“I’m having a lot of fun, considering what I do,” Donald Trump told Atlantic staff writers Michael Scherer and Ashley Parker during an impromptu phone call last month.
In the first 100 days of his second term, as Michael and Ashley report, Trump has upended the federal government, roiled foreign policy, spurned U.S. allies, induced vertigo in the financial markets, disemboweled ethics and anti-corruption architecture, and redecorated the Oval Office into a Palm Beach approximation of a royal court. The billionaire class prostrated itself before him; white-shoe law firms and an Ivy League university bent to his whims.
When Parker and Scherer first spoke with the president, Trump was carrying out his agenda with surprisingly little resistance, even from Democrats. But in the days and weeks that followed, “the patina of infallibility began to crack,” they write in The Atlantic’s new cover story.
After numerous requests by Parker and Scherer for an Oval Office visit, Trump finally invited them, along with The Atlantic’s editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg, to sit down with him for an interview. Read what Trump said, in the cover story.
