WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump agreed to sit for an interview with three journalists from The Atlantic, including Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor-in-chief of the outlet who was accidentally included in a Signal group chat in which senior administration officials, including Vice President JD Vance and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, discussed attacks against the Houthis.
The president made the announcement in a post on Truth Social on Thursday in which he explained he agreed to the interview "out of curiosity" and views it as a “competition with myself” to see if the outlet, which he has long criticized, can be “truthful.’”
"Are they capable of writing a fair story on 'TRUMP?'" the president wrote. "The way I look at it, what can be so bad – I WON!”
Trump added that he was told the interview, set to be conducted by Goldberg as well as The Atlantic's Michael Scherer and Ashley Parker, was for a story that would be titled “‘The Most Consequential President of this Century.’”
Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt was seen retrieving the trio from the White House briefing just after 3 p.m. Thursday afternoon. The journalists came back into the briefing room just over an hour later.
The interview comes just weeks after Goldberg’s pieces — detailing how he had been added to a group chat on the messaging app Signal with top national security officials in Trump’s administration in which they discussed attacks against the Houthis in Yemen — rocked the Beltway.
The administration acknowledged at the time that the chat appeared to be authentic but maintained the information shared was not classified. Officials responded by publicly bashing Goldberg, who has found himself in Trump’s crosshairs for his reporting for years, particularly over a 2018 story in which The Atlantic journalist wrote that the then-first term president declined to visit an American cemetery near Paris that holds the bodies of fallen World War I service members and instead reportedly referred to them as “suckers” and “losers.”
Trump’s former chief of staff, retired Marine Gen. John Kelly, later confirmed Goldberg’s reporting but the president has vehemently denied the details of the story and using those terms to refer to dead troops.
In an interview with NBC News last month, Goldberg pushed back on the administration’s criticism of his Signal chat reporting, that he is not worried about retaliation and won’t be “bullied.”
“We at The Atlantic are not intimidated by this nonsense,” he said. “We're going to keep reporting the truth as we see it.”
Trump started the post announcing his participation in the interview by referring to Goldberg as the “person responsible for many fictional stories about me,” listing both the “Suckers and Losers” and Signal chat reporting. He said Goldberg was “somewhat more ‘successful’” with the Signal chat story. It is unclear what he meant by “successful.”
Trump also criticized Scherer and Parker, calling them “not exactly pro-Trump writers, either, to put it mildly!”
