This month’s cover story is written by two of our newest reporters, Ashley Parker and Michael Scherer. Both came to The Atlantic from The Washington Post, where they covered the White House and national politics. As one might expect, they have developed complicated and intriguing ideas about the brain of Donald Trump and the nature of Trumpism.
A simple question animates their story: How did Trump rise from political ruin in 2021 to seize the commanding heights of government and the world economy? One is not required to admire Trump to acknowledge that he has become the most consequential American political figure of the 21st century, and that we all live inside a reality he has made—and makes anew each day. As you will read, Trump himself has a capacious understanding of his power. “The first time, I had two things to do—run the country and survive; I had all these crooked guys,” he told Michael and Ashley. He was referring, it seems, to anyone who’d investigated him. “And the second time,” he added, “I run the country and the world.”
[From the June 2025 issue: Ashley Parker and Michael Scherer on Donald Trump’s plan to change America forever]
Covering Trump is a challenge for White House reporters. It is true that he never stops talking, and so he provides the press with limitless fodder. But it is also true that he tries to intimidate reporters—and, crucially, the people who own news organizations—in ways that are clearly dangerous to democracy. I reported on the presidencies of George W. Bush and Barack Obama, and though some stories displeased them and periodically made them angry, they responded with the self-restraint one traditionally associates with the presidency. Trump, by contrast, makes his feelings known in visceral and cutting ways, with the intent to humiliate and intimidate.
Except when he doesn’t. I recently joined Michael and Ashley in the Oval Office for a meeting with the president. The odd circumstances of this interview are described in their cover story (also described: the new decor of the Oval Office). What I found in this particular meeting was a Trump who was low-key, attentive, and eager to convince us that he is good at his job and good for the country. It isn’t easy to escape the tractor beam of his charisma, but somehow we managed, and we asked him what needed to be asked. But squaring Trump the Charmer with the Orcish Trump we more frequently see is difficult. Ashley and Michael describe, in sometimes amusing detail, their encounters with Trump, and I will spoil nothing more here. But at one point in the reporting process, Trump posted on the social-media platform he owns that Ashley is a “Radical Left Lunatic” (she is not) and that Michael “has never written a fair story about me, only negative, and virtually always LIES” (also false).
It is our task at The Atlantic not to be bullied by these sorts of attacks. No one here is scared of Trump—and, in any case, we have a job to do. The president first called The Atlantic a “failing magazine” nearly five years ago, after I reported that he had slandered veterans and fallen soldiers as “suckers” and “losers.” (I will note for posterity that The Atlantic was not profitable then, but is now, and has doubled its number of subscribers in the intervening years.)
Recently, Trump made this same sort of attack after I was inadvertently included in a Signal group chat with senior administration officials. The chat, which focused on upcoming military strikes against terrorists in Yemen, included the vice president, the CIA director, and much of the president’s Cabinet. The outlandish details of this episode—labeled, inevitably, Signalgate—are well known. What interests me about Signalgate as much as its inherent absurdity is the administration’s response to the controversy.
[Read: The Trump administration accidentally texted me its war plans]
In our cover story (reported as the Signal controversy was unfolding), Ashley and Michael describe in absorbing detail Trump’s belief, acquired in his four-year Joe Biden–induced exile, that no stove is too hot to touch, and also his conviction, refined after much experimentation, that normative reality does not exist.
This second notion governs Trump’s answer to anyone who challenges him. A different sort of president would have responded to the revelations of Signalgate, in which his national-security team did just about the stupidest thing imaginable, by fixing the problem directly and quickly. First, acknowledge the mistake. Then, apologize, promise to investigate, and offer a plan to keep something like this from happening again. End of story.
Not so with Signalgate, or anything else. The administration responded immediately, resuscitating its “failing magazine” line of attack. Trump said of me, “I’ve known him for a long time, and he is truly a sleazeball”; Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth called me a “deceitful and highly discredited so-called journalist,” and Michael Waltz, the national security adviser (who was the one who mistakenly included me in the chat), said that I was “the bottom scum of journalists” and a “loser.” (The episode called to mind an earlier moment, when Trump described me as a “horrible, radical-left lunatic,” and one of my children noted, with some amusement, “You’re not left-wing.”) Waltz, whom I previously knew to be a smart person, also alleged that I had “sucked” my number into his phone. The name-calling matters less than the fact that Trump and his coterie argued, against all available evidence, that they had revealed no secrets and done nothing wrong.
Denial and attack have worked exceedingly well for Trump. As Michael and Ashley note in their story, Trump’s decision to foment the January 6 insurrection would normally have ended his political career, but it didn’t. Trump called the insurrection a “day of love,” and his decision, at the outset of his second term, to pardon or commute the sentences of the insurrectionists—transforming even those who assaulted police officers into victims of malignant prosecutors—only made him more powerful.
But there are limits. The limits come when people choose steadfastness over cowardice. Too many Republican senators live in fear of Trump. There are media companies that have paid obeisance to his administration (Jeff Bezos’s Post among them), and law firms and corporations and even universities. These institutions are making strange and bad choices. After we published our first story on the Signal controversy, the Trump administration accused us of lying; it said we were trafficking in falsehoods, that there was nothing sensitive or secret about the material its members had transmitted.
The administration’s knee-jerk response forced us to release the Signal chat, which showed conclusively that Waltz, Hegseth, and others were doing all sorts of things that serious national-security professionals would never do.
The point of journalism is to hold the powerful to account. By encouraging our journalists to go where the truth takes them (and by hiring stellar reporters such as Ashley and Michael), I believe that we are fulfilling The Atlantic’s mission.
Our colleague Caitlin Flanagan often says that the truth bats last. I believe she is right.
This article appears in the June 2025 print edition with the headline “Signalgate, Trump, and The Atlantic.”