It was 35 days before the midterm elections and President Donald Trump wanted to talk about dirt. Standing on the White House lawn, outside the Residence, he told us about the poor conditions his predecessors had left in the world’s most famous home office. The dirt that visitors, especially those in high heels, confronted when they visited the Rose Garden, before his installation of a patio.
Most pressing of all, the dirt that Marine One had to land in before he completed his newest addition to the complex, a 100-ft.-wide helipad. It was part of another whirlwind week that included a speech before the U.N. General Assembly and hosting Chinese President Xi Jinping and his delegation at the White House—name cards for leading attendees were still on the walk outside the Oval Office when we visited—as well as an Air Force One flyover of the Texas-Tennessee football game, a visit to the Presidents Cup golf tournament outside Chicago, the announcement of a new steel mill in Iowa, and a controversy over the release of taxpayer-funded political ads.
As the midterms near, the President is touting successes: low unemployment, economic growth, oil exports rebounding in the Middle East, business opportunities created in Venezuela. But for the moment, Trump seemed stuck in the mud. The costs of housing, health care, and gasoline are increasing at significant rates.
His polls are at career lows (he dismissed these numbers as “fake”), Democrats are salivating over the possibility of taking over the House and maybe the Senate, and Trump’s approach to ending an unpopular war with Iran is unfolding as trial and error. The day we met with the President marked seven months since the beginning of the Iran conflict, an engagement he repeatedly told Americans would last only a matter of weeks. Our interview also followed a week in which he had attempted to bar some of our colleagues from reporting on him from the White House and as part of the President’s traveling press corps, a move we have joined our colleagues in objecting to.
With Eric Cortellessa's cover story, as part of our commitment to transparency, we are publishing a full transcript of our interview with the President along with a fact-check of his remarks on Time.com. This cover marks a milestone for this magazine and for the President: with 56 appearances, Trump has now been on the cover of TIME more often than any other individual, surpassing President Richard Nixon, who held the title for more than half a century, repeatedly breaking his own record as the Watergate scandal progressed. Trump’s first TIME cover came in 1989, when he appeared to personify that moment’s collective aspiration for luxury.
His voice in that story remains familiar to us now: “I have an absolute strategy, but it’s an innate strategy and not definable,” he said. Eight of the 10 most frequent TIME cover subjects over the past century have been Commanders in Chief. More than 20 different artists and photographers, including Dan Winters, who photographed the President at his helipad for this issue, have contributed Trump covers over the years.
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