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 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.
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."
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.
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."
___
Associated Press writer Michelle Price in Washington contributed to this report. David Bauder writes about media for the AP. Follow him at http://x.com/dbauder and https://bsky.app/profile/dbauder.bsky.social
