President Donald Trump’s national security team couldn’t have picked a journalist who’s more accomplished—or more hated by the president—to accidentally add to an unsecured group chat about its Middle East war plans.
On Monday, The Atlantic editor-in-chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, penned an explosive story about how he was added to a group chat on Signal, a popular commercial messaging app, called “Houthi PC Small Group” that he initially assumed was fake.
The other 18 members included National Security Adviser Mike Waltz, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, all discussing military strikes on the Houthis, an Iran-backed terrorist group wreaking havoc on shipping traffic in the Suez Canal.
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Goldberg, 59, had no idea why he was added and thought the messages, which included detailed information about targets and weapons, were part of a disinformation campaign—until they aligned perfectly with a March 15 strike that killed 53 people.
Of all the journalists to accidentally include in a classified discussion of U.S. military operations, there’s something almost Shakespearean about the fact that it was Goldberg, who has both deep foreign policy experience and a long history of clashing with Trump.
His resume reads as a who’s who of prestigious American media brands, with bylines in the The Washington Post, New York magazine, and The New York Times Magazine, which featured his reporting from Africa and the Middle East.
In 2000, he became a staff writer for The New Yorker, where he won some of journalism’s highest honors for his foreign reporting. In 2007, he joined The Atlantic as a national correspondent and was named editor-in-chief in October 2016.
That, of course, is when Donald J. Trump entered the scene.
A week before the Atlantic editor-in-chief announcement, Goldberg was responsible for the magazine’s third presidential endorsement in its 160-year history, The New York Times reported. The endorsement was for Hillary Clinton. It described Trump as “the most ostentatiously unqualified major-party candidate in the 227-year history of the American presidency.”
In 2020, Goldberg broke the story that Trump had called Americans who died in war “suckers” and “losers” and asked to keep wounded veterans out of military parades. Afterward, he had to temporarily move out of his house over threats to his safety, CNN reported. (Trump’s team denies the “suckers” and “losers” story, which his former chief of staff, John Kelly, later confirmed on the record.)
And after Trump refused to concede that Joe Biden had won the 2020 election, leading to the deadly Capitol riots and criminal charges against Trump, Goldberg’s criticisms intensified.
“I refuse to participate in the normalization of Donald Trump,” he told CNN in December 2023. “I believe that a second Trump term poses a threat to the existence of America as we know it.”
The interview coincided with the launch of a special issue of The Atlantic titled “If Trump Wins” which carried a warning from Goldberg: “America survived the first Trump term, though not without sustaining serious damage. A second term, if there is one, will be much worse.”
The two dozen articles described how Trump planned to punish his enemies, abandon NATO, rip apart immigrant families, and abandon scientific research if re-elected.
In October 2024, Goldberg broke another story about Trump complaining about the price tag for the funeral of a murdered soldier, whom he allegedly dismissed as a “f---ing Mexican.”
Trump has responded to Goldberg’s reporting by calling him a “horrible, radical-left lunatic” at a rally last summer and saying he was a “sleazebag” during an October campaign event.
On Monday, he reacted to news of the Houthi group chat by saying, “I’m not a big fan of The Atlantic. To me it’s a magazine that’s going out of business. I think it’s not much of a magazine, but I know nothing about it.”
All of which begs the question of how Jeffrey Goldberg of all people was accidentally added to the group.
Does he have the same name as a high-level military official or analyst? Is there another Jeffrey Goldberg who is a producer for Fox News? Was his addition to the group proof that the Freudian death drive is real?
“This appears to be an authentic message chain, and we are reviewing how an inadvertent number was added to the chain,” National Security Council spokesperson Brian Hughes told Fox News. “The thread is a demonstration of the deep and thoughtful policy coordination between senior officials.”
Hegseth himself insisted the whole story was fake, as he landed in Hawaii before a trip to Asia. “You’re talking about a deceitful and highly discredited so-called journalist who’s made a profession of peddling hoaxes,” the Pentagon chief said. “This is a guy who peddles in garbage.”
