Trump downplays Signal blunder: ‘there was no classified information’ – live | Trump administration

When Donald Trump turned to his national security adviser, Mike Waltz, on Tuesday and asked him to comment on what, in other administrations, would have been a career-ending blunder – his accidental inclusion of Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor of the Atlantic, in a Signal group chat about strikes on Yemen this month – Waltz began by doing something he knew would please his boss. He attacked Goldberg.

“There’s a lot of journalists in this city who have made big names for themselves making up lies about this president. Whether it’s the Russia hoax, or making up lies about Gold Star families,” Waltz said. “And this one in particular, I’ve never met, don’t know, never communicated with, and we are looking into and reviewing how the heck he got into this room”.

“Look, this journalist, Mr President, wants the world talking about more hoaxes and this kind of nonsense, rather than the freedom that you’re enabling,” Waltz added.

By attacking Goldberg as purveyor of “hoaxes”, Waltz seemed to be following the lead of Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary, who had also accused Goldberg of inventing stories detrimental to Trump. While Waltz made an oblique reference to reports about Trump and “Gold Star families”, which is the term used by the US military for the relatives of soldiers killed in battle, Hegseth was more direct. “You’re talking about a deceitful and highly discredited so-called journalist who’s made a profession out of peddling hoaxes”, including, Hegseth said, “the suckers and losers hoax”.

That was a reference to Goldberg’s 2020 report that senior officials had told him that Trump had disparaged soldiers who gave their lives in battle as “suckers” and “losers”.

Here’s how that article, published in the heat of the 2020 election campaign, began:

When President Donald Trump canceled a visit to the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery near Paris in 2018, he blamed rain for the last-minute decision, saying that “the helicopter couldn’t fly” and that the Secret Service wouldn’t drive him there. Neither claim was true.

Trump rejected the idea of the visit because he feared his hair would become disheveled in the rain, and because he did not believe it important to honor American war dead, according to four people with firsthand knowledge of the discussion that day. In a conversation with senior staff members on the morning of the scheduled visit, Trump said, “Why should I go to that cemetery? It’s filled with losers.” In a separate conversation on the same trip, Trump referred to the more than 1,800 marines who lost their lives at Belleau Wood as “suckers” for getting killed.

Although viewers of rightwing news outlets, like Trump, firmly believe that this reporting, like reporting on Russia’s established efforts to help Trump win the presidency in 2016, was “a hoax”, it was, in fact, confirmed on the record four years later by John Kelly, who was Trump’s chief of staff in his first term.

But, by reminding Trump that it was Goldberg who first revealed that he had criticized dead troops, Hegseth and Waltz seem to be hoping to redirect anger away from them and in the direction of the reporter.

Trump’s comments at the same White House event seemed to suggest that the effort was working, at least for now. “I happen to know,” Trump said of Goldberg a minute after Waltz finished speaking, “the guy’s a total sleazebag.”

“The Atlantic is a failed magazine, does very, very poorly, nobody gives a damn about it,” Trump continued. “I will tell you this: they’ve made up more stories, and they’re just a failing magazine, the public understands that.”

In the last weeks of the 2024 presidential election campaign, Goldberg published another report that was deeply unflattering to Trump, also based on his access to Washington insiders who had worked for Trump in his first term. In that article, Goldberg reported both that Trump had praised Hitler’s generals to Kelly, and that the president had reneged on a promise to pay for the funeral of a young female soldier who had been murdered by a fellow soldier at Fort Hood, in Texas.