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The White House
The White House in Washington, D.C.
President Donald Trump admitted he was enjoying his second presidency more than his first during a lengthy, sit-down interview.
The president agreed to an interview with The Atlantic, whose editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg was inadvertently involved in a war planning group chat that has plunged the administration into scandal. But correspondents Ashley Parker and Michael Scherer found him eager to strike a bargain with them.
“As ever, Trump was on the hunt for a deal,” they wrote. “If he liked the story we wrote, he said, he might even speak with us again.”
“'Tell the people at The Atlantic, if they’d write good stories and truthful stories, the magazine would be hot,'" he said, according to the reporters.
The correspondents had been hearing for weeks, both inside and outside the White House, that Trump was having more fun this time around. “'The first time, the first weeks, it was just, Let’s blow this place up,’” lobbyist and Trump ally Brian Ballard had told the reporters. “'This time, he’s blowing it up with a twinkle in his eye.'”
Trump agreed with that assessment, but with an ominous tone.
“'I’m having a lot of fun, considering what I do,' Trump said in a phone call. “'You know, what I do is such serious stuff.'”
The first time, I had two things to do—run the country and survive,” he added later. “I had all these crooked guys, and the second time, I run the country—and the world.”
The reporters asked Trump about a rumor they'd heard about him tasking the Justice Department to examine whether he could legally run for a third term, which he denied but left open as a possibility.
“'That would be a big shattering, wouldn’t it?'” Trump said, laughing, according to the report. “'Well, maybe I’m just trying to shatter [democratic norms].’”
He noted that supporters often shout out for him to seek a third term, but he expressed a recognition that wasn't a possibility.
“‘It’s not something that I’m looking to do, and I think it would be a very hard thing to do,’” he said.
