Jeffrey Goldberg, editor-in-chief of the Atlantic, during The Atlantic Festival 2024 in Washington, DC. Photo by Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images for The Atlantic

Senior Columnist Rob Eshman March 26, 2025

If you assumed that Jeffrey Goldberg, editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, would be uniformly lauded for exposing a dangerous security lapse at the highest levels of government, you haven’t seen the 2024 movie The Apprentice.

If you did, you would have anticipated the tsunami of attacks, denials, lies and antisemitism that followed in the wake of Goldberg’s superb and judicious reporting.

In the film, a young Donald Trump (Sebastian Stan) listens raptly as his mentor, the red-baiting lawyer Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong), offers three rules for winning. “The first rule is attack, attack, attack,” Cohn says. “Rule two, admit nothing, deny everything. Rule three: no matter what happens, you claim victory and never admit defeat. You have to be willing to do anything to anyone to win.”

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So, since Goldberg revealed that National Security Advisor Mike Waltz included him on a Signal chat with senior defense and intelligence officials planning an imminent attack on the Houthis in Yemen, the response from the administration and its supporters has been textbook Roy Cohn.

First: Attack. “The person that was on just happens to be a sleazebag, so maybe that’s just coincidence. I don’t know,” President Donald Trump said of Goldberg’s inclusion on the chat: “He’s basically bad for the country.” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt tweeted that Goldberg was, “well-known for his sensationalist spin.” (He’s not.)

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who posted detailed attack plans in the group chat, called Goldberg a “deceitful and highly discredited so-called journalist who has made a profession of peddling hoaxes time and time again.” Waltz, the person who included Goldberg on the text chain in the first place, called him, “the bottom scum of journalists.”

Right wing media outlets picked up their cue from the administration. On Fox, Jesse Watters called Goldberg, “not a good reporter.”

Step two: Admit nothing, deny everything. Waltz — who, again, personally added Goldberg to the chat — went on to tell Fox News anchor Laura Ingraham that somehow Goldberg hacked into the chat. (That, by the way, would also be a major security failure; there is a reason that government communications on this level are supposed to take place over secure channels.) “Now, whether he did it deliberately or it happened in some other technical means, is something we’re trying to figure out,” Waltz said. Hegseth told reporters that he absolutely did not post sensitive information to the easily-hackable chat. (He did).

Most Republicans did what Alabama Sen. Tommy Tuberville did — deny by minimizing. The security breach “wasn’t a systemic thing,” Tuberville said, without evidence; after all, we have no idea who else Waltz and Hegseth have been texting, especially as Waltz set messages in the Signal chat to auto-delete after a period of weeks.

Then, finally: No matter what happens, you claim victory. Sen. Ted Cruz said the important thing about the episode was the successful operation against the Houthis, accusing Democrats of pulling focus with their outrage over the group chat fiasco. Speaker of the House Mike Johnson said the leak actually revealed not how irresponsibly some officials behaved, but how competently. “What you did see, though, I think, was top-level officials doing their job, doing it well and executing on a plan with precision,” Johnson said.

And so, the Roy Cohn-ification of government goes, starting at the very top with Trump, the late lawyer’s protege. One of the dangers of this strategy is that by pretending a mistake didn’t happen, you risk repeating it. If a blatant disregard for secure communications crops again in coming months, well, I didn’t tell you so.

But the even more serious danger is that the attacks and denials reverberate, and we end up with the Roy Cohn-ification of America. Which would be terrible for truth. And terrible, specifically, for Jews.

In the case of the Signal scandal, many of the online attacks against Goldberg following his story’s release focused on his Jewishness and his connection to Israel, where he once served as a soldier in the IDF.

“He is a well known zionist and it can’t be by coincidence to be part of the US national security leaders meeting,” tweeted one user. “It’s just another proof that zionism controls us policy.”

“Why are you so eager to defend neocon Jewish war pig, Jeffrey Goldberg?” tweeted another.

Really, there are too many antisemitic posts to choose from, and that’s from a quick search of just one platform, X. The attacks came from users with MAGA initials and American flags in their profiles, as well as from users with watermelon emojis and Palestinian flags. The attacks brought together left-wing anti-Zionists, Islamists and right-wing bigots, as only Jew-hatred can.

Some attacks even came from Jewish Trump supporters, who suggested that Goldberg’s actions were irresponsible, even traitorous. But that’s the point, isn’t it? All the cacophony draws attention away from the original failure and its authors, and turns politics and governance into a blood sport.

And if you feed the antisemitic beast as a result? “You have to be willing to do anything to anyone to win,” said Cohn in The Apprentice.

What’s lost in all the noise is that Goldberg himself did something hard and valuable. He found himself privy to a highly privileged conversation, and in reporting it, he carefully omitted items that would endanger individuals or intelligence gathering methods. (That is, until the wave of denials that any sensitive or classified material was included in the chat prompted him to publish the almost fully unredacted texts on Wednesday.) He didn’t offer his own spin — the writing was urgent but straightforward. And he did all this knowing the forces that would be unleashed against him.

“It’s not my role to care about the possibility of threats or retaliation,” he told his colleague, David A. Graham, of the scoop. “We just have to come to work and do our jobs to the best of our ability. Unfortunately, in our society today — we see this across corporate journalism and law firms and other industries — there’s too much preemptive obeying for my taste.”

That attitude doesn’t make him a traitor, it makes him a journalist.

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