President Trump has helped program his followers to share his frequently voiced disdain for traditional media, parroting his habit of labeling them as “the enemy of the people” and his dismissals of inconvenient or unflattering reporting as “fake news.”
That “shoot the messenger” playbook works better, though, when the Trump administration hasn’t quite so transparently shot itself in the foot, as members of his national security team did by accidentally including The Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg on what was supposed to be a top-secret Signal group chat detailing planned military strikes in Yemen.
On Monday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth immediately defaulted to the familiar Trump strategy, seeking to smear Goldberg as a “deceitful and highly discredited so-called journalist who’s made a profession of peddling hoaxes time and time again.”