Nearly two years after he was forced to resign over leaked homophobic and racist messages, former Puerto Rican Gov. Ricardo Rosselló is on a comeback tour. “I need to show the other side of that story,” Rosselló told The New York Times in his first interview with a newspaper since he stepped down. “From my vantage point, everything I did, I did it for the people of Puerto Rico.”

During his tenure as governor, many of Rosselló’s administration officials were charged with corruption. He oversaw a botched response to Hurricane Maria and sought to privatize the island’s beaches. Yet in the interview he said almost nothing about his mistakes, including the infamous Telegram messages—in which he called a former New York City lawmaker a “whore”—that brought on mass protests calling for his resignation. Rosselló, who recently bought a $1.2 million home in the Washington, D.C., area, is now working as a consultant for a networking company owned by a former associate of his father’s and has hired publicists to improve his image. He prefers to focus on the future, telling the Times, “I don’t aim for people to think I’m, you know, God’s gift to the world, but I hope they don’t see the opposite either.”