Here's what's most striking about this story: Its authors are remarkably eager to to tell us how they were jerked around by Trump, and how they responded by writing exactly the story he asked them to write. Admitting that doesn't fill them with shame. Hey, they're ambitious careerists, A-list journalists who had to produce a big story for a "Trump's first hundred days" deadline. Wouldn't you have allowed Trump to manipulate you to get that story?
Parker and Scherer begin by telling us that they pitched an interview to the White House.
Trump agreed to see us. We were tentatively promised a meeting and a photo shoot—likely in the Oval Office, though possibly the Lincoln Bedroom.Already he's messing with their heads -- I won't just give you an interview, I'll give you a photo shoot! Maybe even in the Lincoln Bedroom! At that point, Trump is a cat toying with a caught mouse. Any idiot can guess what happened next:
But then, as is so often the case with this White House, everything went sideways.They could have retained some self-respect and written the story without his cooperation. But they had a phone number for him and called him. He agreed to talk for a while and went into a boasting monologue, which Parker and Scherer recount at length. But he'd denied them the big get, and he knew it. They'd talked to him, but they still wanted an interview on his home turf. And he toyed with them again:
The week our interview was supposed to occur, Trump posted a vituperative message on Truth Social, attacking us by name. “Ashley Parker is not capable of doing a fair and unbiased interview. She is a Radical Left Lunatic, and has been as terrible as is possible for as long as I have known her,” he wrote. “To this date, she doesn’t even know that I won the Presidency THREE times.” (That last sentence is true—Ashley Parker does not know that Trump won the presidency three times.) “Likewise, Michael Scherer has never written a fair story about me, only negative, and virtually always LIES.”
Apparently, as word of our meeting spread through Trump’s inner circle, someone had reminded him of some of the things we (specifically Ashley) had said and written that he didn’t like. We still don’t know who it was—but we immediately understood the consequences: no photo shoot, no tour of the newly redecorated Oval Office or the Lincoln Bedroom, and definitely no interview.
As ever, Trump was on the hunt for a deal. If he liked the story we wrote, he said, he might even speak with us again.They have interviews with Trump insiders. They have this conversation. But they still want the big get. Near the end of the piece, he calls (or butt-dials) one of them after one in the morning and doesn't leave a message, and instead of finding a way to leverage his apparent craving for another interview, they plead for more, and he tells them what his conditions are:
“Tell the people at The Atlantic, if they’d write good stories and truthful stories, the magazine would be hot,” he said. Perhaps the magazine can risk forgoing hotness, he suggested, because it is owned by Laurene Powell Jobs, which buffers it, he implied, from commercial imperatives. But that doesn’t guarantee anything, he warned. “You know at some point, they give up,” he said, referring to media owners generally and—we suspected—[Jeff] Bezos specifically. “At some point they say, No más, no más.” He laughed quietly.
We made another appeal for an in-person interview. Later that day, an aide told us Trump was denying our request. But the rejection came with a message from the president—a message, Trump specified, only for Michael, not Ashley, with whom he was still annoyed. If the article we were working on really told the remarkable story of how he had come back from the political dead, “maybe The Atlantic will survive after all.”At this point, we already know that that's exactly the story they've written.
Perhaps no one in American history has had a political resurrection as remarkable as Donald Trump’s.Trump teased and bullied and cajoled his way to getting what he wanted -- a detailed account of his awesome, unimaginable comeback (I'll spare you the details, though I'll note that I found his comeback all too imaginable even a few days after January 6).
... he has always been convinced of his own genius, his pure gut instincts. But never more so than today. The past four years have turned him into a Nietzschean cliché. Banishment, multiple indictments, a 34-count felony conviction, repeated brushes with assassins—all have combined to convince him that he is impervious to challenges that would destroy others. Those years also strengthened in him the salesman’s instinct that he can bend reality to his will—turn facts into “fake news,” make the inconceivable not just conceivable but actual, transform the Gulf of Mexico into the Gulf of America, make people believe what he’s selling in defiance of what they see with their own eyes. This is the core lesson that Trump and his acolytes internalized from the 2020 election and January 6.
He eventually gave Parker and Scherer an Oval Office interview, and it's ... a big nothing. It's the same spin we get from Trump in every other medium.
He often avoided direct answers in order to recite lists of accomplishments....That's what you did all that groveling for? This rehash?
We asked about the concern that his administration was pushing the country toward authoritarianism, where politicians use the power of their office to punish their enemies for speaking their minds, as Trump was attempting to do to Chris Krebs, Harvard, law firms, universities, and news outlets. He did not answer the question directly, but instead talked about how he’d been wronged....
Near the end of the interview, we asked Trump why, given that he’s now definitively won a second term, he can’t just let go of the claim that he won the 2020 election.
The president told us it would “be easier” for him to just accept our assertion. But he couldn’t. “I’m a very honest person, and I believe it with all my heart,” he said. “And I believe it with fact—you know, more important than heart. I believe it with fact.”
The press and high-level politicians in both parties won't save us from Trump because they fear that going after him head-on puts their careers at risk. That's why the second-term Trump resistance came from the bottom up. The rest of us have less to lose.
