Radio Atlantic: In The Oval Office With Donald Trump

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Why would President Donald Trump invite The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, whom Trump has attacked as a “total sleazebag,” to meet with him in the Oval Office? Donald Trump himself asked the question when Goldberg and two Atlantic reporters came to the Oval Office last week to meet him: “Most people would say, Why are you doing that?” he mused. The technical answer is that this magazine’s two White House reporters, Ashley Parker and Michael Scherer, had requested an interview, and after many rejections, Trump finally said yes, and asked Goldberg to join.

But the best answer comes from Parker and Scherer, who talked with dozens of people over the last few weeks about what’s animating Trump these days: “From the first phone call, from the first proposal we sent to his staff, the first conversations we had, this has been for him a negotiation,” says Sherer. “What are they trying to do? Could I benefit from it? Is it going to hurt me? It is a window into the most essential fact of Donald Trump, which is that everything he engages in is a transaction, and he's pretty good at figuring out where his advantage is. At the end, he decided that it was to his advantage not only to have us in, but to announce it to the world.”

In this episode of Radio Atlantic, we talk with Goldberg about what Trump told him about Signalgate. We also talk to Parker and Sherer about the lessons Trump learned from his time in the political wilderness, and how he is applying them in his second term.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

 Hanna Rosin: Okay, Jeff.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Yes.

Rosin: You get invited to the Oval Office—

Goldberg: Yes.

Rosin: —by a guy—

Goldberg: By a guy. (Laughs.) Yeah.

Rosin: —who has referred to you as a “total sleazebag” and the editor of a “failing magazine.”

Goldberg: Yeah.

Rosin: How did you expect he would receive you? Like, as you were going over there, what did you think was going to happen?

Goldberg: Eighty percent, he would be full charm offensive; 20 percent, he would start yelling at me.

[Music]

Rosin: This is The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, talking about Donald Trump, of course.

Goldberg:  I figured that people on the staff, on his team, might be a little dubious about this whole operation. And they were. That was facially obvious, as they say.

Rosin: (Laughs.)

Goldberg: But no, him? I kind of guessed this correctly—I figured he was bringing me over there to try to charm me.

[Music]

Rosin: This is Radio Atlantic. I’m Hanna Rosin.

Not long before Jeff and Atlantic staff writers Michael Scherer and Ashley Parker met in the Oval Office on Thursday, Trump posted on Truth Social, calling Jeff a person, quote, “responsible for many fictional stories about me.”

But Trump also wrote that Jeff’s latest story, Signalgate—about when Jeff was accidentally added to a group chat about war plans (oops)—was somewhat successful. Trump wrote the word successful in quotes.

In the second half of the show, we are going to talk to Michael and Ashley about their cover story in The Atlantic—“Trump Is Enjoying This”—including about how Michael cold-called Trump, and Trump picked up the phone.

But first, I wanted to know what happened when Jeff—who wrote one of the biggest stories of this year about Trump’s administration—met Trump, the guy who called him a “sleazebag.”

[Music]

Goldberg: We go over to the Resolute desk, and he stands up and—I forget the exact words, but—it’s like, Oh, this is going to be interesting. And he shakes hands with Ashley Parker, Michael Scherer, and gives me a big handshake—big, warm handshake. And we just sort of sit down right in front of him—Steven Cheung is sitting on the same row—and kind of launch into it. I thanked him for seeing us, and I made my sincere point that it’s better for us to talk than not talk. And then it was off to the races.

But he was charming, focused. And mainly, I was there with two writers who were actually writing a very large piece for us, so they had to drive the interview. But there was no hostility. I mean, you’ve read the Truth Social post about our visit that he posted, like, four hours before that was filled with hostility and nonsense. And I said to him—or one of us said—What was that about? He’s being Mr. Friendly, Mr. Charmer. And he said, Well, wanted to up the pressure on you a little bit. And then he said, Everything is a transaction. So it’s like, Look. I got something out of that post—meaning, I got to screw with you a little bit—but you are going to sell so many more magazines because of that post.

Rosin: (Laughs.) Right, right, right.

Goldberg: I can’t disagree with him. And it obviously drew—I mean, within 20 minutes of that post, I probably had, I don’t know, 50, 60, 70 media calls from other places and, you know, reporters asking, Are you going to the White House? And then there are stories just about the mere fact that I was going over the White House to see him.

So he’s right. It does generate—he knows how to draw attention.

Rosin: Right. So obviously, you talked about Signalgate. Can you describe the exchange?

Goldberg: Yeah, It was very low-key. He wrote something that was odd in his Truth Social post. He said my scoop or, you know—he used a lot of scare quotes—was “somewhat more ‘successful’” than the “suckers and losers” story from four years ago, five years ago.

Rosin: He said you were somewhat successful with Signalgate.

Goldberg: Yeah. And so I said, What does that mean? Do you mean that I exposed an operational-security lapse that then helped you run a tighter administration? But what he meant was, like, You got a lot of attention. The metric of success was, You got more attention in that period than I got. I think it was kind of a, Well, all right. You won that round. And so now you’ve got to come here, and we’ve got to talk about it.

It was not about anything having to do with the issues at hand, whether it’s the war in Yemen or the use of private-message apps to send classified information or the competence of Mike Waltz, his national-security adviser, the competence of Pete Hegseth, his secretary of defense. It was just about, Well, it was kind of like you won that round because you got a lot of attention, and you drove the agenda. I mean, to be fair, I said, What did you learn on a policy level from this? And he said, “Maybe don’t use Signal.”

Rosin: But even that seemed a little jokey. The exchange is interesting. It’s, like, fun to talk about. His answer is a good punch line. But I’m wondering how seriously to take the fact that he didn’t engage with the idea that there was a serious security breach that you uncovered.

Goldberg: Any other president I’ve ever talked to—George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, Joe Biden, whatever—if the same thing had happened: First of all, congressional investigations, [inspector general] investigations, criminal probes. The president would be grave about it. And he would say, undoubtedly, Look—I can’t talk about it, because it’s under multiple investigations, but what I can say is that I promise that it will never happen again. But I can’t talk about it anymore, because possibly indictments are coming. Here it’s like, Well, you won!

Rosin: Right. LOL. Don’t use Signal.

Goldberg: Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s all about the—yeah, it’s wild how different it is in approach.

Rosin: Yeah.

Goldberg: It’s just a game.

Rosin: Yeah. Which is what? What’s the adjective?

Goldberg: Bad.

Rosin: Bad. Okay. Did he say anything about Pete Hegseth? Did you get the sense he was in trouble in any way?

Goldberg: I think Pete Hegseth is in trouble from other reporting that we’ve done and other people have done. He kind of indicated that, Oh, I love Pete. We had a talk. It’s a positive talk. We had a talk, and he’s going to get it together. And, you know, he was behind him until he’s not behind him. If you find out tomorrow that he is out of the job, I mean, no one’s going to be very surprised. Same thing, true for Mike Waltz, for different reasons.

I think President Trump likes Pete Hegseth. True believer—true believer in Trump: Fox & Friends, loyalist, knows him from television. But if that story of Pentagon mismanagement and incompetence continues, it gets in the way of other messages that the White House is trying to send.

Rosin: Yeah. Was there anything that he said that will keep you vigilant, where you left thinking, Oh, we have to keep our eye on this one?

Goldberg: Yeah. When Ashley asked him about the 2028 hats and what they might mean, he mostly made a joke of it and said it wasn’t very likely and acknowledged that he’s a shatterer of norms, but kind of indicated that might be a norm too far.

But he didn’t just say, No. Of course, I’m not trying to run in 2028. The Constitution doesn’t—a normal politician in his second term as president would say, Why are you asking me whether I would run for a third term? I can’t. But this is Donald Trump, so everything’s open. And why would it be surprising if he somehow tries to hold onto power?

Rosin: Yeah.

Goldberg: So I have an eye on that. I’m most interested in his policies on Ukraine. And I asked him—I said, Is there anything that Vladimir Putin could do that would cause you to kind of fully and frankly embrace Zelensky’s cause? And he says, Zelensky? No. But Ukraine, he—

Rosin: He made it personal.

Goldberg: He always makes it personal. But he left it open the idea that maybe Putin can push him too far, which I thought was interesting. I don’t necessarily believe that. I think he wants to be friends with Putin. And I think he doesn’t care about Ukraine. But I also imagine that he understands that pictures of Russian tanks rolling into Kyiv and slaughtering Ukrainians would be bad for him.

Rosin: So did your impression of him, in an overall way, change after this meeting? Like, in any way did you come away thinking differently, broadly about Trump than before the meeting?

Goldberg: Look—I find him totally fascinating, obviously. And if you really want to know, I find it very easy to relate to his personality, because I grew up around people like that. I grew up five miles from where he grew up. I understand that type. I understand the humor. Some people don’t find him funny. I actually do find him funny. I know that he’s doing shtick half the time. The shtick has extraordinary consequences, but his ability to bifurcate and not take anything—how do I say this?

If you called me the names that Donald Trump has called me, I think you and I would both find a personal encounter very, very, very awkward. He doesn’t find it awkward, because he believes that it’s just a game. It’s just a performance. And I think he believes—at least with me, and maybe with others—that I believe it’s just a performance. But no—he’s an interesting guy to talk to and listen to. And our job is—to the extent that he’s understandable—to understand him. And so the more exposure I have to him, the better it is for me from an analytical standpoint. I am trying to figure out what’s inside him, if there is anything inside him, and why he thinks the way he thinks.

[Music]

Rosin: Jeff, thanks for coming on.

Goldberg: Thanks for having me.

[Music]

Rosin: When we come back:

President Donald Trump: Tell the people at The Atlantic—

Michael Scherer: Yeah.

Trump: —if they’d write good stories and truthful stories, the magazine would be hot.

Rosin: Atlantic staff writers Ashley Parker and Michael Scherer on their new cover story: “Trump Is Enjoying This.”

Scherer: (Laughs.) I’ll pass—

Trump: The magazine would be hot.

Scherer: I’ll pass on the message.

Rosin: That’s after the break.

[Break]

Rosin: All right, we’re back, and now I’m joined by staff writers Ashley Parker and Michael Scherer. Ashley, Michael, welcome to the show.

Ashley Parker: Thanks for having me.

Scherer: Thank you for having me.

Rosin: So let’s start with where it starts, which is the phone call.

Parker: Well, it actually starts with the request for the interview and him canceling it on Truth Social.

Scherer: So the story is that we talked to some of his advisers. His advisers say, Yes, this sounds like a great idea. We should keep talking. We’ll get a request to the president. We kind of write a formal request after some more conversations; it’s delivered to the president. The president comes back and says to a staffer—tells Ashley, Yes, we’re doing it. We can probably have a photo. We might get a tour of the residence. We maybe go to the Lincoln Bedroom. And then we wait a few weeks, and it’s put on the schedule provisionally. It’s sort of discussed in a larger meeting at the White House.

And then that afternoon, after it’s discussed in the White House, Ashley gets a call, sort of last minute, saying, He’s about to put out a Truth Social. Brace yourselves. And then, you know, we look at our phones, and he’s calling us names and saying, you know, he’s not going to sit down with us, he can’t trust us, etcetera, etcetera, which then prompts us to seek other means of getting his attention.

Rosin: Okay, why don’t we just play the phone call?

[Phone ringing]

Scherer: Hello. Is this? This is Michael. Hello. Is President Trump there?

Trump: Who’s calling?

Scherer: This is Michael Scherer. I’m a reporter for The Atlantic. You wrote—

Trump: Oh, I know who you are, Michael. I know who you are. You never write—you never write good about me, Michael. Never, ever.

Rosin: I mean, so the way you land an interview with a sitting president is you just call him on his cell phone, and he picks up the phone, “I know who you are, Michael.”

Scherer: You know what’s interesting about this? He didn’t say who he was. He didn’t really make much sound initially, so I assumed it was a staffer picking up the phone on his behalf, which is why I was so confused initially. And I had to wait for, you know, a tone of his voice come through before I realized.

But yes, that is under this current president the way things work. I mean, we write about in the story that, you know, lots of people have that phone number, and he talks with lots of people, and he’s very proud of the people he talks to privately. And the White House does not control this. The White House had no idea we were calling that day. You know, he was not prepped for it.

You know, one of the staffers said that during the call, there was somebody else in the room, and they got a text saying, Oh, by the way, you should know he’s on the phone right now with a reporter. And so they sort of find out as we’re doing the conversation.

Parker: I should say, again, it’s worth noting: We did try to go through official channels first, and it was only once it looked like we were not going to get in that way that we procured the number and Michael called him at 10:45 on a Saturday morning.

Rosin: I mean, this is so much better.

[Laughter]

Rosin: So you’re just sitting in your kitchen talking to the president?

Scherer: No, I have, like, a little office—like, a COVID office upstairs at my house. I had to tell my kids to be quiet and tell my wife to be quiet. It was a Saturday morning.

Rosin: So you talked to a lot of people besides Trump about his comeback, and I’m most interested in lessons he learned from that comeback and brought to his second term. So, Ashley, you write that while he was in the political wilderness, which is after he lost the 2020 election, one big lesson he learned was the “vampire” lesson. Can you explain that?

Parker: Yes. In that phone call, Michael asked him about it. But it was fascinating. It was that all these would-be vampire slayers, the Democrats, the Never Trumpers, the legal cases against him, the media critics, even his Republican opponents—they failed to drive a stake through his heart, continuing with the vampire analogy.

And in doing so, they only made him stronger. For instance, after January 6, when the House impeaches him, you know, senators had a moment where they could have convicted him. That would’ve been a knockout blow. They did not. He was sort of banished. There was a world in which Republicans could have worked to truly implement that banishment.

I mean, as we went back and we reported this story, we knew there was this moment where Kevin McCarthy was in Florida for fundraisers. Trump invites him to Mar-a-Lago. A photo of the two of them is, you know, kind of blasted out on social media, and it’s the first step of Trump’s political retribution.

But what was so striking when we re-reported this, because you forget some of these details: That happened one week after Trump left Washington as a pariah because of his role in January 6. It wasn’t three months later or a year later: One week. After McCarthy himself suggested maybe Trump should resign and not even serve out the final, you know, two weeks of his term, he is down there with a publicity photo that helps rehabilitate Trump. So it is striking how quickly this all begins.

Rosin: So the lesson is—is it just, like, whatever doesn’t kill you, makes you stronger?

Parker: The lesson is that—Michael can share his own lesson; he thinks I say this too frequently, but my big takeaway, with Michael writing 12,000 words and talking to dozens of advisers, is that—Trump has an ability to bend reality to his will and, by never ceding, never giving any quarter, to make people believe and feel a version of events that does not actually comport with reality or the facts on the ground.

Rosin: Right. Okay, so that’s the lesson. Then how are we seeing that lesson play out in this new presidency?

Scherer: Well, I think having overcome what he overcame over the four years in the wilderness has emboldened him. I mean, the attitude with which he took back the White House is so different from the attitude with which he arrived in 2017, after the first win. I remember interviewing him in December of 2016, and there was a clear sense—he was trying to figure out how to go forward, but—he was still sort of in shell shock.

He didn’t know who he was going to hire. He didn’t really know how to run the government. He didn’t know much about governing or policy or political theory. And then he kind of stumbled around for years, trying to figure that out. And his own party didn’t really like him, a lot of leaders. He comes through this process, using those four years, fighting his way back, taking over, finally, the Republican Party, taking over, finally, the Congress—I mean, he’s had a hand in almost every one of their campaigns at this point; I mean, he endorses, he talks to them—and truly understanding how the federal government works and how he wanted to do it differently.

I mean, he talked about at the end of the campaign almost this, you know, divine intervention with the assassination attempt. He feels like he is ready for this moment and comes in, you know, without any reservations.

Parker: He also understands the norms that he can shatter, right? That a lot of the pillars of our democracy are sort of based on societal agreements and niceties that, when a court rules, you follow the court’s ruling. And in the first term, there were things that Trump wanted to do—fire his attorney general—that the people around him said, You can’t possibly do that, right? You would pay a political price, or, That’s against the law, or, You absolutely can’t.

And this time, not only is there no one telling him he can’t; he fully believes he can. And this, you know, may not seem as consequential as, say, deporting people without due process, but this time, when he says, You know what? I kind of want to just fire everyone on the board of the Kennedy Center and make myself chairman, instead of aides being like, Well, you can’t possibly do that, because people on the board serve six-year terms, you know, they say, Okay. Yes, sir. We’re going to figure out how to do it, and we’ll have you an answer by tomorrow. And he does it.

Rosin: Michael, he said something in your phone call with him that relates to that point. I want to play it for us.

Trump: The first time I had two things to do—run the country and survive; I had all these crooked guys, you know? And the second time, I run the country and the world, because, you know, it’s the world I’m trying to save.

Rosin: What do you make of that? What is he saying?

Scherer: He’s saying that his first term and the four years before he came back to office have been consumed by him playing defense, by him being attacked by his rivals—he thinks, unfairly—and that he now feels free of that, and he can finally do the job he wants to do and sort of be the president he always wanted to be. When we spoke to him in the Oval Office, he said, When I fired James Comey, the FBI director when he first came in the first term, it was like throwing a rock into a hornet’s nest.

And his point was, like, That was a surprise. I didn’t realize what I was going to unleash. He comes into office now—he knows all the threats that face him, so he goes after the law firms and says, If you’re going to do pro bono work on my side, you’re not going to be able to work against me. He goes into the FBI, puts a handpicked guy who has, like, written a children’s book about him.

Rosin: Mm-hmm.

Scherer: I mean, is so devoted that there’s no question there. He starts declaring publicly that I am the chief law enforcement officer of the country, even though that’s the title of the attorney general.

It’s still on the webpage of the Department of Justice: Chief law enforcement officer is the attorney general. He says, No, that’s me. And everyone knows it. And, you know, he’s been coming after media organizations very aggressively. They were his opposition before. He’s trying to undercut them from the start.

And so that’s just all knowledge he lacked in 2017 and 2018. And he’s coming in now and sort of keeping everybody on defense from the start.

Rosin: You know, another big difference from his first term that you did ask him about on that phone call was his mood.

Scherer: One of the things that a couple of your advisers have told us is that you’re having a lot of fun this time.

Trump: I am. I’m having a lot of fun, considering what I do. You know, what I do is such serious stuff.

Scherer: That actually came out of interviews we had done with advisers to him before, who had been saying that—this is in the first months of the administration. People would say to us, You can’t believe how much fun we’re having. There’s no bad days here. It’s just great.

Rosin: Sunshine all the time.

Scherer: Sunshine all the time. And how much fun he is having.

And they talked about—I mean, he still does this. He will have the press in for more than an hour a day, routinely. You know, three events, 35 minutes of questions, two times, another spray somewhere else. And he just sits in the Oval Office and takes questions—and not even if news is happening—’til everyone’s tired. And he does it every day because he’s really enjoying it.

Parker: And they’ve also said, even on days when they brief him before the press comes in, right—even on days where there’s going to be tough issues and tough questions, you know—his attitude is: It was described to us as sort of like, Bring in the hounds, right? Like, it’s a fun thing.

Rosin: And what difference does that make, that he’s having fun? Like, what does that bring the country, the fact that he’s having fun?

Scherer: I think there’s a lot more—I don’t know if this is the right word—like, adventurism. Like, the degree to which he is going—like, every week now, his advisers have to come up with new executive orders for him to sign, new things for him to go after, new crusades to start. You know, what he did with tariffs was basically say to the world, You all have to negotiate with me. There’s a[n] appetite here that is enormous. And he’s right when he talks about, You have to realize how many things I’ve got in the mix right now.

When we spoke to him in the Oval Office, later that day, he directs the Justice Department to go after the chief fundraising machinery behind the Democratic Party, ActBlue. I mean, so I think that’s really what it means.

There’s a constant appetite for more and more and more, which is really in contrast to Biden, definitely, you know, who was—at the end of his term, the aperture had been narrowed so small that what he was actually doing was very controlled and very tight. And I don’t know if we’ve had as energetic a president.

Parker: And another thing a top Trump adviser told us was that, you know, some of the people around him have a rule, which is that We only do stuff when he says it twice. And we said, Why? And, you know, this person said, Well, he says a lot of crazy shit. But the difference is: Before, when he would say the quote-unquote “crazy shit” in the first term, there were people who would slow-walk it or, again, tell him he couldn’t do that, or, you know, literally steal a paper off of his desk, with the hopes that he would forget about it.

And now, you have people who, yeah, maybe they want to hear it a second time, but when Trump comes up with some outlandish idea and he says it twice, they’re like, All right, Mr. President. Let’s figure out how to execute.

Rosin: Like Greenland, Gulf of America, whatever it is. You know what image just popped in my head as you both were talking? The movie Big. When you keep bringing the grown-up new toys, it’s like, The basketball thing is not enough. This isn’t enough. We need to do something else. You know? Keep them entertained.

Another thing that your sources talked to you about was the “shock-and-awe” strategy. Can you describe what that is and how it’s played out in the second term?

Parker: Yeah, I think of that a ton, as well. You know, it’s not just that Trump is sort of this—to use the cliché—fire hose of stuff everywhere, because he is, you know, as they would say, “having fun.” But it’s very deliberate. It’s very strategic.

And just one example is a quote an adviser said to us, but that kind of sticks with me and can be applied throughout the administration so far—although this pertained to day one. They said, Look—on day one we, we planned for it, and we came in, and we did all of these immigration executive orders. And if we had just left it at that, the media would’ve covered it as, We’re horrible people. We’re kicking immigrants out of the country. We’re separating, you know, women and children. We’re awful. But we did that, and then—bam!—we pardoned every one of the J-6ers.

And by the way, he gives his traditional inauguration remarks. He gives another inauguration speech, then he repairs to the Oval Office, where he takes questions from reporters in the Oval Office. And then that night, he goes out dressed up, you know, with his wife and her designer clothes to the balls. And it’s like, Screw you, media. You have to choose what you want to cover. You can’t cover it all. And that’s not to mention the things that they may be doing quietly behind the scenes that they really don’t want you to know about.

Rosin: And why? Like, what’s the point of that? Is the point to overwhelm us, the media, just so that we can’t keep up—literally, we can’t keep up with it? Like, there just aren’t enough hands?

Parker: Yes.

Scherer: Yeah, I think it—I mean, it’s to overwhelm us but also to overwhelm the American people, right? If you remember, the first weeks of 2017 were the weeks of the Women’s Marches, of mass events on the Mall, of outrage over the Muslim ban. There was a linear quality to that that allowed for an uprising, for a resistance—a popular resistance—to happen, for Democrats to sort of figure out what their message was.

That hasn’t happened this time. There’ve been sporadic protests. It’s hard to keep track of all the court cases any given day: you know, the immigration stuff, the DOGE stuff, you know, all the dismantling of federal agencies. Look—we’re living in a time where years are happening in weeks, right, in terms of, you know, like, the normal lifespan of government news. And if his goal is a sort of radical transformation of how the government functions, of how American politics works, that’s to his advantage.

Rosin: Michael, in your phone call, you asked him about deportations. Let’s listen to that exchange.

Scherer: Are you at all concerned that any of those people you deported may have been the wrong people, they may not have been part of the gang?

Trump: Well, I have to do what I do. And, you know, I’m not involved in that. You know, I have many people, many layers of people that do that.

Scherer: Yeah.

Trump: Including Homeland [Security] and ICE and people that are very professional. And I would say they are all extremely tough, dangerous people. I would say that. And they came in—don’t forget, they came in the country illegally.

Rosin: Okay, so that’s not really an answer. Did he ever answer this question in your couple of interviews?

Scherer: A couple things to say. That answer is consistent with what he has done, which is to basically say—it’s, like, the I just work here defense. When you point out specific legal cases, bizarre arguments his government is making, specific errors his government has made, specific harm that has happened—he immediately distanced himself from that. “I have many layers of people.” I’m not doing that. Other people are doing that. We did, in our interview at the Oval Office, go back into this line of questioning.

Parker: Yeah, when we asked again, What if you mistakenly deport an American citizen or the wrong person without due process? his answer was sort of a Gallic shrug of, Well, let me tell you: Nothing in life is perfect, which is actually an argument for due process, because nothing in life is perfect.

Rosin: Right.

Scherer: And going back to the 2016 campaign, he has been consistent in this. When you bring up real harm his policies do or have the potential to do, rather than defend against that, he will often say, Well, you have to compare it to all the other harm that’s being done in the world. And so he’s able to sort of dismiss those concerns and abstract them. And, you know, in talking about immigration and these court cases, he often goes back to the idea that, Well, millions of people came to the United States under Biden before, and they weren’t getting detailed hearings as they came in the government. That was a wrong. So if we’re kicking them out and they’re not getting detailed hearings going out, why is that so bad?

Parker: Right. He says quite explicitly, his idea: If you came here illegally, you are essentially not entitled to anything, right? That original sin gives me grounds to sort of—he doesn’t put it this explicitly, but—to treat you all however I choose.

Scherer: And we should say there that the Supreme Court seems to disagree with him. I mean, in the case that is now still in the courts about the Salvadoran man who was deported back to El Salvador, despite a court order saying he should not be deported back to El Salvador, the Supreme Court has basically ruled that the government has to facilitate his return, that court orders matter, that you can’t just make mistakes and say, Oops.

Rosin: Right. But you asked him in both your interviews about the Supreme Court, and he said, I haven’t always agreed with a decision, but I’ve never done anything but rely on it. So how do you square these two things, that he seems to be defying the Supreme Court—everybody talks about that as a constitutional crisis—but he says very clearly, I rely on the Supreme Court. I will not defy the Supreme Court?

Scherer: I don’t think we’re yet at the constitutional-crisis point. Now, what he is doing is: The Supreme Court ruled, sent it back to the lower court. And he’s now fighting in the lower court. And that is eventually going to go back to the Supreme Court. And the Supreme Court almost certainly will have more specific instructions. The Supreme Court’s ruling in that case was basically to ask the lower court to give instructions on how to resolve this, and now that’s where the fight is. There could come a point where there’s an explicit, clear order from the Supreme Court, and Trump and his government does something that he says he won’t do, and then we’ll be in that moment.

Parker: His sense of the Supreme Court still is that, My justices are there, and at the end of the day, when push comes to shove, they’re going to rule in my favor. I think when the rubber meets the road is if something goes to the Supreme Court and they rule definitively against him, does he still stand by, You have to do what the court says?

Scherer: And in that initial phone interview, he even went so far as—like, as an aside—to talk about how much he likes the Democrats on the Supreme Court and how he sees them at events and how he respects them. And it was sort of an unrequested moment of praise. So I think he’s definitely working the refs there.

Rosin: So what you’re both saying is that we’re just still suspended. Like, we don’t know. We don’t have the crisis yet. I mean, how many headlines I’ve read that say the constitutional crisis is here, but you’re not saying that.

Scherer: So I think strictest definition of a constitutional crisis would be defying the Supreme Court—the executive branch or the legislative branch defying the Supreme Court. I think what can be said, though, is that the courts move much slower than the executive branch. And so we are in a moment of history now where so much has happened that may yet very well be found to be illegal, from the dismantling of USAID to orders of the Pentagon about transgender troops.

Like, all kinds of things are in the courts right now, and it may be two, three years before that ever reaches the Supreme Court. So you have—the system itself is not superefficient. And so it could be that in three years, we look back on this year and say, well, 10 of the things he was doing were unconstitutional and illegal.

Parker: But the clearest definition, I think would still be, for instance, the Supreme Court says, you know, just to simplify it, You absolutely cannot put any more undocumented immigrants on planes and fly them to El Salvador. And then Trump is sort of like, YOLO. We’re doing it anyhow. That’s the crisis.

Rosin: Right, and we haven’t done that. Ashley, you asked Trump about the 2028 hats that his organization is selling.

Parker: Yes.

Rosin: Yes. (Laughs.) You rolled your eyes when I asked you that. What was your takeaway about what he’s saying about running for a third term?

Parker: Well, you know, this is always the question. Michael and I separately had been chasing a tip we had heard that he had asked his attorney general and his Department of Justice to look into whether or not he could seek a third term, and he said, No, I haven’t. So that was something we wanted to know: Is this true? But what’s interesting is, in reporting out that story, you sort of hear both sides from his advisers, which is that he says this as a troll. He says this as a, you know, provocation. But, you know, there’s people on the outside—Steve Bannon and others—who really are looking at ways to do this. And by the way, also, if Trump ever thought it was actually feasible, like, yeah, he’d seriously consider it. And that was sort of the answer he then gave us.

So he said, No, I haven’t, you know, asked for a legal opinion on this. And I kind of pressed him and said, Well, you know, you’ve shattered so many norms. This isn’t another norm you’d like to shatter? And he sort of goes, Huh, well, that’d be a really big shatter, wouldn’t it? You know, maybe I just really want to shatter. But then he pauses and says, But look—it’s not something I’m talking about. It’s not something I’ve looked into. And frankly, I think it would be quite hard to do. So it’s kind of a no until and unless it becomes a yes.

Rosin: What do you think Trump wanted to accomplish by inviting you two and Jeff to the Oval Office? Why did he want to sit down with you?

Scherer: From the very beginning of this—from the first phone call, from the first, you know, proposal we sent to his staff, the first conversations we had—this has been, for him, a negotiation, right? It’s a transaction. What are they trying to do? Could I benefit from it? Is it going to hurt me? I think it is a window into the most essential fact of Donald Trump, which is that everything he engages in is a transaction, and he’s pretty good compared to other politicians, other people, at figuring out where his advantage is and then finding those advantages. And that’s basically the story of this story.

Parker: I also think he was—again, he’s sort of a guy who fundamentally came of age in the ’80s, where magazine covers meant something. I mean, I think they still mean something. But I think he was intrigued by the idea of being on the cover of The Atlantic, which is not the cover of another magazine. The Atlantic has written some pretty tough pieces about him that he remembers. He remembers Jeff Goldberg’s “suckers” and “losers” piece. And I think that was appealing to him.

Rosin: And what was the orientation towards Jeff? Like, what was the vibe between them? What did he seem to want from Jeff?

Scherer: I think he wanted to—

Parker: He wanted to charm him and win him over. And it’s interesting: People will say—Jeff could leave that meeting, right, and say, like, Well, which is the real Trump? Is it the Trump that was sort of solicitous and, you know, trying to make sure I understood where he was coming from and seeking my opinion and, you know, kind of having a respectful back and forth? Or is it the Trump who at rallies goes after Jeff by name?

Which is the real Trump? And the answer is: They’re all the real Trump, because to fundamentally understand Donald Trump—Donald Trump is a consummate salesman, consummate promoter, and he is trying to win the minute, the hour, the day, the person directly in front of him.

So when Jeff, Michael, and I are sitting in the Oval Office in front of him, the way to win us over is probably not to berate us and then toss us from the Oval. And when he’s trying to win over his MAGA base or he’s at a rally or he’s on social media, it’s a different crowd. It’s a different medium. And what you do to win over that group is quite different.

Scherer: And the takeaway is not that he really, truly is a charming gentleman, even though he can be a charming gentleman, or that he’s really a raving madman you see at rallies or, you know, am antidemocratic authoritarian. It’s that he’s willing to use all of those tools throughout his life and that you just have to understand that about him.

Rosin: Ashley, Michael, thank you both so much for joining us.

Parker: Thank you.

Scherer: Thank you.

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Rosin: This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Kevin Townsend and Jinae West. It was edited by Claudine Ebeid and engineered by Erica Huang and fact-checked by Sara Krolewski. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

If you like what you hear on Radio Atlantic, you can support our work and the work of all Atlantic journalists when you subscribe to The Atlantic at theatlantic.com/podsub. That’s theatlantic.com/podsub.

I’m Hanna Rosin. Thank you for listening.