Inside The Atlantic magazine's circuitous route to interviews with Trump
[April 29, 2025]
By DAVID BAUDER
Writers Ashley Parker and Michael Scherer of The Atlantic say they've
learned one thing during their years of covering President Donald Trump:
His first word is rarely his last one.
That's obvious from their circuitous journey in landing interviews with
the Republican president, which included an apparent late-night “butt
dial” and Trump's unexpected invitation to include in the session their
editor, Jeffrey Goldberg, whom Trump had bashed as a “sleazeball” weeks
earlier.
That last interview, this past Thursday, sparked a true “stop the
presses” moment. The Atlantic had already sent Parker and Scherer's
piece, the cover story for its June issue, to the printers. They called
it back to add new material.
The article, titled "Trump is Enjoying This” and published online
Monday, was in the works before Goldberg was inadvertently included in a
Signal chat group among administration leaders about a military attack
in the Middle East.
The interview wasn't supposed to happen
The writers, who recently joined The Atlantic from The Washington Post,
had pitched an interview to talk about the details of Trump's improbable
political comeback. He was willing to talk, but on March 17 — during the
week they were supposed to meet — Trump posted on social media that
Parker was a “Radical Left Lunatic” incapable of doing a fair interview.
Scherer's past pieces about him were, Trump wrote, “virtually all LIES."
The interview was off. The writers surmised in their article that
someone in Trump's camp had persuaded him not to do it.
At 10:45 a.m. on a Saturday in late March, Scherer — armed with Trump's
cellphone number — called him anyway. “Who's calling?” Trump asked.
Scherer identified himself.

“Oh, I know who you are, Michael,” Trump replied, according to a tape
released by The Atlantic. “I know who you are. You never write — you
never write good about me, Michael. Never, ever.”
And he proceeded to give Scherer an interview on the spot.
An accidental dial and more developments
Wanting to ask some follow-up questions, the writers called Trump again
on April 12. They left a message that wasn't returned, but Scherer's
cell phone recorded a call from Trump's number at 1:28 a.m. the next
morning with no message left. They figured it had been dialed
inadvertently.
The journalists made a request through Trump's staff for an in-person
interview, but were rejected. Nine days later — last Wednesday — with
their story already written, the White House called and said to come to
the Oval Office the next day. And bring Goldberg with them.
Goldberg, The Atlantic's editor-in-chief, had written on March 24 about
being included in the highly sensitive group chat, arguably the most
embarrassing story about the new administration so far. Striking back,
Trump called Goldberg “truly a sleazeball,” and Defense Secretary Pete
Hegseth called him a “deceitful and highly discredited so-called
journalist.”
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Jeffrey Goldberg, editor in chief of The Atlantic, speaks while
being interviewed by Anne Applebaum at the New Orleans Book Festival
at Tulane University in New Orleans, March 27, 2025. (Brett Duke/The
Advocate via AP, file)

On his Truth Social platform, Trump explained he was doing the 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!”
There was no immediate reply from the White House to questions about how
they think the interview went. In a briefing for “new media” on Monday,
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt compared Trump agreeing to
some interviews to his willingness to speak to leaders like North
Korea's Kim Jong Un.
“The president believes in direct diplomacy, whether it is our
adversaries and competitors around the world or left-wing activists like
Jeffrey Goldberg,” she said.
Trump's adversarial relationship with the press has been plain on
several fronts since returning to the White House. His FCC is
investigating several outlets, including CBS and ABC News, and he's been
fighting in court with The Associated Press over access to White House
events.
It was a civil interview
When Goldberg came into the Oval Office, Trump gave him a warm handshake
— even if the faces of many of the president's aides did not look at all
happy to see him, Goldberg said in an interview with the journalists
posted by The Atlantic on Monday.
“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,”
Goldberg said. “He doesn’t find it awkward, because he believes that
it’s just a game. It’s just a performance.”
From the moment The Atlantic proposed the interview, it had been a
negotiation for Trump, Scherer said in the same interview. “It's a
transaction,” he said. “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.”
The president was also well aware of the value of an interview to The
Atlantic, along with the value of Goldberg's Signal story. Goldberg said
that he correctly guessed that Trump was trying to charm him last week.
The president seemed less interested in talking about the national
security implications of the story that Goldberg broke than in
conveying, “Well, you won,” Goldberg said.
“He's an interesting guy to talk to and listen to,” he said. “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.”
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