit to Washington”.

On Monday, Tusk also met with Nawrocki ahead of the White House trip to discuss the government’s views. The prime minister said that while he “does not want to impose any agenda”, he had “confirmed to the president that the government’s recommendations remain in effect”.

Meanwhile, Sikorski published a video on social media in which he outlined that the government’s main suggestions to Nawrocki were to “explain Putin’s true intentions in Ukraine” to Trump and to “avert a reduction of US military forces in Europe, and especially Poland”.

Poland’s constitution states that the government “shall conduct the internal affairs and foreign policy of Poland” and that “the president shall cooperate with the prime minister and the appropriate minister in respect of foreign policy”.

Nawrocki’s election has raised concerns that Poland’s effectiveness on the international stage will diminish due to his conflict with the government, which has already seen him veto a series of bills passed by the ruling majority in parliament.

Those were amplified last month when no Polish representative was invited to join other European leaders accompanying Volodymyr Zelensky for talks with Trump.


Notes from Poland is run by a small editorial team and published by an independent, non-profit foundation that is funded through donations from our readers. We cannot do what we do without your support.

Main image credit: Bartosz Bera/MON (under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 PL)

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