Liberal Trumpism

Now that Jeffrey Goldberg has received a lot of attention for sparking “Signalgate,” it’s a good time to reflect on his role in the broader continuum of liberal-conservative politics, which have devolved into Trumpism and its European parallels.

From The Atlantic‘s influential perch, Goldberg has spent considerable editorial resources over the years sanewashing the drip-drip of nativist revisionism, military interventionism, and contributing to the general suspicion of certain sets of immigrant and minority groups.

This is on display up to and including his release of the Trump Administration’s Signal chat about bombing Yemen in March. His telling of it fits someone who helped make the case for the US invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Goldberg expresses no qualms in his article that Trump Administration officials emoji-fist-bumped the news of a blatant war crime they committed. If anything, he justifies it by making clear early on in the piece that the Houthis are an “Iran-backed terrorist organisation whose motto is ‘God is great, death to America, death to Israel, curse on the Jews, victory to Islam.’”

However accurate a description that may be, it hardly seems like relevant information in a story that Goldberg otherwise makes into a very inside-the-Beltway account of Trump officials’ cavalier handling of US national security. The subtext is subtle, but clear: They deserved it. For Goldberg, this kind of ethnonational shoehorning is a feature, not a bug.

The crown jewel of his brand of journalism is an 11,000-word Atlantic cover story from 2015, with an incendiary question-as-headline that both inverts an Antisemitic trope — do Jews need to leave Europe? — and undermines Goldberg’s and The Atlantic‘s own stated belief in liberal democracy. Because if the latter is working as intended, the former becomes unnecessary.

Goldberg answers the yes/no binary that the headline forces on its readers with cherry-picked anecdotes from a self-selecting group of official Jewish or establishment Israeli voices and a sprinkling of statistics, ignoring the fact that the wave of attacks that swept France at the time killed all kinds of people, including Muslims and Arabs.

Yet Muslims and Arabs are the villains in Goldberg’s telling, who enjoy almost no representation in his reporting, as they are repeatedly talked about rather than talked to. When they do get a word in, they are presented as nameless others quoted anonymously with little context.

At one point, in an exchange with police outside the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam, Goldberg goes as far as to implicitly suggest Europe’s Muslim communities are its new Nazis.

Meanwhile, the political leaders who are the legitimate inheritors of Europe’s Nazi and Antisemitic legacies become the Jews’ Christian saviours. Goldberg laments Europe’s “failure of integration” as a primary cause of Jewish insecurity, with a near-total lack of introspection that would have held those same, supposedly well-meaning leaders to account for that failure.

Far from what the story’s subhead suggests, Europe’s homegrown fascist spinoffs get almost no attention; to the contrary, Marine Le Pen comes off as just another leader with uncomfortable ideas. Unlike the racialised baddies, Goldberg takes the time to interview, contextualise, and afford plenty of quote space to her.

With Le Pen’s normalisation complete, he goes on to do the same to Israel’s repression of Palestinian self-determination, which was bad then and unspeakable now. Israeli policies are fine to criticise, of course, in the same way you might one side or another of a banal debate over pension reform. But if you dare address them for what they actually are — not just democratic politics-as-usual, but systematic criminal and illiberal efforts that align better with Hungarian or Russian revisionism than what “European values” supposedly stand for — you aren’t just anti-Zionist. You are an Antisemite.

That claim is itself Antisemitic, by conflating Israeli state imperatives and the well-being of the Jewish diaspora, suggesting dual loyalties in a way anti-Catholics did in the 1960s, who feared President John F. Kennedy would let the Vatican control the US. Benjamin Netanyahu, who in 2015 was and in 2025 still is prime minister, has made a career out of this conflation, happy to help diaspora Jews feel unsafe in the interest of compelling them to come “home”.

Because Goldberg isn’t stupid, it can only be intentional that he omits how pushing this conflation gives many Arabs or Muslims reason to conflate the two, as well. Thus, the trap is set: Israel and its Western Christian allies are free to merge Jewish livelihood and Israeli Staatsräson, but if those who harbour understandable grievances towards the latter express that in violence against the former, it’s simply unhinged Jew-hate.

Even Goldberg’s Atlantic colleague, Anne Applebaum, who struggles to understand how her liberal brand of anticommunism dovetails with Viktor Orbán’s national-conservative kind, can see that Israel benefits Europe’s far right.

Like so many others of its kind before and since, Goldberg’s feature isn’t really concerned with Jewish safety, but about using Christian guilt as a means to reach supremacist or authoritarian ends, for which both Jews and Arabs/Muslims pay the price: the former as eternal victims and the latter as unredeemable perpetrators. Neither is fully human.

Years of this kind of chauvinist and jingoistic framing, rampant in The Atlantic and similar media that the liberal mainstream hold in high regard, has helped deliver us our Trumpian moment.

When the danger seems existential, any defence becomes justifiable; when the threat is called evil, as if otherworldly, it can only be purged; and only when you buy into this framing can student campus protests be scarier than a security state empowered to snatch students off the street for their campus protests.

In certain circles of polite company, it remains preferable to double down on the disconnect between the two rather than reckon with how vilifying and discrediting one sets the stage for the other. Genocidal delusions of the Gaza Riviera and the criminalisation of constitutionally protected activism did not begin with Trump — nor do they end with him.

As European democracies recoil at what their transatlantic ally is doing, they are engaged in much the same behaviour.

Deportation and threats of denaturalisation, including of EU citizens; the picking-and-choosing of international law; and repression of fundamental rights and academic freedom — which, as Columbia’s James Schamus has pointed out, is also anti-Jewish — are now as acceptable in dominant strands of liberal policymaking as they are in illiberal ones. Only the forthrightness differs.

Goldberg’s reporting, which stands out in a crowded field of moral panic and ethnonational dog-whistling, is not only poor journalism but one of the calamitous bridges connecting the two. Ironically, if not inevitably, it has also helped fulfil his thesis: Certain Jews, in Europe and the US, aren’t safe — just not for reasons he imagines.

As such, Jeffrey Goldberg didn’t just find himself in a Signal chat group of under-qualified reactionaries posing as revolutionaries as they openly celebrated the war crime of intentionally targeting a civilian building. By helping make this sort of politics acceptable in the first place, he helped precipitate it. We are all worse off as a result.