Ryan Bort
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Donald Trump speaks in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, D.C., on Sept. 30, 2026. Kent NISHIMURA/AFP/Getty Images Donald Trump has had it with the free press. He’s spent his second term trying to ban news outlets from the White House and ranting on social media about unfair coverage, and he’s only growing more hostile as his poll numbers tank ahead of the midterm elections. The president lost it on a Time reporter this week during an interview in the Oval Office.
“You haven’t asked me one fucking positive question,” he said. “All of this. What about this? What about that? What about that? What about this? All negative.”
The president had been asked about whether Mitch McConnell should resign from the Senate because of his health issues. Trump responded by indicating that videos of McConnell struggling were a “disappointment to a lot of Republicans,” before noting that “Sleepy Joe gave pardons to everybody.” He then exploded at the reporter, questioning why they were asking about the White House renovations so much, and griping that they hadn’t asked him about Venezuela. The reporter pointed out that they talked about Venezuela at length earlier in the interview.
“I don’t understand. I’m sitting here. I’ve done all this stuff,” Trump said. “I took the White House and made it beautiful again.”
The rest of the interview portrayed a frustrated president cocooning himself in an alternate reality as the nation turns on him.
When asked to explain to people who are struggling to pay bills why it is so important for him to spend so much time and energy renovating the White House, Trump waxed about how the White House is “a symbol of our greatness” and claimed, falsely, that the renovations are coming at no expense to the American taxpayer. “For me, it’s relaxing,” he said of the renovation process. Trump did not address the cost of living crisis in his answer. An Associated Press-NORC poll released Thursday found that only 17 percent of Americans approve of his handling of the issue.
Trump also bashed the conservative-dominated Supreme Court, despite a series of favorable rulings after he was able to appoint three justices during his first term. The Supreme Court has indeed been kind to Trump, but it has not enabled him to skirt the Constitution at will, to his dismay. “Yeah. Yeah,” he responded when asked if he regretted nominating Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett. “What can I do? I put them in. They voted against me too often. I was very — I gave them the position of a lifetime, and they vote against me often. They vote for me too. The Democrats stick like glue — those three, they virtually never vary.”
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The interview took place as Trump and his administration have emphasized their commitment to artificial intelligence, and as the president has repeatedly promoted data centers. When asked if the 71 percent of Americans who oppose data centers are wrong, Trump indicated that the press hasn’t been covering them fairly. He also essentially agreed with Americans who oppose having them in their communities. “But if I spoke to the American people, and if I got a fair press on, which I never would, I would like to have data centers,” he said. “It doesn’t mean I want them right next to my house, but certainly I like them in my county. They show a data center, and I go up right next to a guy’s house, and I wouldn’t necessarily like that. Although his house is probably a hell of a lot more valuable.”
Trump offered a novel approach to world peace when discussing foreign policy: “Because by annihilating Iran, we’ve created peace in the world,” he said, threatening once again to obliterate the nation of 90 million from existence. He also claimed that Israel and Saudi Arabia would both be “wiped off the face of the planet” if he weren’t the president. When asked about his initial stance that the Iran war would be over in a matter of weeks, Trump blamed the press for that timeline, and said the Iran war isn’t so bad when compared to the decades the United States was entangled in Vietnam.
