President Donald Trump reflected on how his job has changed in his second term during an interview with the Atlantic, which was published ahead of his one hundredth day in office.
Trump interviewed with the outlet twice ahead of the 100-day milestone, once in March and again in April. Last week, he announced a meeting with Editor-in-Chief Jeffrey Goldberg, who broke the Signalgate group chat story after being added to a private chat with national security adviser Mike Waltz and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.
“The first time, I had two things to do — run the country and survive. I had all these crooked guys,” Trump said in a March phone interview with the outlet in response to a question about whether his second term felt different than his first. “And the second time, I run the country and the world.”
Trump said he and his team believed certain things were off-limits in his first term. A former adviser told the outlet that firing certain people or changing things was considered touching a “red-hot” stove.
“And then you touch it,” the adviser said, “and you realize it’s actually not that hot.”
Those around Trump aren’t telling him not to touch the stove anymore, the adviser added.
Nevertheless, his administration is operating under an unofficial rule only to do things when Trump says them twice, because “he says a lot of sh*t,” the adviser said.
The wide-ranging interviews also covered Trump’s election win in 2024 and what led him there, from his social media bans after Jan. 6 to his criminal convictions. The Trump campaign used MAGA influencers and outlets such as the Right Side Broadcasting Network to spread Trump’s message while he was banned from X and Facebook.
Trump reportedly refused to launch his campaign during a June 2022 televised hearing of the House Select Committee on Jan. 6, saying he wasn’t “ready for this.” He waited until November 2022 to launch his bid, a deliberation an adviser believed proved Trump was “not going to just use it as a stunt to make a moment. He wants to win.”
The president later used his criminal conviction to boost fundraising en route to the White House.
“Shockingly, yes,” Trump said in the March interview about whether the sentence strengthened him. “Normally, it would knock you out. You wouldn’t even live for the next day. You know, you’d announce your resignation, and you’d go back and ‘fight for your name,’ like everybody says — you know, ‘fight for your name, go back to your family.’ ”
“Yeah, it made me stronger … made me a lot stronger,” he added.
As for Hegseth and Waltz, the two main people implicated in Signalgate, Trump said the defense secretary would “get it together.”
“I had a talk with him, a positive talk, but I had a talk with him,” Trump said last week, adding that Waltz is “fine” despite being “beat up.”
He said the lesson from the ordeal, which could have breached classified information related to a strike on the Houthis in Yemen, was, “Maybe don’t use Signal, OK?”
On tariffs, Trump said Wall Street’s opposition won’t be enough to roll them back, though he has shown signs of bending his tariff policies if the market falls.
“It always affects you a little bit,” he said, but there’s no red line or “certain number” at which he would feel compelled to change course.
Trump also denied a rumor that he asked the Justice Department to look into a way for him to run for a third term, but laughed at the possibility of shattering the two-term limit.
“That would be a big shattering, wouldn’t it?” he mused. “Well, maybe I’m just trying to shatter.”
His denial came after the Trump Organization sold “Trump 2028” hats, suggesting he’s campaigning for something he shouldn’t be able to attain. However, Trump backtracked in the interview, saying that running for a third term is “not something I’m looking to do. And I think it would be a very hard thing to do.”
Before Trump’s first interview with the Atlantic, he bashed its writers, Ashley Parker and Michael Scherer, saying Parker is a “radical left lunatic” and Scherer has “never written a fair story about me, only negative, and virtually always LIES.”
Trump questioned whether the outlet, known for being left-leaning, could be “truthful” for his second interview.
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“I am doing this interview out of curiosity, and as a competition with myself, just to see if it’s possible for The Atlantic to be “truthful.” Are they capable of writing a fair story on “TRUMP”? The way I look at it, what can be so bad – I WON!” Trump said in a Truth Social post.
The Washington Examiner reached out to the White House for comment on the article and whether the outlet covered Trump fairly, but received no response.
