The Atlantic Mess: Team Trump Tests the Limits of Shooting the Messenger
President Trump has helped program his followers to share his frequently voiced disdain for traditional media, parroting his habit of labeling them as “the enemy of the people” and his dismissals of inconvenient or unflattering reporting as “fake news.”
That “shoot the messenger” playbook works better, though, when the Trump administration hasn’t quite so transparently shot itself in the foot, as members of his national security team did by accidentally including The Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg on what was supposed to be a top-secret Signal chat detailing planned military strikes in Yemen.
On Monday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth immediately defaulted to the familiar Trump strategy, seeking to smear Goldberg as a “deceitful and highly discredited so-called journalist who’s made a profession of peddling hoaxes time and time again.”
Yet in movie terms, it felt like the equivalent of saying, “Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain,” when Goldberg had receipts to support his explosive story, and transparently appeared to be an unwitting bystander in a mix-up he handled as professionally as he possibly could under extraordinary circumstances.
For his part, Goldberg told CNN that Hegseth was lying when he stated that no war plans were included in the chat, citing the “recklessness” of how the exchange was conducted and calling his inclusion “an obvious, ridiculous security breach.”
As the Bulwark’s Will Sommer reported, Trump’s most fervent media loyalists were left “scrambling to explain” what happened, offering excuses that included a laughable theory about deliberately inviting Goldberg into the chat to send a message to Europe. They also, not surprisingly, quickly pivoted to perceived lapses by the Biden administration, seeking to change the focus.
After initially professing to know nothing about the story — hours after, by Goldberg’s account, he had reached out to the administration for confirmation — Trump downplayed it on Tuesday, while expressing support for National Security Advisor Mike Waltz, who appeared to have been responsible for sending the invite to Goldberg. Trump and Waltz also stressed the fact that the military operation went off without a hitch, while striking a customarily defiant posture toward the media.
Still, even some reliable GOP supporters found the Trump team’s initial arguments, and especially Hegseth’s reaction, far fetched. Fox News analyst Brit Hume, for example, expressed exasperation on X over the attempt to portray Goldberg as a non-credible source, tweeting, “Oh for God’s sake, the administration has already confirmed the authenticity of the message.”
A few other Fox News personalties echoed those sentiments. “The administration really just needs to come out and explicitly say they F’d up,” commentator Tomi Lahren posted on X. “The word gymnastics is making it worse.”
Similarly, the conservative National Review called for Hegseth’s firing, with executive editor Mark Antonio Wright referring to the episode as “a tale so clownish, so stunning, so outlandish that it would seem to better fit into a gonzo satire of government ineptitude such as ‘Burn After Reading’ or ‘Veep.’”
By contrast, Fox News primetime hosts like Jesse Watters labored to downplay the incident. Watters likened the errant text to Goldberg to anyone inadvertently hitting the wrong name and suddenly “your aunt Mary knows all of your raunchy plans for the bachelor party.”
“I’m sure it won’t happen again,” Watters generously concluded.
Fox is staying on brand by concocting alibis for the Republicans, but the truth is there are still far more questions than answers regarding this story, beginning with how Goldberg wound up in the chain, why nobody noticed an unintended party and the broader issue of using Signal to conduct such sensitive discussions in the first place.
During a televised hearing Tuesday, Trump intelligence officials frequently resorted to “I can’t recall” in responding to tough questioning from Democratic senators, a less-than-convincing response regarding a situation that unfolded within the last few weeks.
Trump and his supporters — including his biggest media sycophants — can fall back on the “Nothing to see here,” “Don’t trust the media” and “Hey, accidents happen” approaches to try and defuse the situation, and given the pace of the news cycle, some new controversy might effectively push the Atlantic’s accidental scoop to the sidelines. That’s certainly happened before.
The danger for the Trump administration, however, is that while a committed core will support him no matter what, there is an ideologically adjacent contingent inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt — especially when the conflict involves the hated “liberal media” — that can still see this situation as a sign of incompetence.
Because while “Veep” was a good show, in political terms, getting compared to it is never a good thing. And if you do something like include the wrong person in a private chat more than once, even Aunt Mary — if not necessarily Jesse Watters — might start to conclude that you’re kind of an idiot.
The post The Atlantic Mess: Team Trump Tests the Limits of Shooting the Messenger appeared first on TheWrap.