Donald Trump, like many politicians, will be very difficult for journalists to get a straight word out of.
The 78-year-old recently marked his first 100 days back in the Oval Office and it's certainly been an eventful few months for the US president, with his 'liberation day' tariffs arguably taking the number one spot when it comes to decisions likely to change the course of history.
As we saw just the other day, the Republican leader is known for providing answers that sometimes don't make a lot of sense when he's talking with the media, but what he told two reporters from The Atlantic seems both very candid and extremely controversial.
Ashley Parker and Michael Scherer had managed to organise an elusive White House interview with Trump in order to discuss his second term and what is undoubtedly one of the biggest political comebacks in history.
Advert
However, just days before the planned meet-up, Trump shared the following tweet on Truth Social, the social media site that was launched by the president himself back in 2022.
He wrote: “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.
"To this date, she doesn’t even know that I won the Presidency THREE times."
The latter of these statements is certainly ironic, given that his site is called Truth Social, as if you weren't aware, Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election.
“Likewise, Michael Scherer has never written a fair story about me, only negative, and virtually always LIES," Trump added. So, as you might be able to guess, the interview was called off.
But the duo clearly weren't going to be deterred and instead, having managed to get hold of his number, they decided to take their chances at cold calling him.
They explained in their piece: "Don’t ask how we got his number. All we can say is that the White House staff have imperfect control over Trump’s personal communication devices."
Trump picked up and was clearly in a good mood, and despite his earlier enmity for Parker and Scherer he was keen to talk to them about all of his 'successes' in his time back in the White House.
He said: “I’m having a lot of fun, considering what I do. You know, what I do is such serious stuff.”
When asked by the reporters if his second term felt different from the first, the 78-year-old said: "The first time, I had two things to do — run the country and survive; I had all these crooked guys.
"And the second time, I run the country and the world.”
Sorry Beyoncé, I guess in Trump's opinion, girls don't run the world, he does.
Trump ended the call by saying that if he liked the story Parker and Scherer wrote, he'd be up for a slightly more official interview further down the line.
He concluded: "Tell the people at The Atlantic, if they’d write good stories and truthful stories, the magazine would be hot."
Topics: Donald Trump, Joe Biden, US News
James Moorhouse