Trump thinks it’s a great idea to face reporter who keeps humiliating him
On Thursday, President Donald Trump announced he would sit for an interview with Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic, writing on his Truth Social platform that Goldberg was “the person responsible for many fictional stories about me, including the made-up HOAX on ‘Suckers and Losers’ and, SignalGate, something he was somewhat more ‘successful’ with.”
Goldberg’s “somewhat more successful” story that Trump is referring to involved top Trump administration officials discussing war plans on the unsecured Signal messaging app, in a group chat that accidentally included Goldberg.
The obscene lapses in security and judgment made by the officials involved—from Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth to Vice President JD Vance—should have been career-ending.
In his post, Trump also refers to a 2020 Atlantic report about Trump allegedly skipping a visit to the graves of American soldiers buried in the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery, near Paris, because he viewed the fallen as “suckers” and “losers.” And despite Trump’s assertion that the story was a “HOAX,” The Atlantic’s reporting was corroborated by Trump’s own former chief of staff John Kelly.
Trump’s earlier, public attacks on the late Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona, a former prisoner of war, did little to support his denials of denigrating service members. “He’s not a war hero. He was a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured,” Trump famously said in 2015, while also calling McCain a “loser.”
It’s hard to say why Trump is agreeing to be interviewed by a reporter of integrity rather than, say, a Fox News propagandist. Maybe Trump hopes the optics of the interview will improve his tanking approval rating. Maybe it was as simple as Goldberg telling him the article’s title will be “The Most Consequential President of this Century,” regardless of what they write about him.