At the opening night of the Martha's Vineyard Book Festival, Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor in chief of The Atlantic, talked with three-time Pulitzer Prize-winning staff writer Ashley Parker about reporting on the president, Signalgate and the future of news.
Since Donald Trump was elected to his second presidential term, each political action has drawn heavy media attention, keeping his name in the news every day.
At the Martha’s Vineyard Book Festival’s opening event Friday evening, Jeffrey Goldberg, editor in chief of The Atlantic, said that’s exactly what the President wants.
“He only has one measurement of success – it’s attention,” Mr. Goldberg said.
Book fest founder Suellen Lazarus introduces Mr. Goldberg.
Book fest founder Suellen Lazarus introduces Mr. Goldberg.
At the Signal vs. Noise: Covering This Presidency talk, three-time Pulitzer Prize winner and Atlantic staff writer Ashley Parker, who has covered President Trump since 2016, joined Mr. Goldberg to offer insights into the President, reflect on a major U.S. security breach known as Signalgate, and chat about the future of news.
“We’ve both been living inside Trump’s mind for 10 years,” Mr. Goldberg said to the sold out crowd at the Chilmark Community Center grounds. “Trump is in our minds in a way that’s not healthy psychologically.”
Suellen Lazarus, founder and director of the festival, said she was thrilled to kick-off the festival for its 20th anniversary with two journalists who continue to report the truth in a fraught political landscape.
“These conversations matter,” Ms. Lazarus said. “They ignite curiosity, deepen understanding and remind us why dialog – real, thoughtful, in-person dialog – is more important than ever before.”
Much of Friday’s chat centered on Signalgate.
In March, while sitting in a Safeway parking lot in Washington, D.C., Mr. Goldberg discovered that a Signal chat he’d been added to by National Security Advisor Mike Waltz was discussing a bombing campaign in Yemen. The group included top Trump administration officials — namely Vice President JD Vance, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
When Mr. Goldberg saw the messages, he didn’t think it was real. He thought he’d been a part of some foreign intelligence organization trying to entrap journalists.
“I was screenshotting all of this all along because I didn’t know when my phone was going to actually explode,” Mr. Goldberg said.
Four minutes after the target time sent in the chat, Mr. Goldberg saw the reports of explosions in Yemen, and he knew it was real. He also knew he had to write about it.
“We [discovered] inadvertently and passively, an immense flaw in the operational security in the United States, and so we [had] to what do journalists do – we hold officials, people in power, publicly accountable,” Mr. Goldberg said.
“I had some awareness [that] something was going on because any time I would walk by your office, there were a lot of people packed in, mainly lawyers, [with] very serious looking faces,” Ms. Parker added.
Mr. Goldberg said that, at the time, he looked at his phone like it was kryptonite and left the chat the night of the Gridiron dinner, a white-tie event with politicians and members of the Washington, D.C. press. The phone is now locked in a heavy-duty safe.
“I proved the thing that I wanted to prove, which is that there was breach, and I wanted to get out there,” Mr. Goldberg said. “And I wanted to get out [of] there in a clean way.”
Friday's talk kicked off the three-day festival in Chilmark.
Friday's talk kicked off the three-day festival in Chilmark.
He added that there was a concern given the relationship between the Trump administration and the media, especially The Atlantic, that he would be investigated, have his devices seized by national security and have his home searched.
“The most disturbing thing is that nothing happened,” Mr. Goldberg said. “I was trying to trigger a response. I was hoping that Mike [Walz] would call and say, ‘What’s going on?’ … but they didn’t notice that I was in the chat [and] they didn’t notice that I wasn’t in the chat.”
Instead, Mr. Goldberg said the Trump administration attacked his character and denied there was anything secret shared in the chat. Mr. Goldberg said Mr. Hegseth thinks Mr. Goldberg broke into the Signal servers, which is not possible, since it’s an encrypted messaging service.
“One of my kids [during] this thing says ‘The most shocking thing of all is that you learned how to take a screenshot’...” Mr. Goldberg said. “So, the idea that I was going to break into Signal was pretty silly.”
The content in the chat itself was insightful to the inner workings of the Trump administration, according to Mr. Goldberg. Aside from the inappropriate use of emojis, Mr. Goldberg said it revealed the officials’ deep dislike of European allies and Mr. Hegseth’s struggle for power.
“Dude, you are the Secretary of Defense. You don’t have to play Secretary of Defense,” Mr. Goldberg said.
Ms. Parker and Mr. Goldberg at the book festival talk also delved into what it’s like to cover the President, day-in, day-out.
After Signalgate subsided, Ms. Parker was writing a cover story for the June issue of The Atlantic with her colleague, Michael Scherer, that focused on President Trump’s ability to revive his political career after the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection in the Washington. They tried to schedule an interview with the President, but found out via a Truth Social post that President Trump decided to cancel.
Eventually, President Trump reached out to The Atlantic and agreed to the interview, but extended the invitation to include Mr. Goldberg.
Ms. Parker said it felt as if President Trump had a begrudging respect for The Atlantic after Signalgate. Mr. Goldberg added that it relates to Trump’s need for attention, and when his byline commanded the spotlight, President Trump felt he’d found a worthy match.
During the interview with the President, Mr. Goldberg said President Trump joked about The Atlantic’s ability to sell more magazines because of the Signalgate story.
“He didn’t seem to care…” Mr. Goldberg said. ”It’s evidence of his power in the culture that he can sell subscriptions to The Atlantic by attacking The Atlantic.”
Ms. Parker said over the years she’s spent studying Mr. Trump, she’s learned that he cares deeply about “winning the person directly in front of him.”
She told a story from when she was riding on Air Force One towards the end of President Trump’s first term when he was discussing who he would pardon.
“We’re all gathered around and talking to him, and then he turns to us and sort of very earnestly and genuinely asks to the group of the press pool with him, ‘You guys have anyone you need pardoned?’” Ms. Parker said.
“I’m frantically scanning my internal Rolodex to see if there was a second cousin I could hook-up,” she joked.
Mr. Goldberg said President Trump’s charm and humor appeals to many Americans.
“It’s hard to cover him and write about him because you have to separate out the personality and some of the charming characteristics from the fact that obviously, he’s plainly a populist authoritarian who’s destroying American norms and values,” Mr. Goldberg said.
He added that President Trump lives in a reality of his own making, and it bothers him when people tell him the opposite. As an example, Mr. Goldberg recounted how a couple of hours before the talk, President Trump fired the Commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Erika McEntarfer, because he didn’t like the data she published showing weakness in the labor market.
Mr. Goldberg said the Trump administration has launched a war on both reality and knowledge. He closed the discussion with a call to arms for the press, emphasizing that in today’s political climate, journalists must remain steadfast in their commitment to documenting the truth.
“The best thing we can do is catalog the attack on knowledge, decry the attack on knowledge when appropriate, and make sure that people at least know,” he said.
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