Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg was struck by President Donald Trump‘s “truly odd” obsession with his predecessor, former President Joe Biden, during their interview last week, he said Thursday.
When Goldberg arrived at the Oval Office to speak with Trump for the magazine’s June cover story, the first thing the president said was, “‘I bet Joe Biden would never do this,’” the top editor recalled.
It didn’t stop there. Goldberg, appearing on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, said that the president mentioned Biden about “six or eight times” over the course of their conversation: “‘Joe Biden doesn’t do this, Joe Biden is dumb. Joe Biden is sleepy.’”
“It’s like, it’s truly odd,” Goldberg said. “Like, he’s gone. You’re the president. It’s just this crutch—and you see it in all his speeches—that was noticeable.”
Asked for comment on whether Goldberg is correct that Trump is fixated on Biden, White House spokesperson Liz Huston responded by, like Trump, slamming Biden.
“President Trump has spent the first three months of his presidency cleaning up the disasters created by Joe Biden and Making America Great Again,” she wrote. “Under President Trump’s leadership, the border is secure, inflation is cooling, jobs are up, and common sense is restored.”
Goldberg, whose journalism has long stirred Trump’s rage, was at the center of the Signalgate scandal that rocked the White House in March.
He was accidentally added to a group chat where Trump’s top officials, including Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, discussed operational details of a strike on terrorists in Yemen. He wrote an article in the Atlantic exposing the national security breach.
After Signalgate, Trump called Goldberg a “total sleazebag,” while White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt wrote that he was “well-known for his sensationalist spin.”
Nevertheless, he was one of three Atlantic journalists who were allowed into the Oval Office for an interview after they said their story would be called “The Most Consequential President of this Century.”
“I am doing this interview out of curiosity, and as a competition with myself, just to see if it’s possible for The Atlantic to be ‘truthful,’” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post on April 24. “Are they capable of writing a fair story on ‘TRUMP’? The way I look at it, what can be so bad – I WON!”
The resulting article, which ran this week with the headline “‘I Run the Country and the World,’” presented the president’s firsthand account of the “fun” he’s having during his second term.
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