The president has used a strongman playbook to bring universities, news organizations and law firms to heel. That didn’t work on The Atlantic.
Over the past two months, President Donald Trump and the people in his orbit have used bullying, misdirection and brute force to bring some of the nation’s oldest and most powerful institutions to heel.
That playbook didn’t work on The Atlantic.
The magazine, loathed by Trump and his allies, on Wednesday morning published the entire group chat conversation among top administration officials about a military operation in Yemen. In doing so — after press secretary Karoline Leavitt told the magazine “we object to the release” — Editor-in-Chief Jeffrey Goldberg and national security reporter Shane Harris effectively stood up to an administration that has largely grown used to getting its way — and dared a White House with limited options to make the next move.
Allies, too, were urging the administration to turn down the temperature.
“I think the important thing is here they made a mistake, they know it,” said Republican Senate Majority Leader John Thune on Wednesday. “They should own it and fix it so it never happens again.”
Aided by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, Trump has moved to gut a federal government he and his allies see as being run by an antagonistic “deep state.” One of the country’s biggest news networks, ABC News, settled with Trump for $15 million, and another, CBS News, appears poised to settle for millions more. The law firm Paul, Weiss, once a champion against the president in his first term, pledged $40 million in pro bono legal services to issues Trump has supported. And Columbia University, an Ivy League institution older than the Republic itself, agreed to nine unprecedented policy changes in an effort to open talks that would unfreeze $400 million in federal funding.
But The Atlantic’s case was different.
When national security adviser Mike Waltz inadvertently added Goldberg to a Signal group chat of other top administration officials, including Vice President JD Vance, as they discussed attack plans against Houthi rebels this month, it was a major, self-inflicted screw-up.
Against other foes, Trump has largely taken a strongman approach, signing executive actions against them and pulling federal funding. But those options don’t exist in this case, which has forced Trump into his base-level strategy: “Attack, attack, attack.”
Goldberg is a “sleazebag” whose reporting is “bad for the country,” Trump said Tuesday, defending Waltz and bashing The Atlantic, which he called a “failing” magazine (as of March 2024, it was profitable). Steven Cheung, Trump’s communications director, called the story a “hoax” and the resulting outrage “a witch hunt.”
In his first report, Goldberg declined to publish the messages in their entirety, writing that “the information contained in them, if they had been read by an adversary of the United States, could conceivably have been used to harm American military and intelligence personnel.” But on Tuesday, Trump, White House officials, Waltz and other people in the chat emphasized that no part of it was classified — all but daring Goldberg to publish.
He did.
The administration is retaining its same strategy, arguing that “war plans” were not shared at all. “The Atlantic has conceded: these were NOT “war plans,” Leavitt said on X.
Downplaying the incident appears, for now, to be the administration’s only move — unless, of course, it selects a head to roll. Investigations are likely to follow, and the blunder is so incendiary, even in Trump’s firehose news cycle, that it appears likely to play into the 2026 and 2028 elections.
“Stupid,” said a Trump ally, discussing the White House’s strategy of claiming the Atlantic was lying. The person was granted anonymity to avoid alienating administration officials.
“There is a clear public interest in disclosing the sort of information that Trump advisers included in nonsecure communications channels, especially because senior administration figures are attempting to downplay the significance of the messages that were shared,” the reporters wrote.
It was a remarkable rebuke of Trump, who since Inauguration Day has embarked on a revenge tour, tearing through the federal government, elite universities, news organizations and law firms he sees as enemies. And it left the president, unable to flex his typical levers of power, with limited options — with the most straightforward way out being something he is loath to do: apologize.
“There’s only one response to a mistake of this magnitude: You apologize, you own it and you stop everything until you can figure out what went wrong and how it might not ever happen again,” Connecticut Rep. Jim Himes, the highest-ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said Wednesday during a hearing. “That’s not what happened. The secretary of Defense responded with a brutal attack on the reporter who did not ask to be on the Signal chain.”
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