US President Donald Trump has said in an interview with The Atlantic magazine that he “runs the world” and is “having a lot of fun” in his second term. 
When asked if his second term felt different from his first, Trump said it did. “The first time, I had two things to do—run the country and survive; I had all these crooked guys,” he said. 
“And the second time, I run the country and the world,” Trump added in the interview published on Monday.

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The interview was conducted after the magazine, which Trump once ridiculed as “failing,” called his cellphone and the president answered.

Trump touched on several sensitive issues, including the controversy surrounding his Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s use of the Signal chat app and the deportations of some Americans.

He expressed his confidence in Hegseth, telling The Atlantic—which exposed Hegseth’s Signal leak of information— “I think he’s gonna get it together...I had a talk with him, a positive talk.”

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When queried on the possibility of his administration accidentally ejecting an American citizen in its mass deportation push, Trump said, “Let me tell you that nothing will ever be perfect in this world.”

He also praised the tech tycoons Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos as “great,” while suggesting that they and others with great wealth are friendlier with him in his second term because they have “a higher level of respect ... maybe they didn’t know me at the beginning, and they know me now.”

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“I’m having a lot of fun, considering what I do ... you know, what I do is such serious stuff,” Trump said when asked if the observation made by one of his allies that he was “blowing it up with a twinkle in his eye” was correct.

Trump has repeatedly bashed The Atlantic, including in the weeks leading up to the interview after its editor-in-chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, was inadvertently included in the Signal chat in which top Trump officials discussed national security secrets last month. 

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Trump initially denied the magazine’s request for an interview by publicly bashing writers Ashley Parker and Michael Scherer on Truth Social.