Bonus: Goldberg on Signalgate

Speaker 3 Hey, it's Hanna, host of Radio Atlantic, here to tell you about the 17th annual Atlantic Festival happening in New York City this September.

Speaker 2 We have an incredible roster of guests, including David Letterman, Scott Galloway, Dr.

Speaker 5 Becky Kennedy, H.R.

Speaker 8 McMaster, and many more.

Speaker 3 I'll be hosting a live recording of Radio Atlantic, and we'll also have book talks and screenings, including a first look at season three of The Diplomat and a conversation with stars Carrie Russell and Allison Janney and creator Deborah Kahn.

Speaker 10 Guys, you can ask them about that season two cliffhanger.

Speaker 4 Learn more at theatlanticfestival.com.

Speaker 12 Hi, it's Anne.

Speaker 12 You've probably read about the Atlantic's editor-in-chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, who was accidentally added to a government group chat in Signal.

Speaker 12 I had the opportunity to interview Jeff at the New Orleans Book Festival the week the story broke.

Speaker 12 We wound up talking about autocracy, democracy, freedom, resistance, as well as the absurd situation of the Signal chat.

Speaker 12 And so we thought fans of the Autocracy in America podcast might appreciate hearing our conversation too.

Speaker 12 So, here you go. Thanks for listening.

Speaker 11 Oh, that's embarrassing.

Speaker 12 So this is the second standing ovation I've witnessed this week for Jeffrey Goldberg. So one more time.

Speaker 12 So thank you all so much for coming. It's a real pleasure to be in this enormous packed room full of

Speaker 12 full of people who read books.

Speaker 12 So 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.

Speaker 12 I'm in the unusual position of interviewing my editor, so you'll

Speaker 12 forgive me if I make mistakes.

Speaker 12 It's a first time. There's been some news over the last week

Speaker 12 and I thought we might focus on that. I wanted to start with my own experience.
So I was at the Atlantic offices on Tuesday. So if you remember, I won't recount to you the content of Jeff's

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 12 So the story was published. As you know, Jeff was put on

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 12 And I walked in on Tuesday morning, and there was a decision to be made about what to do next.

Speaker 12 And Jeff had printed out the copies of the screenshots from the chat and was looking at them. And what were you thinking?

Speaker 11 Let's just go off the record for a minute.

Speaker 11 Just between us.

Speaker 11 Well, I was thinking, A,

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 11 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,

Speaker 11 I mean, there were so many different lines of attack at once.

Speaker 11 It's a hoax.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 12 Actually, the word scumbag.

Speaker 11 Yeah, that was one of their main arguments.

Speaker 11 Or sleazebag.

Speaker 11 Sleazebag?

Speaker 11 I want to be accurate.

Speaker 11 Sleazebag.

Speaker 11 And, you know,

Speaker 11 calling me names, obviously, calling The Atlantic. I mean, Donald Trump has been running that play, The Atlantic is a failing magazine.

Speaker 11 He's been saying The Atlantic is a failing magazine for about eight years now.

Speaker 11 We were half the size when he started.

Speaker 11 So

Speaker 11 sometimes I joke that he's like our circulation director in a kind of way.

Speaker 11 It's not,

Speaker 11 that's been a weird help.

Speaker 11 so 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 it's a serious thing like don't like you you guys made a mistake.

Speaker 11 It's a serious mistake. It's a serious breach in national security.

Speaker 11 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 play, the playbook.

Speaker 11 And so what we did was we started

Speaker 11 reaching out to all of the agencies. This is once Donald Trump said there was nothing serious in the material.

Speaker 11 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?

Speaker 11 Because the last thing that we want to do is put American service people in harm's way. Like, that's just my, I mean, other people in journalism have a debate about this kind of thing.

Speaker 11 No, no, it's a serious debate. I'm just not going to,

Speaker 11 I'm not gonna do that. Like, that's not gonna happen.

Speaker 11 And so, what happened?

Speaker 11 We got some feedback, some people ignored us. We finally got a sort of anodyne statement from the White House.

Speaker 11 Like, it's not secret, but don't publish it anyway, was the request, which didn't really hold a lot of water.

Speaker 11 The CIA actually did ask us to withhold a specific piece of information, which we did.

Speaker 11 They explained why, and it seemed like a good explanation.

Speaker 11 And so,

Speaker 11 you know,

Speaker 11 we just,

Speaker 11 they essentially goaded us into publishing the full

Speaker 11 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

Speaker 11 yesterday, I guess? It was just yesterday.

Speaker 11 Feels like a lot longer. Yeah.
It feels like a little bit longer, but it was yesterday. And,

Speaker 11 you know, it's funny because you get to, when you're in journalism, you get to, to,

Speaker 11 we love talking in kind of high-falutin, idealistic terms about what we do. And, you know,

Speaker 11 and this is an opportunity to actually say to ourselves

Speaker 11 what is in the best interest of our readers, of the people of the United States. They should see the whole truth.

Speaker 11 And then they should make up their own minds about whether this is a serious breach of national security or not.

Speaker 11 Our goal is to, like all good journalists or people who are trying to be good journalists, to hold powerful people to account.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 12 But let me return to the attack on you,

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 12 That attacking the messenger, attacking the journalist, attacking the institution of journalism, attacking the Atlantic,

Speaker 12 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, right?

Speaker 12 I mean, they want to say, nothing, don't believe anybody except me.

Speaker 12 You know, ignore Jeff Goldberg. He's a scumbag and a loser and a sleazebag.

Speaker 12 Only listen to R

Speaker 12 into what we are saying.

Speaker 12 Do you think that by publishing the texts, you injected that little dose of reality into the conversation?

Speaker 11 I hope so. I mean, you know, it's...

Speaker 11 Look,

Speaker 11 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,

Speaker 11 on the history of the Gulag,

Speaker 11 and has been writing about totalitarianism and authoritarianism ever since. So

Speaker 11 not telling you certainly anything you don't know.

Speaker 11 The goal of people who are authoritarian-minded is to force compliance.

Speaker 11 They can only do

Speaker 11 what they want to do if no one fights them, if no one argues with them, if no one counters it.

Speaker 11 And so if

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 11 I mean, you know, I've been saying this for a long time. I mean,

Speaker 11 saying this before Donald Trump was re-elected. If there are eight or nine, I think nine or ten additional Republican senators

Speaker 11 who would have voted for impeachment after the January 6th rebellion or whatever you want to call it, uprising,

Speaker 11 Donald Trump would not have been allowed to run for president.

Speaker 11 But they enforced compliance, and they do that in the Republican Senate caucus, and they enforce compliance through intimidation, through threat, through fear.

Speaker 12 So Mike Waltz calls you a loser on TV.

Speaker 12 Implies that

Speaker 12 you've somehow mysteriously made your phone number appear on his telephone.

Speaker 12 It was sucked in.

Speaker 11 Using my brain waves.

Speaker 11 That's right.

Speaker 12 You know, so how does that work in your brain? So you're accused of these very bad things, and

Speaker 12 you're meant to be intimidated, and you're meant to say, you're right, Your Honor, we won't publish anything.

Speaker 11 Yeah.

Speaker 11 Well, I mean, he could,

Speaker 11 Mike Waltz can call me a loser if he wants, but at least I know how to text.

Speaker 11 And

Speaker 12 did you break into his phone?

Speaker 11 You know, can I just tell you something? Did I break into his phone? So one of my kids in

Speaker 11 our family chat

Speaker 12 Where you only use initials, right?

Speaker 11 Yeah, yeah, our family chat, which is now, you know, entirely encrypted in code.

Speaker 11 I mean, our family, most of our family chat consists of, does anyone have the Hulu password? You know, I mean, that's that's basically the family chat, right? Um

Speaker 11 in our in our family chat, uh one of my kids uh the day before last said, The m the most amazing thing about this story is that daddy has learned how to take a screenshot.

Speaker 11 Um

Speaker 11 so

Speaker 11 so

Speaker 11 you know, I I

Speaker 11 I don't really have those skills to,

Speaker 11 I mean, I think, you know, you know, this goes back to, you know, what you're saying. You throw a bunch of stuff against the wall and you hope it sticks.

Speaker 11 So instead of, this is what I don't understand. And anybody who's in a leadership position in any organization knows this.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 11 If you have to fall on your sword, you fall on your sword. If you get a second chance, great, you learn from it.

Speaker 11 You just deal with it.

Speaker 11 He did

Speaker 11 invite me into the Signal chat.

Speaker 11 And you could just say,

Speaker 11 wow, that was a doozy.

Speaker 11 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 or we're going to, you know.

Speaker 11 You could just, you could, no, I mean, I'm being entirely serious. Like,

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 11 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?

Speaker 11 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?

Speaker 11 But

Speaker 11 the Waltz-Hegseth tactic in this case was to say crazy things and push back in a way that that you know and and what I would say is it's like it's literally it's literally one of those situations where before you start

Speaker 11 calling

Speaker 11 a person an editor a magazine names you should really make sure that that that person doesn't have the receipts because if you have the receipts

Speaker 11 you're you're forcing us, in all seriousness, you're forcing us to say, actually, we're not lying. Here's the truth.

Speaker 3 Hey, it's Hannah, host of Radio Atlantic, here to tell you about the 17th annual Atlantic Festival happening in New York City this September.

Speaker 2 We have an incredible roster of guests, including David Letterman, Scott Galloway, Dr.

Speaker 5 Becky Kennedy, H.R.

Speaker 7 McMaster, and many more.

Speaker 3 I'll be hosting a live recording of Radio Atlantic, and we'll also have book talks and screenings, including a first look at season three of The Diplomat and a conversation with stars Kerry Russell and Allison Janney and creator Deborah Kahn.

Speaker 10 Guys, you can ask them about that season two cliffhanger.

Speaker 4 Learn more at theatlanticfestival.com.

Speaker 12 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,

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 12 And so the question is: what's different about these guys? What is it that they're doing that's

Speaker 11 what is different? We only have 13 minutes. 13 minutes and 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.

Speaker 11 What's different

Speaker 11 is that

Speaker 11 the leader,

Speaker 11 the leader, in this case,

Speaker 11 was taught from an early age, or learned, either from his father or Roy Cohn, his first lawyer of note,

Speaker 11 a valuable lesson. You don't apologize, you don't explain, you double down.
And by the way, it generally speaking works.

Speaker 11 This is what I'm going to ask. Well, this is the thing, and we've talked about this.
We're both,

Speaker 11 I think it's fair to say, admirers of John McCain, the late John McCain.

Speaker 11 And in 2015, I guess it was 15,

Speaker 11 the summer of 15, Donald Trump is being interviewed about John McCain, who he doesn't like.

Speaker 11 And he says, I don't like people, he was talking about POWs, I don't like people who are captured, I don't like people who are shot down.

Speaker 11 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?

Speaker 11 I mean, for any American

Speaker 11 any American politician to say that about John McCain or any POW or any honored veteran is absurd, right?

Speaker 11 Especially

Speaker 11 and he's

Speaker 11 trying to get the nomination of a party that is associated with patriotism and support for the troops, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

Speaker 11 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

Speaker 11 I'm not understanding something crucial about

Speaker 11 politics in America or about this party or about what he's doing. He's discovered some kind of trick, right?

Speaker 11 Trick is not even,

Speaker 11 trick doesn't treat it seriously, right? He's discovered

Speaker 11 a pathway to success that no other American politician that we can think of has ever discovered, which is you literally, you take

Speaker 11 the criticism and you turn it into,

Speaker 11 you refashion it into a weapon. Remember when people said to you, people said,

Speaker 11 America first, oh, Donald Trump, you can't say that. 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.

Speaker 11 And then everybody's like, okay. And then they moved on to the next kind of moment.

Speaker 11 And it's like, that is like a, that's kind of a political, I mean, it's a, maybe it's a dark art, but it's a genius dark art.

Speaker 12 I mean, there's something about it, to me, what he seems to have is

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 11 So he can say. Or maybe it is self-control.
maybe he knows.

Speaker 12 But

Speaker 12 something about it

Speaker 12 makes people admire it.

Speaker 12 You know, I'm not allowed, I have to be careful, I have to be polite to people, and he doesn't have to be.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 11 Why do

Speaker 11 it's a genuine question? Why do people,

Speaker 11 so many people, why are they drawn to the

Speaker 11 autocratic figure?

Speaker 11 Why is democracy not

Speaker 11 as popular as maybe you would think it would? Or the idea of democratic self-restraint, why is that not popular?

Speaker 12 I mean, so in almost every country on the planet where there is a harsh dictatorship, there are also people who want democracy. So,

Speaker 12 you know, I've been in all kinds of places in the world. As you know, I was recently in Sudan.

Speaker 12 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

Speaker 12 there is a way in which people who live in the harshest societies understand intuitively that it's not fair. It's not fair that

Speaker 12 the judges are controlled by the leader. It's not fair that people have no influence over politics.
It's not fair that

Speaker 12 people are treated unequally or that people don't have rights. So there is actually actually something intuitive about democracy as well as dictatorship.

Speaker 12 But what dictators usually do is they create, it goes back to what we were talking about a minute ago, they create an atmosphere of, it'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.

Speaker 12 They create a world in which it's very difficult for the what people don't have incentives to break out of it.

Speaker 12 And that's what's changed, it feels to me in Washington, is that there are now a lot of people

Speaker 12 who have incentives not to say things they know are true, or incentives to attack Jeff Goldberg for something that they know is true.

Speaker 11 Are you surprised by how easily it is to scare people?

Speaker 12 I've been surprised by some people, but not

Speaker 12 overall no. I mean, really, there is no,

Speaker 12 you know, there's no such thing as an exceptional society where these rules rules don't matter.

Speaker 12 I mean, I suppose the strange thing about the United States is that it's not like we're living in a world where

Speaker 12 if you lose your job as national security advisor, you go to the Gulag,

Speaker 12 what will happen? Well, maybe you'll... You'll go to Fox.
You'll go to Fox.

Speaker 12 Or, you know, you'll teach at the Kennedy School. I don't know.
You know, you'll be at a think tank.

Speaker 12 So the pressure that's being put on people is pressure to do with careers and status.

Speaker 12 There's no violence.

Speaker 11 Yeah, and by the way, I should say, Mike Waltz, who says he doesn't know me, is,

Speaker 11 I have found to be an interesting guy.

Speaker 11 You've probably encountered him as well, and he is in the camp.

Speaker 11 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 definitely teams within the Trump administration.

Speaker 11 J.D. Vance is definitely more of a kind of a soft isolationist,

Speaker 11 and Mike Waltz is uh more of you know in the old kind of

Speaker 11 like conservative intervent muscular interventionist kind of of model internationalist almost and you can see that he's a patriot he uses patriotic language and he uses patriotic language and I'm sure he's not comfortable with our

Speaker 11 what would you call it, pivot to Russia.

Speaker 11 I'm sure he's not comfortable with that, but it's, I mean,

Speaker 11 this is just

Speaker 11 as an aside.

Speaker 11 It's interesting how people like that, I mean,

Speaker 11 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

Speaker 11 political character, because when

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 11 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, I mean, I guess the question is,

Speaker 11 how does that happen?

Speaker 12 Well, usually

Speaker 12 there are different paths. I mean, people tell themselves various stories.
You know, if I'm on the inside, I'll be influential.

Speaker 11 Or

Speaker 12 if I don't do this job, then somebody else will.

Speaker 12 Or,

Speaker 12 my mother-in-law is ill and my wife is worried about our mortgage, and I can't afford to lose this job right now. I mean,

Speaker 12 there's a sort of range of excuses.

Speaker 11 And that's legitimate fears.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 12 And that's that.

Speaker 12 Well, I was thinking about Mike Waltz. I mean, you maybe.

Speaker 11 No, no, no.

Speaker 11 Well, let's leave that aside for the moment.

Speaker 11 Sorry. No, no, no.

Speaker 11 No, but by the way, by the way, this is one of the things about this general moment in America. You have to be,

Speaker 11 if you want to stand for reality, you have,

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 12 I mean, clearly, one of the answers or one of the things that I hope happens in the next

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 11 But the problem,

Speaker 12 you know,

Speaker 12 that's much harder to pick the point.

Speaker 11 It's a good point, but what we've seen from some reporting this week on the law firm issue,

Speaker 11 you know, you had Paul Weiss, the big law firm, being attacked by the Trump administration.

Speaker 11 And according to some of the reporting, at least, Paul, officials from Paul Weiss went to other big firms and said, hey, would you stand with us?

Speaker 11 And what was going on was that these other firms were trying to raid Paul Weiss for their best lawyers and their clients. I mean,

Speaker 11 it was not solidarity forever.

Speaker 12 And it's very short-sighted because then down the road, you know, they'll be next. Yeah.
And it's a, you know, I suppose they're not used to thinking along those lines.

Speaker 11 Well,

Speaker 11 that's kind of the ultimate question is what do people who and this is not a partisan question because there's

Speaker 11 plenty of Democrats and Republicans and everybody who are concerned about this. But we're not used to this.

Speaker 11 We're just not used to this. I mean, we're not, I mean, if we lived in Poland or Russia or across most of the world, actually, we've experienced,

Speaker 11 we would have experienced things like this. But

Speaker 11 what do people at institutions have to do to expand their their thinking or to not have a failure of imagination about what might be coming?

Speaker 12 I mean, you know,

Speaker 12 it helps to read the Atlantic. Oh, it does.

Speaker 11 It helps to know history.

Speaker 12 It helps to know some American history. I mean, you know, you can find incidents and reflections like this in our own history, including right here in Louisiana.

Speaker 12 There was a governor of Louisiana who some of you might know his name.

Speaker 11 Right. Pushed the limits.

Speaker 12 Who pushed the limits here, you know, Huey Long. And so

Speaker 12 there's a tradition of it, and you can study the tradition and learn what people did before. Right.

Speaker 11 I mean, the very fact that America First is rooted, 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

Speaker 11 before.

Speaker 12 That was The Atlantic's editor-in-chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, talking with me at the New Orleans Book Festival.

Speaker 12 You can get more from your favorite Atlantic voices when you subscribe to The Atlantic.

Speaker 12 A subscription gives you access to all of our award-winning award-winning journalism, and you can listen to as many articles as you want online or in the Atlantic app.

Speaker 12 Your subscription helps fuel all of our journalism in the magazine, on the internet, and on our podcasts. So subscribe today at theatlantic.com/slash podsub.

Speaker 12 And thank you.

Speaker 3 Hey, it's Hanna, host of Radio Atlantic, here to tell you about the 17th annual Atlantic Festival happening in New York City this September.

Speaker 2 We have an incredible roster of guests, including David Letterman, Scott Galloway, Dr.

Speaker 5 Becky Kennedy, H.R.

Speaker 7 McMaster, and many more.

Speaker 3 I'll be hosting a live recording of Radio Atlantic, and we'll also have book talks and screenings, including a first look at season three of The Diplomat and a conversation with stars Carrie Russell and Allison Janney and creator Deborah Kahn.

Speaker 10 Guys, you can ask them about that season two cliffhanger.

Speaker 4 Learn more at theatlanticfestival.com.