Thirty minutes into our interview with President Donald Trump in the Oval Office on April 22, an aide opened the door to tell the President that India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi was on the line. She gave Trump a typed note, and he picked up the phone on his desk. Hold music could be heard. Earlier in the day, gunmen had killed 26 people at a resort town in Kashmir, and Trump told us to keep our seats while he offered condolences to his fellow world leader. At one point he mouthed the word terrorism to us as an explanation for the call. At another moment during the call he waved at the back wall of the Oval Office, as if to say we should take a look at the paintings and decoration he had added to the room. (“This is new and improved,” Trump said of the office when we entered.)
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]This was the fourth interview the President has done with TIME since clinching the Republican nomination for President last spring, and a rare long-form, on-the-record interview, one of the longest with any news organization since his Inauguration in January. We were there to ask Trump about his first 100 days in office, a milestone for any presidency, and certainly for one as ambitious and aggressive as this one.
The conversation came at a moment of incipient crises for Trump’s second term. That morning, his handling of the economy had unleashed painful headlines. The performance of major American stock indexes was drawing comparisons to 1928 and 1932. (“Just don’t move,” Trump advised when the question of retirement savings came up. “You’ll be good. You’ll see.”) Pete Hegseth, Trump’s Defense Secretary, was facing scrutiny for a staff exodus and his handling of sensitive information. Conflicts abroad, including the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which he said during the campaign he could solve in a day, continue to fester. “The war has been raging for three years. I just got here, and you say, what’s taken so long?” he told us.
But what was on our minds was Trump’s transformation of the American presidency. Over his first 100 days, he has sought to take power from rival U.S. institutions—the courts, Congress, media, law firms, universities—consolidating it in the presidency with a breadth and speed unseen at least since FDR, possibly ever. Trump, for his part, rejected the notion that he was stretching the powers of the presidency. “I don’t feel I’m expanding it,” he told us. “I think I’m using it as it was meant to be used.”
Trump’s return to Washington can still shock. In the private dining room, where Trump watched the attack on the U.S. Capitol play out four years ago on television, the TV showed Fox News footage of his press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, briefing the press. On the table sat a pile of papers, including a large map of Ukraine, and a golden television remote. The boxing championship belt that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky left behind after his recent failed visit with Trump hangs above a door frame. In a small room off the dining room are a pair of cabinets holding merchandise for visitors, including MAGA hats in red, white, and black, travel mugs, Trump-branded towels, and golden Trump basketball sneakers.
For more than 100 years, TIME has covered world leaders, providing exclusive interviews and reporting to increase transparency and accountability. As in the past, we are publishing the full transcript of our interview with Trump and analysis of his remarks along with this week’s cover story, written by Eric Cortellessa, who covered the most recent Trump campaign and the President’s return to office for TIME.
Trump’s engagement with TIME, as he will tell you, goes back decades. He was first on the cover in 1989. The cover accompanying Cortellessa’s story is Trump’s 46th, a tally equaling that of Ronald Reagan, whose portrait now hangs prominently in the Oval Office. The two Republican Presidents are second only to another, Richard Nixon, who has been on the cover of TIME more than any other individual. Our new cover photo was taken by Martin Schoeller, who first photographed Trump for TIME’s cover a decade ago, the summer after he launched his first presidential campaign, beginning a political story that has altered this century. The headline on that one: “Deal with it.”
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