Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth attends the White House Easter Egg Roll in April.Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call/Zuma

In March, The Atlantic’s editor-in-chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, glanced at his phone and couldn’t believe what he was seeing. He’d been inadvertently included in a secret chat on Signal among the Trump administration’s national security team about imminent military strikes in Yemen. The Signal chat leaks—which inevitably became known as “Signalgate”—called into question President Donald Trump’s national security team and how it handled top secret information.

Many of those same officials oversaw recent military operations against Iran and its nuclear facilities. Few journalists have seen how the administration operates from the inside out better than Goldberg. He says those Signal chats revealed something about how he believes Trump’s officials view their jobs, especially Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth.

“I almost felt like, at a very basic level, he was showing off for the vice president, who was also in the chat,” Goldberg says. “The thought I had was, ‘Dude, you don’t have to cosplay being secretary of defense. You are secretary of defense.’” He adds that while it was happening, he didn’t “contemplate just how amazingly stupid the whole thing was.”

On this week’s More To The Story, Goldberg sits down with host Al Letson to reflect on the Signal chat leaks, fears of World War III, and what truly worries him about the future of US democracy.

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This following interview was edited for length and clarity. More To The Story transcripts are produced by a third-party transcription service and may contain errors.

Al Letson: So after the US bombed Iran, I’ve seen all over the place that people feel like this could be the beginning of World War III. What are your thoughts?

Jeffrey Goldberg: Yeah, I see that and I read it. I just, no one’s explained to me how this leads to World War III yet. That is not to say that things can’t spin out of control in the Middle East. The Middle East, the only constant in the Middle East is sudden and dramatic change, so something can go off the rails even as we’re speaking.

There’s a larger point, and sorry to give you this lengthy answer, but I actually think that we’re in World War III and we’ve been in World War III since the Russian invasion of Ukraine or the full-scale invasion of Ukraine three years ago. And by that I mean, when you have a situation in which Russia, aided by North Korean troops and Iranian drones and supported diplomatically by China, is invading a neighboring country that is supported by Western Europe and until today at least, the United States, that seems like a low-grade world war. Right? It’s controlled, it’s conventional, it’s mostly done through proxies, at least from the western side it’s done through proxies. But we’re having all of these eruptions all the time now, and the world is not at peace because the major powers are battling it out through proxies and in other ways.

I think what has been a little bit surprising for me with this new front or change in the Middle East when it comes to Iran and Israel, is seeing that some people on the right are really against American intervention with Iran. And I’m thinking specifically about Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene. I saw her saying that she thought that this was going to become a nuclear war. And then you’ve got Tucker Carlson who really grilled Ted Cruz and brought his thoughts to the forefront. I don’t know, I just did not expect to see that happen.

I’m going to go deep here for a second and I’m going to argue against the idea that Americans don’t like wars. I think Americans are fine with wars as long as they’re short wars that we win.

Agree.

So I think, look, one of the differences and I just wrote a piece about this. I covered Barack Obama and as foreign policy, national security policy in depth so I know something about that and I know something about Donald Trump. Barack Obama was interesting because he would study the second and third and fourth order consequences of actions America could take, and that would frequently paralyze him into not taking any action. Remember, the Syrian red line controversy is a good example. Donald Trump, I don’t think understands intellectually the idea that there’s consequences to actions, right? And so they’re wildly different. And so when you have somebody like that, like Donald Trump, who doesn’t really ask analytically, what could happen down the road if I do X or Y or Z? You’re really rolling the dice.

I think maybe more than any journalist, you have seen up close the incompetence of the Trump Administration. And obviously-

Oh, I wouldn’t go that far.

I don’t know. I mean, you were added to a top secret group chat about a bombing. I think I would stand by my statement just because of that.

Okay, maybe yes, in the sense that it was coming in on my phone. Yes, it was very close.

Yes, I would say that-

I was getting a firsthand glimpse. I’m not going to argue the point.

How much confidence do you have in this team? And I’m talking about Secretary of Defense Hegseth, I’m talking about Trump, I’m talking about all the people that are around these decisions. How confident are you in their ability to execute a plan and to protect American lives?

I have confidence in, let me put it this way, the General in charge of Central Command, General Kurilla, who oversaw this operation, highly competent. There’s a lot of competent people still in government. I have no confidence in Pete Hegseth’s management or analytic or moral capabilities. Marco Rubio is a mystery to me because I knew Marco Rubio a bit and I was........

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