Recently, Trump made this same sort of attack after I was inadvertently included in a Signal group chat with senior administration officials. The chat, which focused on upcoming military strikes against terrorists in Yemen, included the vice president, the CIA director, and much of the president’s Cabinet. The outlandish details of this episode—labeled, inevitably, Signalgate—are well known. What interests me about Signalgate as much as its inherent absurdity is the administration’s response to the controversy.
In our cover story (reported as the Signal controversy was unfolding), Ashley and Michael describe in absorbing detail Trump’s belief, acquired in his four-year Joe Biden–induced exile, that no stove is too hot to touch, and also his conviction, refined after much experimentation, that normative reality does not exist.
This second notion governs Trump’s answer to anyone who challenges him. A different sort of president would have responded to the revelations of Signalgate, in which his national-security team did just about the stupidest thing imaginable, by fixing the problem directly and quickly. First, acknowledge the mistake. Then, apologize, promise to investigate, and offer a plan to keep something like this from happening again. End of story.
Not so with Signalgate, or anything else. The administration responded immediately, resuscitating its “failing magazine” line of attack. Trump said of me, “I’ve known him for a long time, and he is truly a sleazeball”; Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth called me a “deceitful and highly discredited so-called journalist,” and Michael Waltz, the national security adviser (who was the one who mistakenly included me in the chat), said that I was “the bottom scum of journalists” and a “loser.” (The episode called to mind an earlier moment, when Trump described me as a “horrible, radical-left lunatic,” and one of my children noted, with some amusement, “You’re not left-wing.”) Waltz, whom I previously knew to be a smart person, also alleged that I had “sucked” my number into his phone. The name-calling matters less than the fact that Trump and his coterie argued, against all available evidence, that they had revealed no secrets and done nothing wrong.
Denial and attack have worked exceedingly well for Trump. As Michael and Ashley note in their story, Trump’s decision to foment the January 6 insurrection would normally have ended his political career, but it didn’t. Trump called the insurrection a “day of love,” and his decision, at the outset of his second term, to pardon or commute the sentences of the insurrectionists—transforming even those who assaulted police officers into victims of malignant prosecutors—only made him more powerful.
But there are limits. The limits come when people choose steadfastness over cowardice. Too many Republican senators live in fear of Trump. There are media companies that have paid obeisance to his administration (Jeff Bezos’s Post among them), and law firms and corporations and even universities. These institutions are making strange and bad choices. After we published our first story on the Signal controversy, the Trump administration accused us of lying; it said we were trafficking in falsehoods, that there was nothing sensitive or secret about the material its members had transmitted.
The administration’s knee-jerk response forced us to release the Signal chat, which showed conclusively that Waltz, Hegseth, and others were doing all sorts of things that serious national-security professionals would never do.
The point of journalism is to hold the powerful to account. By encouraging our journalists to go where the truth takes them (and by hiring stellar reporters such as Ashley and Michael), I believe that we are fulfilling The Atlantic’s mission. To support this mission, I hope you’ll join us as a subscriber.
Our colleague Caitlin Flanagan often says that the truth bats last. I believe she is right.
Jeffrey Goldberg
Editor in Chief
