The night before, Trump had been greeted at the helipad by Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and his wife Cami Clark, who joined the President for a late-night dinner. 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.