Donald Trump talks a lot of smack about the media in public. But, in private, it turns out he’s happy to shoot the breeze with reporters—even the ones he claims are liars and lunatics.
Even when they cold-call him from an unknown number.
Even on a Saturday morning.
At least, that is how journalists Ashley Parker and Michael Sherer scored an interview with the president last month, according to their sweeping new cover story in The Atlantic about Trump’s return to the White House.
In late March, just days after Trump excoriated both reporters on Truth Social following their request for an interview with him, Parker and Sherer wrote that they called the president directly on his cell phone from a number he didn’t recognize at 10:45 am on a Saturday. And he actually picked up.
“Who’s calling?” he reportedly asked, like any other 78-year-old grandpa, the sound of what Parker and Sherer said seemed to be the television blaring in the background at his Bedminster, New Jersey golf club.
“We had a perfectly fine, gracious interview,” Sherer told CNN Monday.
Despite his very public insistence on Truth Social that Parker is “as terrible as is possible” and Sherer “virtually always LIES,” the president apparently was happy to talk. On the subject of his new billionaire bestie, Jeff Bezos, Trump reportedly said, “He’s 100 percent. He’s been great.” And Mark Zuckerberg? He too has “been great,” Trump said. “Maybe they didn’t know me at the beginning, and they know me now,” Trump told Parker and Sherer of the tech executives.
Trump also used the call to take a victory lap around the recent capitulation of law firms and universities in the face of his threats. “What do you think of the law firm? Were you shocked at that?” he asked the reporters regarding Paul Weiss’s negotiations with the White House over an executive order that would have restricted its attorneys’ access to federal buildings.
And he celebrated the leverage he has over the rest of the Republican party. “When I endorse somebody, they win,” Trump told Parker and Sherer.
Trump warned the reporters that if The Atlantic wrote “good stories and truthful stories, the magazine would be hot,” and said that most media owners were growing tired of standing up to Trump, a possible reference to Bezos’s Trump-friendly turn at The Washington Post. “At some point, they say, No más, no más,” Trump reportedly said.
The interview came shortly before The Atlantic broke the news about National Security Advisor Michael Waltz accidentally inviting Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg to a private Signal chat, which prompted the president to sour on the magazine all over again. (Trump called Goldberg “a total sleazebag.”) But once again, his public barbs didn’t stand in the way of a separate invitation to the White House, which he extended to Sherer, Parker, and Goldberg last week. During that meeting, Sherer said on CNN, Trump “was in a far more conciliatory mood” and acknowledged the turmoil that has since overtaken the Pentagon. “I think he’s gonna get it together,” Trump said of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. “I had a talk with him, a positive talk, but I had a talk with him.”
As for the news that his Cabinet officials had accidentally texted secretive strike plans to Goldberg, Trump said he’d instructed his team, “Maybe don’t use Signal, okay?”
The Atlantic’s story is a telling account of how the president staged an unlikely comeback after becoming a political pariah in the wake of the January 6, back when his team was reportedly having trouble getting him even booked on Fox & Friends. It also shows how he’s come back more powerful than the first time around now that the guardrails of his first term are off. As Trump reportedly put it during the Saturday morning phone call, “The first time, I had two things to do—run the country and survive; I had all these crooked guys. And the second time, I run the country and the world.”
But even more than that, the story is a stunning illustration of how, perhaps the most media-savvy president of all time works the press in public and private—but still somehow does not know how to screen a phone call.
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