During his next White House assignment, he covered the travails of Bush's second term, from the Iraq War and Hurricane Katrina to Supreme Court nomination fights and the economy.

In between the stints at the White House, Baker and his wife, Susan Glasser, were bureau chiefs in Moscow for four years chronicling the rise of Vladimir Putin, the rollback of Russian democracy, the Second Chechen War, and the Beslan school hostage crisis.

He later was in the Middle East for six months, reporting from inside Saddam Hussein's Iraq and around the region before embedding with the U.S. Marines on the drive to Baghdad.

While serving as White House correspondent for The Washington Post, he won the Gerald R. Ford Journalism Prize for Distinguished Reporting on the Presidency in 2007 for his "exceptionally trenchant appraisal" of the achievements and shortfalls of the second year of George W. Bush's second term in office.

[11] Baker again won the Gerald R. Ford Journalism Prize for Distinguished Reporting on the Presidency and the Aldo Beckman Memorial Award in 2015.

[12] In October 2013, he published his third book, Days of Fire: Bush and Cheney in the White House through Doubleday, a detailed narrative account of the two-term presidency of George W.

[15] After being briefly assigned as the Jerusalem bureau chief for the Times, in December 2016, Baker was reassigned back to the White House beat for the incoming administration of President Donald Trump.

[16] In October 2018, Baker published a book with Random House entitled Impeachment: An American History, along with Jon Meacham, Timothy Naftali, and Jeffrey A.

They live in Washington D.C. Their son, Theo Baker, is the youngest person to win a Polk Award for reporting (when he was eighteen) allegations that some research papers by Marc Tessier-Lavigne, then the president of Stanford University, had manipulated images.