Inside the Trump Signal chat leak: ‘His administration is staffed by either idiots or loyalists’

Read time: 5 mins

In brief…

• Jeffrey Goldberg says the Trump administration’s only approach to leadership is to “bully” – and reveals what happened when he found himself on the receiving end of this.
• He says being added to a Signal chat, where top members of Trump’s team discussed bombing Yemen, was nothing but a “bump in the road” for the president, who is more concerned with people taking attention from him than national security.
• The MAGA president has crafted an administration of “idiots or loyalists” and has regressed US politics by 150 years, he says.

What’s the story?

It’s one thing to send a message to the wrong person, it’s quite another to find yourself added to a government group-chat that’s discussing international security issues.

But that’s what happened to Jeffrey Goldberg earlier this year, when he found himself in a Trump administration Signal chat where missile strikes on Yemen were being discussed by the likes of Pete Hegseth and Mike Waltz.

Goldberg is the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, and after news broke of the security breach, Waltz told Fox News that phone contacts can be “sucked in” to private chats on messaging apps such as Signal – but later took responsibility for creating the chat.

When he wrote about being included in the chat, he withheld some of  the sensitive details he learned for fear of endangering the lives of American soldiers. But when the Trump administration accused him of lying about what had been shared in the chat, he says he was "forced" to disclose the details.

He tells The News Agents that the Trump approach is always to "bully", and to do it "over and over again".

“Their tactic was, for some strange reason, to attack me, though I was the completely passive recipient of their chat,” he says.

“Mike Waltz calls me the lowest scum of journalism – which is a strange expression – and he calls me a loser.

“I tried to maintain my dignified, diplomatic posture through all of the interviews and everything, but I did say he can call me a loser if he wants, but at least I know how to text.”

Waltz’s rookie mistake when setting up the Signal chat was one of the reasons cited when he eventually lost his position in the Trump administration.

“Mike Waltz denied knowing me, which is not true. We do know each other. There are photographs of us together. He called me all these names to show how MAGA he is,” Goldberg says.

“He was trying desperately to separate himself from me, because Donald Trump was not interested in the Signal controversy as a national security lapse or failure.

“He wanted to know if Mike Waltz was friends with Jeff Goldberg, because that would be the fatal problem for Mike Waltz.”

While it was Waltz who was responsible for the group chat, it was defence secretary Pete Hegseth who sent the messages, which Goldberg considers the “bigger sin” in the Signal debacle.

Hegseth remains in his role, but that’s no surprise to Goldberg, with Trump’s team rushing to protect the former Fox News anchor from the fallout.

“Mike Waltz was always suspect among the MAGA faithful,” he says.

“Waltz came from a more traditional Republican background. Hegseth was Fox all the way – he has the right tattoos and he has the right attitude.”

But that’s not to say Hegseth will enjoy a full four years as part of Trump’s top team.

“No one knows how long Pete Hegseth is going to last. It's all chaos over there all the time,” Goldberg adds.

“It turns out that you can't take a weekend host of Fox and Friends and put him in charge of the world's largest and most complicated organisation without some bumps in the road.”

And to Trump, the Signal chat was precisely that – a bump in the road. Goldberg believes it simply doesn’t matter to the president.

“This is a man who kept state secrets in the toilet at Mar-a-Lago – which was a basis for one of the criminal cases against him,” he says.

“He declassifies at will.”

Goldberg adds that any anger from Trump towards Waltz is more likely to have been for taking attention from him for a “silly” slip-up, rather than any concern for national security or the safety of US troops.

And attention is the one thing Goldberg says Trump wants more than anything else, describing him as someone who will say whatever he needs to in order to get through the next five, 10 or 20 minutes.

“I’m not sure that there's an ‘actual’ Donald Trump,” he says.

“He's just someone trying to get through the next phase and is trying to get as much attention as possible.

“Trump is charming, he has a lot of charisma, and he'll use whatever weapon he has to get the attention that he needs.”

Beyond attention seeking, group chat mistakes and insults being hurled, Goldberg says he has serious concerns about the future of America, and whether democracy can survive a second term in The White House for Trump.

Since his inauguration in January, and the subsequent work of Elon Musk leading his Department of Government Efficiency, many jobs have been lost in the US government and civil service – and it’s this which worries Goldberg.

“I don't know that we can survive intact because they're driving out many of the most important and valuable employees in government,” he says.

“You're gonna have a government staffed by either idiots or loyalists. We're going back 150 years to a time before professionalism in the civil service.

He says protection could possibly come from US courts and a “free and robust press”, but as yet the current administration has seen little to no pushback in any area.

“It’s all up for discussion” he concludes.

“We're talking about an American president who's threatening to go to war against Denmark.

“It sounds like a Peter Sellers movie that's not real.”

Listen to the latest episode of The News Agents.