Read the full transcript of The Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg in conversation with Anne Applebaum on the Signal group chat at New Orleans Book Festival, [Mar 28, 2025].
TRANSCRIPT:
Introduction
ANNE APPLEBAUM: This is the second standing ovation I’ve witnessed this week for Jeffrey Goldberg. So one more time. Thank you all so much for coming. It’s a real pleasure to be in this enormous packed room full of people who read books. Thank you so much for coming and contributing to the festival and listening to us talk about things that happen in real life as opposed to things that happen in culture wars far away.
I’m in the unusual position of interviewing my editor, so you’ll forgive me if I make mistakes. It’s a first time, and I wanted to start with some recent news. I was at the Atlantic offices on Tuesday. So if you remember, I won’t recount to you the content of Jeff’s story that was printed on Monday, because I think if you’re here, you probably know what was in it. But on Tuesday, there was an interesting decision to be made.
The story was published. As you know, Jeff was put on a Signal chat of the leading members of the Trump administration, and then they reacted to the chat, then they began denying it. They said it was a hoax. And I walked in on Tuesday morning, and there was a decision to be made about what to do next. And Jeff had printed out the copies of the screenshots from the chat and was looking at them. And what were you thinking?
The Decision to Publish
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Let’s just go off the record for a minute, just between us. Well, I was thinking… I wish I weren’t in this position, because I didn’t want… I mean, obviously we made a decision early, before the first story, that we weren’t going to publish certain texts because I felt that they were too sensitive from a national security perspective to publish, obviously, information about specific operations.
So I felt like I was being put into a kind of a box, but I didn’t want to be put into a box, so I felt like we had to get out of it. And the way we got out of it is to say to ourselves, well, if the Trump administration is going to say that… I mean, there were so many different lines of attack at once. It’s a hoax. It’s not a hoax, but it’s not sensitive. It’s sensitive, but it’s not top secret. Jeff Goldberg is a scumbag. That was one of their main arguments, actually.
ANNE APPLEBAUM: The word scumbag.
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Yeah, that was one of their main arguments. Or sleazebag. Sleazebag. I want to be accurate. Sleazebag. And, you know, calling me names, obviously calling the Atlantic… I mean, Donald Trump has been running that play, the Atlantic as a failing magazine for about eight years now. We were half the size when he started. So sometimes I joke that he’s like our circulation director in a kind of way. That’s been a weird help.
So if they hadn’t done all those things, I wouldn’t have had to decide to publish. But we were faced with this dilemma. I’m not going to be called a liar. I’m certainly not going to have my magazine be called a liar. And more to the point, it’s a serious thing. Like, you guys made a mistake. It’s a serious mistake. It’s a serious breach in national security. They had an opportunity to just accept that they made a mistake, tell us how they’re going to fix the mistake and then move on. But they instead went on this weird kind of attack, attacking the messenger, which is part of the playbook.
Consulting with Government Agencies
And so what we did is we started reaching out to all of the agencies. This is once Donald Trump said there was nothing serious in the material. We reached out to all the different agencies, CIA, DNI, NSC and so on, and said, look, you know, Trump says this, Tulsi Gabbard says that, but we want to know, just because we’re belt and suspenders, right? Is there anything you actually think shouldn’t be put out into the public eye? Because the last thing that we want to do is put American service people in harm’s way. That’s just my… I mean, other people in journalism have a debate about this kind of thing. No, it’s a serious debate. I’m just not going to do that. That’s not going to happen.
And so what happened? We got some feedback. Some people ignored us. We finally got a sort of anodyne statement from the White House. Like, it’s not secret, but don’t publish it anyway was the request, which didn’t really hold a lot of water. The CIA actually did ask us to withhold a specific piece of information, which we did. They explained why, and it seemed like a good explanation.
And so, you know, they essentially goaded us into publishing the full transcript. And so we did, because we didn’t have a choice at that point. And so that was the decision. We put that out. Was it yesterday? I guess it was just yesterday.
ANNE APPLEBAUM: It looks like a lot longer.
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Yeah, it feels like a little bit longer, but it was yesterday. And, you know, it’s funny because when you’re in journalism, you get to… We love talking in kind of highfalutin, idealistic terms about what we do. And this is an opportunity to actually say to ourselves what is in the best interest of our readers of the people of the United States. They should see the whole truth and then they should make up their own minds about whether this is a serious breach of national security or not.
Our goal is to, like all good journalists or people trying to be good journalists, to hold powerful people to account. And so if they’re going to tell the American people that this isn’t important and we feel it’s important, we’re going to let the people decide.
And that’s what we did.
Attacks on Journalism and Reality
ANNE APPLEBAUM: But let me return to the attack on you, because this is something that we know from other times and other places. I mean, it’s not just something that the Trump administration does – attacking the messenger, attacking the journalist, attacking the institution of journalism, attacking the Atlantic. This is a way, this is something that autocrats and dictators do in other countries in order to be able to create their own reality.
I mean, they want to say nothing, don’t believe anybody except me. You know, ignore Jeff Goldberg. He’s a scumbag and a loser and a sleazebag. You know, only listen to what we are saying. Do you think that by publishing the texts, you injected that little dose of reality into the conversation?
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: I hope so. I mean, look, and Anne, as you all know, is one of the great experts in the world on authoritarian behavior. I mean, wrote the book on the Gulag, on the history of the Gulag, and has been writing about totalitarianism and authoritarianism ever since. So not telling you certainly anything you don’t know.
The goal of people who are authoritarian minded is to force compliance, right? They can only do what they want to do if no one fights them, if no one argues with them, if no one counters it. And so if you have a dose of reality that you can inject into the system, into the cognitive system of the United States, well, then you should do it because they’re counting on people not doing it.
I mean, I’ve been saying this for a long time. I mean, saying this before Donald Trump was reelected, if there were eight or nine, I think nine or ten additional Republican senators who would have voted for impeachment after the January 6th rebellion, or whatever you want to call it. Uprising. Donald Trump would not have been allowed to run for president, but they enforced compliance, and they do that in the Republican Senate caucus. And they enforce compliance through intimidation, through threat, through fear.
Responding to Personal Attacks
ANNE APPLEBAUM: So how does… So Mike Waltz calls you a loser on TV, implies that you’re, you know, that you’ve somehow mysteriously made your phone number appear on his telephone.
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: It was sucked in using my brain waves.
ANNE APPLEBAUM: That’s right.
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Yeah.
ANNE APPLEBAUM: So how does that work in your brain? So you’re accused of these very bad things, and you’re meant to be intimidated, and you’re meant to say, you’re right, your honor, we won’t publish anything.
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Yeah, well, I mean, he could… Mike Waltz can call me a loser if he wants, but at least I know how to text.
ANNE APPLEBAUM: And did you break into his phone?
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: You know, can I just tell you something? Did I break into his phone? So one of my kids in our family chat…
ANNE APPLEBAUM: Where you only use initials, right?
The Reality of the Situation
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Yeah. Yeah. Our family chat, which is now, you know, entirely encrypted in code. I mean, our family… Most of our family chat consists of “Does anyone have the Hulu password?” You know, I mean, that’s basically the family chat, right? In our family chat, one of my kids the day before last said, the most amazing thing about this story is that daddy has learned how to take a screenshot. So, you know, I don’t really have those skills.
I mean, this goes back to what you’re saying. You throw a bunch of stuff against the wall and you hope it sticks. So instead of… This is what I don’t understand. And anybody who’s in a leadership position in any organization knows it’s like… it’s when you make a mistake and you’re called out on it, and you know it’s a mistake. You know, you have choices. You can own the mistake. If you have to fall on your sword, you fall on your sword. If you get a second chance, great. You learn from it. You just deal with it.
Like, he did invite me into the Signal chat. And you could just say, wow, that was a doozy, and we’re not going to do that again. And we’re going to not use Signal and other private commercial apps to communicate war plans or attack plans. I mean, I’m being entirely serious. Like, we have to be open to the idea that people in government, just like everybody else, make mistakes. And sometimes the mistakes have profound consequences. And the test is, how do you respond to the mistake? Do you just say, well, we made a mistake and we’re going to do X, Y and Z?
By the way, we wouldn’t even be talking about it today if they had done that. I mean, maybe we would be, but it would be ebbing. Right? But the Waltz-Hegseth tactic in this case was to say crazy things and push back in a way that… And what I would say is it’s literally one of those situations where before you start calling a person, an editor, a magazine names, you should really make sure that the people, that person doesn’t have the receipts. Because if you have the receipts, you’re forcing us, and in all seriousness, you’re forcing us to say, actually, we’re not lying. Here’s the truth.
A Different Kind of Administration
ANNE APPLEBAUM: But there’s something else here, which is that almost—not almost, I’ll be more definitive—any other administration in recent years, Republican or Democrat, in which something like this or some similar incident took place would have, you know, at the very least fired somebody or would have acknowledged that this was an important breach or would have made some concession and would not have merely focused on making up names about you. And so the question is, what’s different about these guys? What is it that they’re doing?
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: We only have 13 minutes, 13 minutes, 4 seconds. What’s different? I mean, I don’t want to, I’m trying to repress my desire to make jokes about this whole thing. Obviously, what’s different is that the leader, the leader in this case was taught from an early age or learned either from his father or Roy Cohn, his first lawyer of note, a valuable lesson. You don’t apologize, you don’t explain, you double down. And by the way, it generally speaking works.
ANNE APPLEBAUM: This is what I’m going to ask.
The Dark Art of Political Taboo-Breaking
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Well, this is the thing, and we’ve talked about this. We’re both, I think it’s fair to say, admirers of John McCain, the late John McCain. And in 2015, I guess it was 15, the summer of 15, Donald Trump is being interviewed about John McCain, who he doesn’t like, and he says, “I don’t like people who are captured. I don’t like people who are shot down.”
I’m watching that and I’m thinking, oh, I mean, according to the ordinary rules of political physics, that’s the end of his campaign, right? I mean, for any American, any American politician to say that about John McCain or any POW or any honored veteran is absurd, right? Especially in… And he’s trying to get the nomination of a party that is associated with patriotism and support for the troops and etc.
But then we watched in the coming days, he didn’t apologize for it, he doubled down on it and he just rode that wave. And so I realized then that I don’t understand something crucial about politics in America or about this party or about what he’s doing. He’s discovered some kind of pathway to success that no other American politician that we can think of has ever discovered, which is you literally take the criticism and you refashion it into a weapon.
Remember when people said to Trump, “You can’t say ‘America First.’ That was Charles Lindbergh’s theme. That was what the Nazis were saying in America in the 30s.” And he goes, “I think it sounds great,” right? And then everybody’s like, “Okay.” And then they moved on to the next kind of moment. It’s a dark art, but it’s a genius dark art.
ANNE APPLEBAUM: I mean, there’s something about it. To me, what he seems to have is he does things that other people can’t do. In other words, he keeps breaking taboos and he keeps saying things. You know, he has no self-control at all.
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: So he can say, or maybe it is self-control, maybe he knows, but…
ANNE APPLEBAUM: Something about it makes people admire it. You know, “I’m not allowed. I have to be careful. I have to be polite to people.”
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: People.
ANNE APPLEBAUM: And he doesn’t have to.
The Appeal of Autocracy
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Well, let me… I mean, you know, as I said before, you’re the expert, especially in the European context, Eastern European and Soviet and then Russian context. It’s a genuine question: Why are so many people drawn to the autocratic figure? Why is democracy not as popular as maybe you would think it would? Or the idea of democratic self-restraint, why is that not popular?
ANNE APPLEBAUM: I mean, in almost every country on the planet where there is a harsh dictatorship, there are also people who want democracy. So, you know, I’ve been in all kinds of strange places in the world, as you know. I was recently in Sudan. You can go into very far corners of countries where there has never really been democracy, where there’s a civil war, and you will meet somebody who says, “What we need here is democracy.”
So there’s a way in which people who live in the harshest societies understand intuitively that it’s not fair. You know, it’s not fair that the judges are controlled by the leader. It’s not fair that people have no influence over politics. It’s not fair that people are treated unequally or that people don’t have rights.
So there is actually something intuitive about democracy as well as dictatorship. But what dictators usually do is they create—it goes back to what we were talking about a minute ago—they create an atmosphere that’s a combination of fear and greed. You know, “In order for me to get ahead and keep my position, I need to play this role.” They create a world in which people don’t have incentives to break out of it.
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right.
ANNE APPLEBAUM: And that’s what’s changed, it feels to me in Washington, is that there are now a lot of people who have incentives not to say things they know are true or incentives to attack Jeff Goldberg for something that they know is true.
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Are you surprised by how easily it is to scare people?
ANNE APPLEBAUM: I’ve been surprised by some people, but not overall. No. I mean, really, there’s no such thing as an exceptional society where these rules don’t matter.
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right.
ANNE APPLEBAUM: I mean, I suppose the strange thing about the United States is that it’s not like we’re living in a world where, you know, if you lose your job as National Security Advisor, you go to the Gulag. You know what will happen? Well, maybe you’ll go to Fox. You’ll go to Fox, or, you know, you’ll teach at the Kennedy School. I don’t know. You’ll be at a think tank. So the pressure that’s being put on people is pressure to do with careers and status. It’s not—there’s no violence.
Political Shape-Shifting
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Yeah. And by the way, I should say Mike Waltz, who says he doesn’t know me, is I have found to be an interesting guy. You’ve probably encountered him as well, and he is in the camp. I mean, one of the interesting things that’s not being discussed as much is that in that long discourse, there are definitely sides within, there are different teams within the Trump administration.
J.D. Vance is definitely more of a kind of a soft isolationist and Mike Waltz is more of, you know, in the old kind of the conservative, muscular interventionist kind of model—internationalist almost. And you could see that he uses patriotic language. And I’m sure he’s not comfortable with our, what would you call, pivot to Russia. I’m sure he’s not comfortable with that.
But it’s, I mean, this is just an aside, it’s interesting how people like that… I mean, you and I both have a lot of experience in the past with Lindsey Graham and I have him in my mind as kind of the ultimate shape-shifting political character. Because when I knew Lindsey Graham well, it was when he was Sancho Panza to John McCain’s Don Quixote. Right. And he was like 100% lockstep with John McCain. And he knew that John McCain couldn’t stand Donald Trump and everything that he stood for, both from a political perspective and from a character perspective. But now he’s all in and you’ve written about that. And so, I mean, that is maybe one of the great operative examples. Like how does that happen?
ANNE APPLEBAUM: Well, usually there are different paths. I mean, people tell themselves various stories. “If I’m on the inside, I’ll be influential” or “If I don’t do this job, then somebody else will” or “My mother-in-law is ill and my wife is worried about our mortgage and I can’t afford to leave this job right now.” I mean, there’s a range of excuses.
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: That’s like the legitimate fears. There’s some legitimate fears.
ANNE APPLEBAUM: If you’re in a really repressive society, then you’re, “If I don’t do this, I’ll go to jail.” And that’s the thing that we don’t have here. And that’s… Well, I was thinking about Mike Waltz. I mean, you maybe…
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: No, no, no, I’m not. Well, let’s leave that aside for the moment.
ANNE APPLEBAUM: Sorry.
Standing for Reality
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: No, no, no, it’s… No, but, by the way, this is one of the things about this general moment in America. You have to be, if you want to stand for reality, and there are people who don’t want you to do that, you have to be prepared to suffer the consequences of that. You really do.
ANNE APPLEBAUM: But it’s also true that one of the things they’re doing—and you see it with you, but you’ve seen it with law firms, you’ve seen it with universities—they’re also looking at picking out individuals, you know, one university, one law firm, one journalist and intimidating them that way.
I mean, clearly one of the answers or one of the things that I hope happens in the next few months even, and let alone the next few years, is that people begin to work together. I mean, if all journalists, you know, or all lawyers or all universities are on the same page…
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right, but the problem, no, it’s a good…
ANNE APPLEBAUM: That it’s much harder to pick the most…
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: It’s a good point. But what we’ve seen from some reporting this week on the law firm issue, you know, you had Paul Weiss, the big law firm, being attacked by the Trump administration. And according to some of the reporting, at least officials from Paul Weiss went to other big firms and said, “Hey, would you stand with us?” And what was going on was that these other firms are trying to raid Paul Weiss for their best lawyers and their clients. I mean, it was not solidarity forever.
ANNE APPLEBAUM: And it’s very short-sighted because then down the road, you know, they’ll be next.
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Yeah.
ANNE APPLEBAUM: And it’s, you know, I suppose they’re not used to thinking along those lines.
Preparing for What’s Coming
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Well, that’s kind of the ultimate question: what do people who—and it’s not a partisan question because there’s not at all. There are plenty of Democrats and Republicans and everybody who are concerned about this. But we’re not used to this. We’re just not used to this. I mean, if we lived in Poland or Russia or across most of the world, actually, we would have experienced things like this. But what do people and institutions have to do to expand their thinking or to not have a failure of imagination about what might be coming?
ANNE APPLEBAUM: I mean, you know, it helps to read the Atlantic.
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Oh, it does, by the way. It just helps to read books.
ANNE APPLEBAUM: No, it helps to know some…
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: It does help to read the Atlantic though, by the way.
ANNE APPLEBAUM: It helps to know history. It helps to know some American history. I mean, you know, we can find incidents and reflections in our own history, including right here in Louisiana. There was a governor of Louisiana who, some of you might know his name, pushed the limits—Huey Long. And so there’s a tradition of it and you can study the tradition and learn what people did before.
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right. I mean, the very fact that “America First” is rooted in—I mean, maybe Donald Trump didn’t know where it came from, but it was rooted in a stretch of American history means that we’ve been through times like this before.
ANNE APPLEBAUM: So study our own history, study foreign history, pay attention and make new friends. I mean, build coalitions.
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Make new friends. Everybody go make new friends.
ANNE APPLEBAUM: No, but build coalitions across, you know, across different institutions.
The Surprise Factor
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: But I just have, I mean, and we’re going to, in a few minutes, we’re going to bring out some other Atlantic colleagues to have a broader conversation about this. But I’ll plant this question for you for that. It’s the question for me: why are people still surprised when this administration does things that other administrations haven’t done before?
Because if there’s one thing you could say about Donald Trump, he tells you what’s on his mind and he tells you what he’s going to do. And it’s really interesting to me that in—let’s just take two cases that we’re talking about, universities and law firm and quote, unquote, “big law”—not prepared, just frankly not prepared for what’s going on.
And by the way, you know, obviously groups that advocate for due process in immigration law, I mean, you could start going down a list of people and of course, people who advocate for, you know, the verboten term DEI or some variation of diversity or inclusion or whatever. People are surprised. The question is why the surprise at this point?
ANNE APPLEBAUM: I’m going to stop there.
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Oh, yeah, we’re going to stop.
ANNE APPLEBAUM: We’re going to take a 15-second break and we’re going to bring on some more of our colleagues.
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right. With chairs. They’re going to get chairs and they’re…
ANNE APPLEBAUM: Going to get chairs.
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Yeah.
ANNE APPLEBAUM: And they’ll have even better…
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: We’ll come back in one minute.
ANNE APPLEBAUM: One minute.
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: All right. We’ll be back.
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