The fallout from the purported Signal group chat between top national security officials that inadvertently included a journalist is the latest chapter between President Donald Trump and The Atlantic Editor-in-Chief Jeffrey Goldberg, who once reported that Trump referred to fallen military members as “suckers” and “losers.”
“He is as you know is a sleazebag, but at the highest level. His magazine is failing,” Trump said of Goldberg on Wednesday during an appearance on the “VINCE Show” podcast.
Before coming to The Atlantic, Goldberg has done reporting for several news outlets, including the Washington Post, the Forward and the New Yorker, covering the Middle East, Washington politics and other topics.
He joined the staff of The Atlantic in 2007 and became its editor-in-chief nine years later. Over the last several years, he has written articles on the inner workings of the first Trump administration.
It was under his leadership that The Atlantic published its third presidential endorsement in the magazine’s 168-year history when it backed then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton over Trump in the 2016 election.
The endorsement called then-candidate Trump “the most ostentatiously unqualified major-party candidate in the 227-year history of the American presidency,” and said, “He is an enemy of fact-based discourse; he is ignorant of, and indifferent to, the Constitution; he appears not to read.”
A few weeks after the endorsement, Goldberg criticized Trump’s rhetoric during the campaign in an interview with NPR.
“At the very least, he traffics in racial invective knowingly. To me, that’s a threshold question. If you do that and if you know what you’re doing then, yes, you’re a racist. I think he’s a racist,” he said in the interview.
Trump has attacked Goldberg and the magazine over the endorsement for years, claiming it was a failing publication.
A month before the 2020 election, Goldberg wrote an article in The Atlantic that described an 2018 incident where Trump refused to visit an American cemetery in France where World War I service members were buried.
“Why should I go to that cemetery? It’s filled with losers,” Trump told his advisers, according to the article. It also said Trump called fallen Marines “suckers.”
The president denied he had used those terms on what was then Twitter and went after Goldberg’s sources. John Kelly, Trump’s former chief of staff, later confirmed Goldberg’s account in an interview with CNN.
“This is more made up Fake News given by disgusting & jealous failures in a disgraceful attempt to influence the 2020 Election,” he tweeted.
The editor has remained critical of Trump’s policies, rhetoric and actions.
In 2023, months after Trump announced he was running for reelection, the magazine ran an entire issue dedicated to analyzing what a second Trump term would look and said it was no different than authoritarian regimes.
Trump called out Goldberg by name two weeks before the 2024 election after he wrote a piece about Trump’s relationship with the military during his first term. Goldberg wrote that former Trump officials told him that Trump was obsessed with dictators and said he needed “the kind of generals that Hitler had,” citing two people who heard the private conversation.
Then-Trump spokesman Alex Pfeiffer said the anecdote was “absolutely false. President Trump never said this.”
White House Spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt echoed the president’s attacks on Goldberg during a press briefing Wednesday claiming that the editor has spent years trying to discredit the president while ignoring Trump’s successes.
“No one in the media who loves manufacturing and pushing hoaxes more than Jeffrey Goldberg,” she told reporters.
Goldberg defended his reporting during an interview with ABC News Live on Wednesday.
“They’ve decided to blame the guy who they invited into the conversation. It’s a little bit strange behavior,” he said. “Honestly I don’t know why they’re acting like this except to think that they’re they know how serious a national security breach it is. And so they have to deflect it and push it on to the guy, again, they invited into the chat — namely me.”
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