This week has been dominated by the news that a prominent journalist was accidentally included on a group chat of senior Trump administration officials discussing a future attack on the Houthis in Yemen.

And that journalist, Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg, has found himself facing blistering attacks from Trump’s orbit, including from the president himself, over his past reporting and accusations he’s a partisan actor in a strange media story that’s nevertheless unfolded on familiar lines.

Goldberg set off a firestorm on Monday when he first published a story about being inadvertently included on a Signal chat by National Security Advisor Michael Waltz about plans to attack the Houthis. The chat included Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, CIA Director John Ratcliffe and several other high-ranking figures.

Publishing his story and accusing the Trump administration of an embarrassing security breach did not win him friends in high places. Goldberg has been a high-profile media figure for decades, and he was a go-to interviewer for President Barack Obama during his administration to discuss foreign policy.

TRUMP ADMIN DECLARES THE ATLANTIC’S SIGNAL ARTICLE A ‘HOAX’ AFTER IT DROPS ‘WAR PLANS’ RHETORIC

Trump press secretary Karoline Leavitt said this week there was “arguably no one in the media who loves manufacturing and pushing hoaxes more than Jeffrey Goldberg,” called him an “anti-Trump hater,” and accused him of pushing a fake story about President Donald Trump disparaging military members as “losers and suckers,” among other rejoinders. 

Trump has hotly contested The Atlantic’s claim that he disparaged deceased veterans in that fashion in a story released in the heat of the 2020 election.

“I happen to know the guy is a total sleazebag,” Trump said this week of Goldberg. “The Atlantic is a failed magazine, does very, very poorly. Nobody gives a damn about it.”

In another interview this week, Trump said, “He’s a sleazebag at the highest level. His magazine is failing. It’s going to be out of business soon, in my opinion.”

Under Goldberg’s leadership, The Atlantic endorsed Hillary Clinton for president in 2016, Joe Biden in 2020, and Kamala Harris in 2024, only the third, fourth, and fifth presidential endorsements in the magazine’s history. The magazine has printed heterodox views on a number of topics over the years, but its official position toward Trump is hostile, calling him “one of the most personally malignant and politically dangerous” candidates in history.

VETERAN DEM SENATOR DEMANDS HEGSETH RESIGN OVER SIGNAL CHAT LEAK

Top Trump officials involved in the story have also gone after Goldberg.

Waltz called Goldberg a “loser” at one point while discussing the leak, for which he said he’s taken full responsibility.

Hegseth said Goldberg was “a deceitful and highly discredited so-called journalist who’s made a profession of peddling hoaxes time and time again” who also “peddles in garbage.” He also said no war plans or classified information was disseminated on the chat.

Goldberg, after initially withholding some of what he characterized as overly sensitive material shared in the thread, published the rest of what he called the Trump team’s “attack plans” for Yemen on Wednesday. Vice President JD Vance said Goldberg “oversold” his material.

“There is a clear public interest in disclosing the sort of information that Trump advisers included in nonsecure communications channels, especially because senior administration figures are attempting to downplay the significance of the messages that were shared,” wrote Goldberg and reporter Shane Harris.

The Trump team’s harsh words for Goldberg is certainly no surprise given the mutual antagonism between the administration and much of the media, but whether the familiar playbook has been effective in neutralizing the story is another matter.

ATLANTIC REPORTER PUBLISHES MORE TEXTS ABOUT ATTACK ON HOUTHI TARGETS

“It’s outrageous that anyone would attack him,” one former Atlantic employee told Fox News Digital. “I think to the public, to leading Dems and Republicans, the evasions, the ‘lies’ about what this group was [doing] and what was being sent are obvious – and the impulse to kick Goldberg just looks nasty, and unbecoming of leaders. It seems petty and small.”

Another media writer said Trump has proven attacking the media is an effective strategy, although they added that Trump’s treatment of journalists “goes far beyond typical hostility towards the press.”

“The overzealous response from many in the media to his presidency ended up fueling the public’s worst suspicions about the media and its biases,” they told Fox News Digital. “For those reasons, I don’t think this is a losing strategy from the White House. The combination of Trump’s attacks on the press and the decentralization of information means that Americans no longer share a common reality.” 

“All Americans should want a media that isn’t scared to challenge the U.S. government. We’re in dangerous territory when a free press feels pressure to avoid treating the most powerful political body in the world with scrutiny,” they added.

The White House has said The Atlantic backpedaled off its initial claim that the Trump team had shared “war plans,” and officials have consistently touted that regardless of the chat fiasco, the operation against the Houthi terrorists was a huge success. 

That hasn’t stopped Democrats and Trump administration critics from calling for Waltz and Hegseth to resign and investigations into what they call an illegal security breach that could have endangered American service members.

The Atlantic released a sharp statement on Wednesday in response to the war of words from Trump.

“Attempts to disparage and discredit The Atlantic, our editor, and our reporting follows an obvious playbook by elected officials and others in power who are hostile to journalists and the First Amendment rights of all Americans,” a spokesperson said.

Reached for additional comment, a spokesperson told Fox News Digital, “The Trump administration is trying to move attention away from what its officials did by focusing on semantics and attacks on The Atlantic. We reported what happened. We have now published the Signal messages for everyone to read. This national-security breach is what the Trump administration needs to answer for.”