President Donald Trump announced on Thursday that he would be meeting with The Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg later in the day. This comes after Goldberg, who has published many stories against Trump and his administration, revealed that he had been mistakenly added to a Signal chat in which officials were discussing strikes on Houthi targets in Yemen.
"Later today I will be meeting with, of all people, Jeffrey Goldberg, the Editor of The Atlantic, and the person responsible for many fictional stories about me, including the made-up HOAX on 'Suckers and Losers' and, SignalGate, something he was somewhat more 'successful' with," Trump wrote.
"Jeffrey is bringing with him Michael Scherer and Ashley Parker, not exactly pro-Trump writers, either, to put it mildly! The story they are writing, they have told my representatives, will be entitled, 'The Most Consequential President of this Century.' I am doing this interview out of curiosity, and as a competition with myself, just to see if it’s possible for The Atlantic to be 'truthful.' Are they capable of writing a fair story on 'TRUMP'? The way I look at it, what can be so bad – I WON!"
The Trump White House has criticized Goldberg for his report on the Signal chat, with press secretary Karoline Leavitt telling reporters, "If this story proves anything, it proves that Democrats and their propagandists in the mainstream media know how to fabricate, orchestrate and disseminate a misinformation campaign quite well, and there's arguably no one in the media who loves manufacturing and pushing hoaxes more than Jeffrey Goldberg. Goldberg is an anti-Trump hater. He is a registered Democrat. Goldberg's wife is also a registered Democrat and a big Democrat donor who used to work under Hillary Clinton. This is the same Jeffrey Goldberg who infamously lied about weapons of mass destruction to get us into the Iraq War, which cost trillions of dollars and thousands of American soldiers."
Shortly after the report was published, Trump was asked about it, saying that he did not know about it, but "I'm not a big fan of The Atlantic, to me it's a magazine that's going out of business. I think it's not much of a magazine.