Photo: Alamy
President Trump surprised nearly everyone when he announced on Thursday that he would be sitting down for an interview with a journalist who famously propagated several anti-Trump narratives over the years.
“Later today I will be meeting with, of all people, Jeffrey Goldberg, the Editor of The Atlantic, and 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,” the president wrote on Truth Social.
In March, Jeffrey Goldberg ran a story alleging that he had been accidentally looped into a group Signal chat with high-level Trump administration officials, including Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and Vice President J.D. Vance.
The chat appeared to include conversations about potential strikes against Houthi terrorists in Yemen, with some critics accusing Hegseth and others of inadvertently sharing classified information with a mainstream journalist.
However, National Intelligence Director Tulsi Gabbard testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee on this issue last month, noting that “there was no classified material that was shared in that Signal chat.”
Trump said in his Truth Social statement that Goldberg would bring writers Michael Scherer and Ashley Parker to the interview, whom he described as “not exactly pro-Trump writers, either, to put it mildly!”
The piece, according to Trump, will be titled, “The Most Consequential President of this Century.”
The question about whether the article will be written with an explicitly critical slant remains to be answered. Based on the president’s comments about the interview, it appears that he is doing it for kicks.
“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 explained in his statement.
He continued facetiously, “Are they capable of writing a fair story on ‘TRUMP’? The way I look at it, what can be so bad – I WON!”