Though exactly how Jeffrey Goldberg ended up on a Signal group chat to discuss what were meant to be secret plans to bomb Yemen remains a mystery, posterity may render it one of recent US history’s most serendipitous chance encounters.
Had the fates been conspiring to add a journalist to the forum whose presence would inflict the maximum discomfort to Trump and his circle, they could hardly have chosen a more fitting candidate.
Goldberg, editor-in-chief of the Atlantic, was already considered a bete noire by circles around Donald Trump even before Monday’s embarrassing revelation that he had been accidentally added to a chat that included the US defense secretary, the White House national security adviser and the heads of the country’s intelligence community.
At the same time Goldberg is also widely criticized by some on the left of US media and politics for his views on Israel, his past record serving in the Israeli military and his hawkish views on Iran and his support for the US invasion of Iraq.
However, since becoming the Atlantic’s editor-in-chief in 2016, he has built a track record of unearthing stories that have managed to specifically get under Trump’s skin with the type of journalism loathed by the president’s “Make America Great Again” (Maga) followers. That, coupled with seemingly acute embarrassment over the sensitivity of his disclosures, helps explain the animus displayed towards Goldberg by multiple administration officials and surrogates.
Mike Waltz, the national security adviser who assembled the group chat to discuss the military operation, called Goldberg “a loser”, “the bottom scum of journalists” and insinuated that he may have tricked his way into the group, in a Tuesday interview with Laura Ingraham on Fox News.
Remarkably, given the personal antipathy, Waltz insisted that he did not know Goldberg, adding insinuatingly: “I wouldn’t know him if I saw him in a police lineup.”
The defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, labelled Goldberg a “deceitful and highly discredited so-called journalist who has made a profession of peddling hoaxes”.
The ad-hominem attacks appeared to be orchestrated and aimed at discrediting the source of a story that threatened to puncture the air of invincibility that surrounded Trump’s first two months back in the White House.
It is hardly the first time that the US president and members of Trump’s circle have attacked Goldberg for work that has deeply angered them. In fact, he and his magazine have a lengthy record of publishing such pieces.
During last year’s presidential election campaign, Trump reacted furiously to an Atlantic article written by Goldberg that cited John Kelly, the former White House chief of staff, as describing how Trump wanted to have military generals who would be personally loyal in the same way he believed German commanders had served Hitler.
Trump already harbored grievances about an earlier Goldberg piece from 2020, also sourced to Kelly, in which he was said to have disdained dead US military servicemen buried in a French cemetery as “suckers and losers”.
Trump vehemently denied the allegations, even after Kelly told Goldberg: “There are many, many people who have heard him say these things.”
Compounding the rightwing hostility is the reputation Goldberg gained as Barack Obama’s go-to interviewer.
Obama granted Goldberg five interviews over the course of his presidency that were widely praised as authoritative by Washington insiders.
While Goldberg’s invitation to the Trump group chat remains unexplained, there is something fitting in it being related to the Middle East and Israel, which has been on the receiving end of missiles fired by the Iran-backed Yemeni Houthis that were the target of the US strikes being decided on.
Born in Brooklyn to Jewish parents, Goldberg, 59, studied at the University of Pennsylvania, but left before graduating to move to Israel. He joined the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), serving as a guard at a prison that held Palestinians detainees during the first intifada of the late 1980s and early 1990s. In his memoir he described witnessing the beatings of detainees.
His Israeli connections, have resulted in some eye-catching stories. These included an Atlantic cover story in 2010 – based on sources in the upper echelons of the country’s military and intelligence community – that predicted that Israel would strike Iran’s nuclear facilities within a year to stop Tehran’s Islamic regime acquiring a bomb.
No attack subsequently happened but the article’s impact may have spurred the Obama administration into intensifying pressure on Tehran to negotiate limits to its nuclear programme, which eventually led to a deal in 2015 that Trump later renounced.
Despite his pro-Israel sympathies, Goldberg gained a reputation among some fellow journalists for bravery for being prepared to interview Islamists classified as terrorists by western governments.
Two articles in the New Yorker in 2002, entitled In the Party of God, explored the Lebanese Shia group Hezbollah, and were based on face-to-face interviews conducted in the Bekaa valley.
But he also drew criticism over another New Yorker piece in the same year, which suggested that Saddam Hussein posed a significant threat to the US with weapons of mass destruction that were subsequently never found after the 2003 American-led invasion of Iraq.
The accusation of having made the case for invading Iraq has been cited this week by Goldberg’s present-day pro-Trump critics as part of the effort to discredit him.
But some of Goldberg’s peers say his talents and courage as a journalist and editor have been on clear display in the most recent scandal as the magazine navigates incredibly tricky national security turf and a hostile administration desperate to keep it quiet.
“As is pretty clear in his Atlantic article, he doesn’t give away any top secret information, anything that would endanger the participants,” said Jay Tolson, editor of a cultural review magazine at the University of Virginia and a cohort of Goldberg’s when they were both covering religion and politics in Washington in the early 2000s.
“He’s a very brave guy, and, you know, eager to tell the truth.”
