THE COVER STORY | ||||||
What Trump has built | ||||||
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It was 35 days before the midterm elections and President Donald Trump wanted to talk about dirt. | ||||||
Standing on the White House lawn, he told us about the poor conditions his predecessors had left in the world’s most famous home office. Dirty walls. The dirt that visitors 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. “The happiest people were the pilots,” he said of the change. “They would land in the mud.” | ||||||
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, hosting Chinese President Xi Jinping and his delegation at the White House, 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 latest cover story, as part of our commitment to transparency, we have published a full transcript of our interview with the President along with a fact-check of his remarks. | ||||||
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. 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. “When you start studying yourself too deeply, you start seeing things that maybe you don’t want to see.” 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. | ||||||
Trump has not been shy about his interest in being on the cover of this magazine. During a 2025 visit to Israel he was presented with a framed compilation of his previous TIME covers. “Wow, I love it,” he said. “I want to make sure it comes back with us.” But while the President covets being on the cover, he makes it clear he is not always happy with the result, and he has been keeping score: he told us this week that of the 55 previous covers, he has liked 17 of them. | ||||||
For more than a decade now, Trump has maintained the ability to surprise. To his critics, this leads to shock. To his supporters, delight. He is intent on leaving his imprint on the presidency. That preoccupation with his legacy has been a factor in the burst of renovation and construction projects at the White House and across Washington. He says this work is a form of relaxation. If he cannot control the events of the world, he can control what happens in his own backyard. | ||||||
He also told us he wasn’t sure whether he was a better builder or a better politician. “This whole place was a disgusting mess,” he said of the White House as we left, “and now it’s perfect.” | ||||||
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