'America First' Trump loved hanging out with the global elite during his Asia trip

TOKYO (AP) — For an “America First” president, Donald Trump seemed to love his whirlwind five days skipping across Asia — a reflection of a White House that is increasingly focused on the rest of the world.

When Trump stepped off Air Force One on Sunday for his first stop in Malaysia, he danced with local performers who had greeted him on the red carpet. In Japan, he helicoptered to a mammoth aircraft carrier for a speech with the country's prime minister. And South Korea gave him a gold medal and crown as gifts.

Back home in Washington, the federal government was shut down as Trump’s poll numbers remain low, and it's unclear how much Trump's trip will resonate with voters consumed by other concerns at home.

Yet on the last night of his trip, Trump was overheard at a state dinner talking about how much he enjoyed meetings with his foreign counterparts.

“That was a great meeting,” Trump said. “They’re all great meetings. This was a great meeting. We had a fantastic meeting.”

Had a president who once used the term “globalist” as a slur suddenly found the fun in being a little bit globalist? He definitely likes the international deal making, the parties in his honor, the praise from other leaders and the possibility of leaving his mark on the wider world.

The president sees diplomacy as a way to fulfill his domestic agenda of returning manufacturing to America and creating factory jobs, said Carla Sands, who was the U.S. ambassador to Denmark during Trump's first term and is now chair of the foreign policy initiative at the America First Policy Institute, a pro-Trump think tank.

“President Trump is working as fast as possible to reindustrialize America, bring jobs back home, and secure better trade deals for the American people and businesses,” Sands said.

The ebullience abroad also reflects the mood of a president who has struck economic deals and helped smooth relations between warring nations.

He helped to affirm a ceasefire between Cambodia and Thailand. There’s a detailed list of nearly $500 billion in investment commitments from Japan. And South Korea pledged $150 billion to help revive American shipbuilding, including a project to acquire a nuclear-powered submarine — on top of $200 billion in investments over a decade to the U.S.

“It's not globalism to go to other countries and stand up for America,” said Hogan Gidley, a former White House aide who traveled to Asia and other foreign destinations with Trump in his first term. When Trump travels, he makes sure “the globe is fully aware that this president is going to stand up for the American people first,” Gidley said, making it “the exact opposite of globalism.”

As for the dancing?

“Look, when you're scoring touchdowns, it's OK to dance in the end zone,” Gidley said. “And this president is scoring touchdowns and running up the score.”

Many Trump voters believed they were electing a president who would focus on them instead of distant countries. But Trump in his second term is increasingly finding it easier to sell the idea of America with jaunts to Asia and the Middle East.

The shift in tone reflects foreign governments’ strenuous efforts to keep Trump happy, like stationing American-made vehicles near him in Tokyo and featuring U.S.-raised beef on the menu.

Trump is increasingly showing confidence that he can play on the global stage, instead of grinding metaphorical axes as he did during his first term by attacking NATO and finding ways to intimidate and frustrate allies such as Angela Merkel, then the chancellor of Germany.

“He appears to believe in his skills as a one-on-one negotiator with world leaders,” said Jasen Castillo, a professor with a focus on national security at Texas A&M University. “All of this suggests that his foreign policy ventures are genuine.”

Still, it’s not always clear what Trump is trying to achieve, other than a chance to declare victory. Some of his trade talks have led to foreign countries promising investments, but not necessarily the careful negotiations on which durable coalitions are built.

“What can confuse observers is that he lacks a consistent, coherent world view,” Castillo added.

The U.S. president in Asia was hardly the grimacing presence he’s been at times in the Oval Office, where he’s objected to the support Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has sought in the war against Russia and chastised post-apartheid South Africans on their treatment of white Afrikaners.

In Asia, it was a love fest. Trump said Southeast Asian nations had “spectacular leaders,” the new Japanese prime minister was “a winner,” and the South Korean president could “go down as the greatest of them all.”

Rather than complaining about foreign countries ripping off America, he told business leaders that “the best deals are deals that work for everybody.”

Trump was similarly effusive after sitting down on Thursday with Chinese leader Xi Jinping shortly before returning to Washington.

“I guess on the scale from 0 to 10, with 10 being the best, I would say the meeting was a 12,” Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One.

Trump seems to enjoy doing foreign policy on his own terms. He prizes bold shows of force, like attacking nuclear sites in Iran and boats allegedly carrying drugs in the Caribbean. He minimizes participation in lengthy multilateral meetings that can require more listening than talking.

Arriving at the summit for the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, Trump offered a spot in the armored presidential limousine to Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim, who was thrilled to join him in the vehicle nicknamed “The Beast.”

“When the president arrives, he asked me to join him in the car,” Anwar later recalled in a speech. “I said, ‘That’s against the security and protocol rules,’ and he was delighted to break the rules.”

The White House said that Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi planned to nominate him for the Nobel Peace Prize, with Takaichi telling him she was “so impressed and inspired” by Trump’s commitment to world peace and stability.

South Korean President Lee Jae Myung said Trump “will be recognized forever in the history of humanity” if he could bring his peacemaker skills to ending the military standoff with North Korea, before complimenting him for U.S. stock indexes hitting a record high.

Even the far more reserved Xi seemed to suggest that Trump’s policies behind elevating America were also good for China.

“I always believe that China’s development goes hand in hand with your vision to ‘Make America Great Again,’” Xi said through a translator.

While the White House is trumpeting the results of Trump's trip back home, it's unclear how much his foreign policy actions mattered to a country worried about inflation staying high.

Going into the 2025 elections Tuesday with a mayoral race in New York City and governors' elections in Virginia and New Jersey, many Americans are harboring deep anxieties about Trump’s leadership. The monthlong government shutdown is starting to cause pain with missed paychecks and government food aid no longer being available to millions of families.

About 6 in 10 U.S. adults disapprove of Trump’s performance as president, according to an October poll by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.

Trump told his audiences in Kuala Lumpur, Tokyo and South Korea that America has never been better.

“We’re literally sort of an inspiration to a lot of other countries,” Trump said.

Megerian reported from Busan, South Korea, and Kim reported from Washington.

President Donald Trump shakes hands with South Korean President Lee Jae Myung as they attend a high honor ceremony at the Gyeongju National Museum in Gyoeongju, South Korea, Wednesday, Oct. 29, 2025. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein)

President Donald Trump gestures as he arrives on Air Force One, Thursday, Oct. 30, 2025, at Joint Base Andrews, Md., after returning from a trip to Asia. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein)

President Donald Trump toasts with state leaders including South Korean President Lee Jae Myung, center right, during a dinner event in Gyeongju, South Korea, Wednesday, Oct. 29, 2025. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein)

President Donald Trump left, and Chinese President Xi Jinping, shake hands before their U.S.-China summit talk at Gimhae International Airport in Busan, South Korea, Thursday, Oct. 30, 2025. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein)

U.S. President Donald Trump waves from his official vehicle as he heads to attend the 47th Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) summit after arriving at Kuala Lumpur International Airport in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, Sunday, Oct. 26, 2025. (Hasnoor Hussain/Pool Photo via AP)

U.S. President Donald Trump reacts to dancing performers during a welcoming ceremony after arriving at Kuala Lumpur International Airport, to attend the 47th Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) summit in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, Sunday, Oct. 26, 2025. (Hasnoor Hussain/Pool Photo via AP)

HETAUDA, Nepal (AP) — She paces the side of the darkened highway in central Nepal, just enough light from the trucks roaring past to illuminate her painted face to the men rolling in on rickshaws and motorbikes. She knows that every stranger who pays for her body could end her life. But she also knows their money is the only thing preventing her death.

This spot, littered in condom wrappers and fringed by jungle, is familiar to her. Rubi Lama once came here not as a sex worker, but as an aid worker who helped sex workers.

For nine years, Lama — who is transgender — had devoted her life to conducting HIV outreach in Nepal’s marginalized communities, including the LGBTQ+ sex workers who wait by this highway each night. But after the United States slashed its foreign aid funding last year, Lama and more than 280,000 aid workers worldwide found themselves out of a job.

Much has been written about the devastating impacts the U.S. foreign aid cuts have had on the millions of people the funding once helped. Far less is known about the impacts on the helpers themselves.

In impoverished Nepal, where a conservative culture leaves openly transgender people with few legal job options, the impact on aid workers’ lives was particularly crushing. Starving and scared, Lama and around 100 other LGBTQ+ aid workers left jobless by the funding cuts have turned to sex work to survive, walking the streets alongside the very people they once fought so hard to help.

The public health implications are vast. With the U.S. funding cuts also eliminating access to HIV prevention medication in Nepal, health experts fear a spike in HIV prevalence among the surging ranks of sex workers, as well as members of the LGBTQ+ community.

On the side of the highway, the night is a cacophony of blaring horns and the shouts of drunken men. Lama, 28 years old, softspoken and shy, walks quietly among them, equal parts desperation and dread. Beyond her fear of HIV is her fear of violence, which she and nearly all her former colleagues who have taken to the streets have endured.

She’d give anything to go back to the nonprofit where she once cared for society’s most vulnerable. Now she is the one in need of care, but there is no one left to provide it.

It is 11 p.m. and she’s had two customers so far, who each paid her $3. Rent and food this month will cost her $80.

And so, her slight frame nearly swallowed by the shadows, she waits.

Just a few minutes down the road, in Lama’s old office, stickers bearing the logo of the U.S. Agency for International Development still cling to laptops that lie unused on barren desks, and to the empty condom distribution containers collecting dust.

This is the headquarters for the formerly USAID-funded non-governmental organization called Friends Hetauda, which offered HIV testing, counseling and prevention services to central Nepal’s LGBTQ+ community. All of that ended in January 2025, when U.S. President Donald Trump froze funding for USAID, once the world’s leading donor of humanitarian assistance. Trump later dissolved the agency after calling it a waste of money, even though the U.S. spent just 1% of its budget on foreign aid.

In a statement to The Associated Press, the U.S. State Department said the Trump administration had reinvigorated its assistance programs to focus on efficiency, effectiveness and partnership. The department also said the U.S. spends more on health and humanitarian assistance than any other country.

“The rest of the world needs to contribute more and share the burden,” the department said.

Of the more than 281,000 jobs lost due to Trump’s dismantling of USAID, just 23,000 were American, says Sadie Healy, who runs a global health consulting firm and has been tracking the job losses worldwide. The rest were overseas — many of them belonging to impoverished locals living in conflict zones or economically depressed regions where other employment options are scarce.

In Nepal alone, an estimated 35,000 aid workers lost their jobs amid the USAID cuts, says NGO Federation of Nepal President Arjun Bhattarai. With the country already facing high unemployment, the fallout was devastating.

The Blue Diamond Society, an umbrella organization for NGOs like Lama’s former employer, received 85% of its funding from USAID and was staffed largely by people who were themselves gender and sexual minorities. They served as counselors, health assistants, data collectors and outreach workers. They ran 20 clinics across Nepal, dispensing antiretroviral medication to people with HIV along with PrEP, a medication taken by HIV-negative people to prevent infection. They offered free HIV tests along with condoms and lubricant, which reduce the risk of HIV transmission.

The funding cuts shut down the society’s services, leaving more than 1,200 clients without access to PrEP medication and 262 of the group’s 350 staffers without work.

Outside of NGOs, legal work for openly transgender people in Nepal is virtually nonexistent, executive director Manisha Dhakal says. Which is why between 35% and 45% of the society’s former staffers turned to sex work, she says.

The risks are immense, she says, for both her former employees and the public. Too fearful of discrimination to go to hospitals for antiretroviral drugs, many transgender people have stopped taking them — significantly increasing their risk of transmission. Lubricant and condoms are expensive, so some are having unprotected sex. And PrEP distribution has been halted to everyone but pregnant and lactating women.

“One decision from one powerful country — all these services are cut,” Dhakal says.

She sits at the society’s now-hushed headquarters, the bookshelf behind her lined with framed certificates from USAID, commending her organization for saving lives. Now, she says, those lives are on the line.

“The Trump administration’s executive order will cause people to die,” she says.

Her fears are echoed by Dr. Sarbesh Sharma, director of Nepal’s National Centre for AIDS and STD Control. Viruses like HIV, he warns, do not respect borders.

“Borders are for humans,” he says. “We have a lot of migrant workers, we have a lot of overseas students, we have an open border with India. So those make it not only a Nepal concern, it can become a global concern.”

As a result of the drop in global aid, HIV testing fell by 22% in countries with high infection rates, while funding for condoms was cut by more than 90% in some places, according to data released in June by the United Nations agency that fights HIV.

All 15 aid workers-turned-sex workers interviewed by the AP recognize the risks. One, who is HIV positive, says she lives in fear of transmitting the disease, yet still hits the streets nearly every night to stave off starvation.

Most of the workers spent months trying to find other jobs, frequently being rejected the moment the employers realized they were transgender. Many have been forced to have unprotected sex with clients. Nearly all have faced violence, including gang rape.

None see a way out.

Aashika Tamang, who spent 16 years working in HIV prevention, longs for the days where she liaised with volunteers and social workers. Now, she says, she is abused at least once a week and largely liaises with addicts.

There’s a surreal whiplash when she bumps into fellow sex workers who once came to her for help.

“I used to meet them during the day,” she says. “Now I meet them during the night.”

This story was funded by a grant from the Pulitzer Center. The Associated Press is responsible for all content.

On her first night as a sex worker, Lama sat in her apartment, frozen by indecision and fear. Her makeup was on and her wig was in place, but her mind was in meltdown.

How had she gotten here?

Brainy and warm, with a gentle smile and soft brown eyes rimmed by glasses, she — like most of her former colleagues — had battled so many barriers on her path to aid work. Raised by a conservative family amid crippling poverty, she spent her childhood selling eggs in the local market to pay for her first years of school, where a teacher sexually assaulted her.

Lama finished high school thanks to a government scholarship for impoverished students. She then studied education at a university, but was unable to finish her degree amid harassment from teachers and classmates.

Her salvation came in 2016, when she was recruited by Friends Hetauda, named for the industrial transit city where it is based. Lama searched for, counseled and tested those at high risk of HIV, including the sex workers who service a stream of travelers.

Her father, furious over her job and gender identity, kicked her out. But Lama had found her calling; she knew she was saving lives. A series of promotions eventually netted her around 30,000 Nepalese rupees ($200) per month — enough to rent a one-room apartment.

And then one day in February 2025, she walked into her office and ran into Friends Hetauda’s coordinator, Kiran Thapa. The group’s funding, Thapa told her, was gone. Of its 17 staffers, the U.S. aid cuts had left Lama and 13 others out of a job.

Lama was terrified. She couldn’t go home; her father had made that clear. How would she survive?

In the months that followed, she watched with worry as her peers’ mental health worsened and as more began testing positive for HIV.

She applied for local government jobs she was initially told she had, only to be rejected once she showed up in person. A hotel manager offered her a position as a cleaner, then grabbed her breasts during a training session. The job was hers, he told her — but only if she had sex with him and his friends. Lama refused and was dismissed.

She started skipping meals and could no longer afford medicine or rent. Her landlord threatened to throw her out.

And so she began talking to her former colleagues about their new roles in the sex industry. Of the 14 Friends Hetauda staffers who lost their jobs, between 8 and 10 moved to sex work, says Thapa.

Lama realized it was sex work or starve. She knew where to go: the dark spot by the highway where she’d once tested sex workers and their clients for HIV.

For two nights, she hung back and observed. On her third night, she committed herself to landing a client. She began getting ready around 8 p.m., putting on her makeup and wig, along with a traditional white kurta and red leggings. By 9 p.m., she looked the part, but didn’t feel it.

And so she sat, paralyzed, in her apartment.

At 11:30, she forced herself down to the highway. After two hours, the first man approached. “You wanna go?” he asked. She didn’t, but climbed onto his motorbike anyway, after he promised to pay her 1,000 rupees ($6.50).

At his home, she was sick with fear. “Why do I have to do this?” she thought. “Is this really my path?”

When it was over, he shortchanged her, paying her just 700 rupees ($4.50), and dropped her along the highway.

Back at home, she washed off her makeup and crawled into bed. But sleep wouldn’t come.

Gripped by anxiety, her body grew hot and her thoughts grew dark. She thought about death, and whether it was the kinder alternative.

She thought, too, about her old job. That work had been her life’s purpose.

What was her purpose now?

In the unlit alleys, dense jungles and private homes where the workers service their clients, safety does not exist.

“All of my sex worker friends, including myself, who are involved in this profession are victims of violence,” Lama says.

Ironically, the workers say, it is their powers of persuasion and knowledge of the risks — skills honed through their counseling and outreach roles — that sometimes save them.

Lama’s training helped her remain outwardly calm the night a man pulled a knife on her, held it to her throat and threatened to cut her unless she had sex with him. She bought time, telling him he’d be at risk of HIV if he raped her, given how many other customers she’d been with. Then she shoved him and ran to a bathroom near a gas station, hiding there until friends rescued her.

A few hours’ drive to the north, in the capital, Kathmandu, Sujata Chaudhary frequently draws on her 11 years of work in HIV prevention to explain the dangers of unprotected sex to clients who try to force it upon her. Sometimes, she says, the men back down. Sometimes they don’t. She contracted syphilis as a result.

One night, she managed to talk her way out of a house where two men were threatening to release their large dogs on her. Another night, she confronted several police officers who had beaten her with their batons as she stood near a tea vendor, calling on her knowledge of the law to challenge them.

But often the abuse is impossible to stop. Two men once picked up Chaudhary and a friend and drove them against their will to a hostel an hour away, where more than a dozen other men were waiting. Chaudhary, slender and sensitive, with a tattoo on her arm that says “Aama,” or mother, in honor of the woman she likens to God, was no match for them. She begged them to stop, but was raped by at least eight men. She and her friend were eventually released, and forced to walk hours back to town.

She refuses to go to customers’ homes or hotel rooms now. But she has to keep working. Her father died years ago, leaving her family dependent on her income. She cannot bring herself to tell them, including her Aama, how she earns it.

Barsha Magar, who served at Friends Hetauda for 16 years as a peer educator, outreach worker and data collector, feared she would be killed when she transitioned to sex work. Two months into the job, she nearly was. Two soldiers who initially seemed kind took her into the jungle, held her at gunpoint and raped her while holding her mouth shut to stifle her screams.

She wipes away tears as she recalls the terror of that night. For two weeks, she was too traumatized to return to the streets.

For Bharati Thapa, a former Friends Hetauda field supervisor and peer educator, the violence started the very first night she stood along the highway. Two Indian tourists picked her up and took her to a guest house, where another eight men were waiting, all of them drunk. She was physically assaulted and raped before fleeing the house, clothing torn, body covered in scratches, and screaming for a guard to let her out through the locked gates.

She sits one recent evening in the darkened office of Friends Hetauda.

“My life is at risk now,” she says softly. “I fear that I may contract HIV and sexually transmitted infections. I fear being beaten up and harassed by customers. I fear the police taking me away at night. How can I not be afraid? There is risk from all sides.”

Back on the side of the highway, Lama has landed another customer and disappeared into the dark.

It is Friday, the busiest night of the week. Around 1 a.m., the police arrive, wielding long batons. The sex workers scatter, including Lama. It is time to go home, she says. She has made a total of 1,600 rupees ($10.50) from five clients. It’s a relatively good haul; sometimes she goes home with nothing.

“I wish it was fair,” she says. “I wish I could live with my identity. I wish I could walk in the way that makes me happy. I know what is right and wrong. I am aware of the road I am taking.”

But without a new funding source, she says, there is no way off this road. And so this is where she will return, night after night, to stand alongside the women she once tried to save, in a bid to save herself.

Journalist Tulsi Rauniyar contributed to this report.

A transgender sex worker stands next to a busy highway waiting for clients to approach her in Hetauda, Nepal, Saturday, May 16, 2026. (AP Photo/Bram Janssen)

Barsha Magar, a former aid worker who turned to sex work to survive after losing her job amid the U.S. foreign aid cuts, poses for a photo, Sunday, May 17, 2026, in Hetauda, Nepal. Magar spent 16 years as an HIV outreach worker and peer educator for the NGO Friends Hetauda before turning in desperation to sex work, where she has been raped at gunpoint. (AP Photo/Bram Janssen)

Sujata Chaudhary, who is transgender and a former aid worker who turned to sex work to survive after losing her job amid the U.S. foreign aid cuts, poses for a photo in Kathmandu, Nepal, Friday, May 22, 2026. (AP Photo/Bram Janssen)

An empty condom dispenser hangs outside an office in Kathmandu, Nepal, Tuesday, May 12, 2026. (AP Photo/Bram Janssen)

Rubi Lama, who is transgender and a former aid worker who turned to sex work to survive after losing her job amid the U.S. foreign aid cuts, poses for a photo after her transformation as she heads out to work on the streets, Friday, May 15, 2026, in Hetauda, Nepal. (AP Photo/Bram Janssen)

Rubi Lama, who is transgender and a former aid worker who turned to sex work to survive after losing her job amid the U.S. foreign aid cuts, poses for a photo before her transformation as she heads out to work on the streets, Friday, May 15, 2026, in Hetauda, Nepal. (AP Photo/Bram Janssen)

Men enter a club in Kathmandu, Nepal, Thursday, May 21, 2026. (AP Photo/Bram Janssen)

Bharati Thapa, a former HIV outreach worker who turned to sex work to survive after losing her job amid the U.S. foreign aid cuts, poses for a portrait outside the office of her former NGO, Wednesday, May 20, 2026, in Hetauda, Nepal. Thapa, who suffered a gang rape on her first night as a sex worker, says she fears her new line of work will kill her. (AP Photo/Bram Janssen)

Princy Tamang, a former HIV outreach worker who turned to sex work to survive after losing her job amid the U.S. foreign aid cuts, poses for a portrait, Friday, May 15, 2026, in Hetauda, Nepal. Tamang, who has endured beatings from clients and has been forced to have sex without condoms since transitioning to sex work, fears she will contract HIV. (AP Photo/Bram Janssen)