The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg on the Long-Term Consequences of Trump 2.0

Jeffrey Goldberg has been a thorn in President Donald Trump’s side since the real-estate developer–turned reality-show host first ran for office in 2016. Back then — ten months before he took over as editor-in-chief of The Atlantic — Goldberg wrote a piece headlined “A Brief Exercise Meant to Illuminate the Prejudices of Donald Trump.” The magazine has continued its unsparing criticism of Trump ever since, and Goldberg’s recent Signalgate story was just the latest in a series of blockbuster scoops that have nominally embarrassed the president. On Friday, Goldberg sat down with Kara for an on-stage interview at the WBUR Festival in Boston. They discussed Trump’s corruption, the unserious people staffing his administration (as well as with the very serious Russell Vought, a Project 2025 architect who heads the OMB), the Democratic Party’s travails, and the state of the news media. Questions? Comments? Email us at [email protected] or find us on Instagram, TikTok, and Bluesky @onwithkaraswisher. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:11Kara Swisher?

  Hi, everyone. From New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network, this is On with Kara Swisher, and I'm Kara Swisher. My guest today is Jeffrey Goldberg, editor in chief of The Atlantic, and I interviewed him live onstage at the WBUR Festival in Boston. Goldberg was the reporter behind Signal Gate, and despite Mike Walz's assurances that he didn't know him and couldn't pick him out of the lineup, it's not the first time Goldberg has published a story that embarrassed President Trump. In 2020, he broke the story that Trump had called "American troops who died in war suckers and losers," and The Atlantic has been warning about Trump's authoritarian tendencies since at least 2017. I think he's done a lot as editor in chief of The Atlantic in making it incredibly relevant

• 0:55Kara Swisher?

  in Washington today and holding people's feet to the fire and demanding accountability. It's really tough to do if you're a huge publication, it is not a huge publication, and it's really punching well above its weight. Our expert question comes from Chris Krabs, the former director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, who recently had his security clearance stripped by the Trump administration in what seems like a clear case of retribution. So, stick around.

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• 3:28Kara Swisher?

  Hi, everybody. Thank you and welcome.

• 3:33Kara Swisher?

  I'm very excited to be here with you. You have been in the news a little bit as a newsmaker. Yeah.

• 3:39Speaker 04

  Not a great place to be.

• 3:41Kara Swisher?

  Oh, you love it. Stop it. We're going to talk about the media business, the Democrats, and of course, President Trump. So let's start with him, someone you know a little bit. You famously got added to the wrong group chat.

• 3:53Speaker 04

  Maybe it was the right group.

• 3:54Kara Swisher?

  Indeed, it was the right group. Fair point. When you reported the story, Trump attacked you and said, there was no secret information in the text. The strategy failed because you published the text, which I knew you were going to do. But Mike Walz got demoted mostly because he was coordinating with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over plans to bomb Iran. Plus, he pissed Laura Lumer off. Nobody else got fired. What's your takeaway from Signal Gate in general?

• 4:21Speaker 04

  I mean, I think Waltz was already on thin ice. He and Susie Wiles weren't getting on very well. Waltz, from what I understand from inside, forgot that he was staff. National Security Advisor is staff, and you're not a principal, even though you have a big title. Sure. There are a lot of things going on there. I mean, the Signal thing didn't help, obviously, his career development. The, um, thank you for laughing at that. I thought that was, I actually thought that was slightly witty. Slightly. Just slightly. The, uh, so it's interesting, because after all of this happened, I had two reporters

• 5:03Speaker 04

  going in, trying to go in to see him for a cover story we ran on Trump, Ashley Parker and Michael Shear. And we got word from the White House, they said, "Bring Jeff with you." Right. So I got to go to talk to him about- To the Trump interview, yeah. Yeah, and he, right before the interview, we were set to meet him at 3:00, at 11:00, he posted on Truth Social, a big attack on me, which I thought was hysterical. That's the way you welcome somebody to the White House these days. But that's a technique, right? No, no, and I, and I said, when we walked into the Oval Office, he was like, and he was very friendly, I could explain the dynamic there if you want, but he was very friendly. And, uh, and I said, "Hey, thanks for that, thanks for that Truth Social post, really helped a lot." And he said, "Ah, I was just trying to up the pressure on you a little bit."

• 5:48Speaker 04

  And then he said, "Anyway, you'll sell five times more magazines this way." Right. And, you know, he's, he's correct, because he understands how things, how things work. But, you know, here, here's, here's what's so interesting about the actual problem of Signal, right? The issue is national security. Absolutely. The issue is operational security. It's like, what, who's listening, how, you know, making it as hard as possible, the Chinese, the Russians, Iranians, et cetera, to hear what you're talking about. It's serious stuff. I asked him, because in that Truth Social post, he said, "Goldberg was somewhat successful with Signal." I asked him, "What does that mean, somewhat successful?" And his answer was, because this is the, this is the track his mind goes down, his answer was, "You got a lot of attention." Right.

• 6:34Speaker 04

  And I said, well, was it successful because I inadvertently discovered a gap in our operational security that?

• 6:42Kara Swisher?

  No.

• 6:42Speaker 04

  And he's like, no, no, no, you got a lot of attention.

• 6:45Kara Swisher?

  Right.

• 6:45Speaker 04

  Like, in other words.

• 6:46Kara Swisher?

  So he's unconcerned with national security.

• 6:48Speaker 04

  No, no, no, I mean, he was, finally, I said, did you learn anything about operational security? And he said, in that kind of cat skills, um, delivery that he sometimes has, he says, don't you Signal maybe? You know, he just kind of like, you know, he was just sort of joking. It didn't concern him. What concerned him was that somehow I rested the news cycle away from him for a period of time.

• 7:15Kara Swisher?

  Right.

• 7:15Speaker 04

  And that's kind of like, that's the, that's the language.

• 7:19Kara Swisher?

  That's the coin of the realm.

• 7:20Speaker 04

  That's the coin of the realm, was the language he understands, and he has to contend with that. The issues raised by journalism are not as interesting as the fact of who's getting the attention at any given moment.

• 7:31Kara Swisher?

  So, in that regard, the fallout from Signal Gate is not an improvement in our national security in any way, or there's a lack of concern. And this is someone who keeps the classified documents in a bathroom. So, talk about that. Has there, from your, from what you understand, been any worries about improving security? Because it seems like...

• 7:50Speaker 04

  Not that I can see.

• 7:51Kara Swisher?

  Not that you can see.

• 7:52Speaker 04

  In, in, in, if we weren't through the looking glass, what would have happened in an ordinary presidential administration is, there would have been an investigation, an IG investigation, maybe a Justice Department investigation. Certainly, people would have either been fired or admonished. New systems would have been put in place. You would have had an outside expert come in and talk about this. They would have immediately banned people from using Signal. They're still using Signal, obviously. But that's not the way it, it works here. So, I mean, the assumption has to be, and I think the... US intelligence apparatus assumes that the Russians and the Chinese in particular know what's going on in his phone.

• 8:34Kara Swisher?

  Right.

• 8:35Speaker 04

  And know what he's saying on his phone, knowing what he's typing. And that's just the, that's just the reality. So, no, I don't, I, there's no reason to believe that things have gotten better.

• 8:45Kara Swisher?

  Listen, the Democrats have been messy with national security. A lot of people, the way we do our national security is really porous. And we have an enormous landscape in that regard. Is there any way to solve that problem? Because what typically happens is there are these investigations, these are very serious crimes, really. Is there a way you could just say, from tomorrow forward, if you have Signal on your phone, you will be prosecuted for everybody?

• 9:11Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, the problem is, is that you have two competing demands. One, these people have to talk to each other in order to know what, I mean, in the best possible circumstances. They're, they're talking about plans and operations and intelligence that they're getting. The, the challenge is that you do that most securely from a, a SKIF, a, a secure facility. It could be like a, almost even a tent within a room.

• 9:40Kara Swisher?

  Right.

• 9:41Speaker 04

  That presumably is blocking people's collection activities. But that means you have to go to your SKIF every time you want to call the Defense Secretary. It means you have to, you know, it's not, it's not reasonable to ask busy people. I mean, obviously, within the White House complex and the Defense Department and the State Department, there's rooms next to your office that you can go to. But it's, it's really difficult. And by the way, we don't even know for sure. You always find out later that, oh, that four years ago, the Chinese figured out a way to listen to the SKIF in the State Department. I don't know. But, um, so, so there, there are technical issues here. You know, there's the high side and the low side. The high side is, is the government, uh, language for closed systems.

• 10:26Speaker 04

  You know, they are not connected to the internet. They are just, they are just communication devices talking only to each other and they're monitored directly by the, and the, you know, the low side is regular communication. Signal is good.

• 10:37Kara Swisher?

  Mm-hmm.

• 10:38Speaker 04

  The problem is Signal works and you have it on your phone. I mean, Signal is better than WhatsApp. It's better than whatever you're using to text. And so there are challenges here. But I'll tell you that the, the actual issue to me, or a, a, an important issue, Pete Hegseth. Okay, so Pete Hexeth on the Signal Chat

• 10:58Kara Swisher?

  Right.

• 11:00Speaker 04

  Starts telling the members of the Signal Chat, which include the Vice President, the CIA Director, the National Intelligence Director, and me.

• 11:11Kara Swisher?

  Mm-hmm.

• 11:13Kara Swisher?

  And one of their cousins, but go ahead.

• 11:15Speaker 04

  Yeah, and when they're going, when the, when the

• 11:18Kara Swisher?

  Is happening, right.

• 11:19Speaker 04

  When the attack is happening, in two hours, you know, like, like the bombs will, literally, like, the bombs will start dropping in two hours, you know, so I'm looking at this, and see, this is, this is a human frailty, this is not a technical issue. Pete Hexeth did not have any good reason to put that information into Signal. The Vice President doesn't need to know when the tomahawks are being fired from what ship.

• 11:41Kara Swisher?

  Correct, he was showing off.

• 11:43Speaker 04

  He's cosplaying Secretary of Defense.

• 11:45Kara Swisher?

  Yes.

• 11:45Speaker 04

  This is what I realized, and, and, and I thought to myself, but he doesn't have to cosplay Secretary of Defense because he is Secretary of Defense.

• 11:53Kara Swisher?

  Right.

• 11:53Speaker 04

  Like, you need to just chill.

• 11:55Kara Swisher?

  Right.

• 11:55Speaker 04

  And just understand that we all know you're Secretary of Defense, you're cool already.

• 12:00Kara Swisher?

  Right.

• 12:01Speaker 04

  You got like an armored limousine, and you got guys with guns protecting you, and you get your own plane, the plane, the Secretary of Defense plane is literally called the Doomsday Plane, what's cooler than that?

• 12:10Kara Swisher?

  Right.

• 12:10Speaker 04

  Right? And, and so, so this is the problem of inexperienced, unserious people.

• 12:15Kara Swisher?

  Right.

• 12:16Speaker 04

  Taking on very, very grave jobs.

• 12:18Kara Swisher?

  Right, I, I do understand that, no.

• 12:20Speaker 04

  You can't account for that.

• 12:21Kara Swisher?

  No, you can't.

• 12:22Speaker 04

  There's no technical fix for that kind of unseriousness.

• 12:27Kara Swisher?

  Unseriousness and insecurity and

• 12:29Speaker 04

  Insecurity, yeah.

• 12:30Kara Swisher?

  And possibly three bourbons in.

• 12:33Speaker 04

  I'm not saying that, you are.

• 12:34Kara Swisher?

  I'm sorry, I am saying that.

• 12:36Speaker 04

  I know, I heard you.

• 12:37Kara Swisher?

  Uh, we'll be talking about the New York Times story on Elon's drug use in a second. Please read it while we're waiting here. This, this, it is serious, but it is serious, these are national security issues, military people could be in harm's way very easily.

• 12:51Speaker 04

  Literally, they're sending pilots to a place, Yemen.

• 12:53Kara Swisher?

  Correct.

• 12:54Speaker 04

  That has anti-aircraft capabilities, and I'm sitting on my phone, reading about it.

• 12:58Kara Swisher?

  And you know this, and would you be in touch with, with the people who want to attack those people? It would be a real problem. For them, and a definitely one.

• 13:07Speaker 04

  It's not a situation you want.

• 13:08Kara Swisher?

  So, this is a quote from Adrian LaFrance, the executive editor of The Atlantic, which you run. She wrote, "Unless Trump's power is checked, and soon, things will get much worse very quickly. When people lose their freedoms, it can take a generation or more to claw them back. That is, if you're lucky." What should Americans do to check this power? In this case, it's President Trump, he happens to be there, but any executive's president's power, when there's this much sloppiness and lack of care? And how much time? Writing something like that in The Atlantic is a pretty tough sentence to write.

• 13:39Speaker 04

  I don't like to get overly prescriptive, because our job is to tell people what's going on and try to analyze what it means. But I think that's a good piece of analysis of what's happening. I mean, I've been focused lately. You know, after four or five months of this, it's good to sort of breathe, take a long walk, think about the enormity of what's going on. Because we can't, I don't think cognitively, we can get our mind, this is too big to get your mind around all of the changes. Just talk about, spend the entire hour talking about corruption.

• 14:16Kara Swisher?

  That's my next question.

• 14:17Speaker 04

  Okay, well, then we'll do five minutes on corruption. But any one of these subjects is enormous. It's like we're having a Watergate-sized crisis every day, or maybe three times a day, depending on like how many planes Cutter is giving to the president on that day. Nothing is, look, the courts are obviously still active, Republican-appointed judges are still active in checking power here to some degree. I mean, you know, there's 20 different things going on, whether it's immigration, or Harvard, or this or that. And much of the press is engaged in a muscular way. Much of the press, because of bad ownership, is not engaged in as muscular a way, for

• 15:02Speaker 04

  fear, as it should be. But there's still a very, very active press. We know about, most of the things that we know about are because reporters found them out. But if you don't have Congress in there, there's no, the system only works when you have three co-equal branches of government. And Congress, under the control of the Republican Party, which is not the Republican Party anymore, it's the party of whatever Trump... Decides, um, it doesn't, the whole thing doesn't work. It will eventually grind to a halt if you don't have congressional oversight. Real, honest to goodness congressional oversight of what people are doing. So that the judges are straining, the press is under attack constantly.

• 15:44Speaker 04

  But the most important component in any of this, the congressional check on presidential power, that doesn't exist in, in the current state because the Republicans are too frightened of him, or many of them just go along with it because they like it. So I, I, you know, it's like, you gotta focus on Congress in the next year.

• 16:04Kara Swisher?

  And that's what you'll be focused in on?

• 16:06Speaker 04

  I'm focused on a lot of things, but I mean, I think, I think, again, one of those stories that's too big to believed in a kind of way is the abdication of individual responsibility. Um, a lot of people were sympathetic to Lisa Murkowski, the senator from Alaska, when she said, "It's very scary and I don't like to do it." And the people, I'm sympathetic in an abstract sense, but leadership is not supposed to be easy. It's like, your job, and by the way, she's obviously an outlying Republican on these questions, right? She's not marching in lockstep. But having a, an American leader, an elected member of the Senate, tell the American people that she's scared? Come on, your job is not to be scared.

• 16:51Kara Swisher?

  Right.

• 16:52Speaker 04

  Like, and maybe, okay, fine, in, in your, in your, in your night sweats, you know, in the darkness, in the pit of night, in your bed, you can, you can acknowledge yourself that you're scared, but like, that was...

• 17:02Kara Swisher?

  Disturbing, to say the least.

• 17:04Speaker 04

  It, it's disturbing.

• 17:05Kara Swisher?

  And in some cases, they're not scared, they're actually going along. It's not just scared. There is a level of fear.

• 17:10Speaker 04

  No, no, no, there's a, there's a, there's a, people who love it.

• 17:13Kara Swisher?

  Right.

• 17:14Speaker 04

  And then there are people who know that he has authoritarian instincts and they, they just are like, "I'm not gonna withstand..."

• 17:21Kara Swisher?

  I'm not crossing him.

• 17:22Speaker 04

  Yeah, well, I'm not gonna like, subject myself to social media pressure or actual violence.

• 17:26Kara Swisher?

  Right. So we, we've never seen, speaking of corruption, a president monetize the White House, uh, like Trump and Scott, and I talk a lot about this on Pivot, is ignore all the distractions. Even Harvard... Look at the money. Look at what's happening here in terms of giving money to the very rich or taking money for himself. The crypto grift is particularly blatant. But crypto is popular in a way it burnishes his credentials as an outsider, and crypto money helped swing this election. There was a great amount of money in Ohio and other places. So, talk about what brazen explicit corruption does. Now, we've always had corruption in our government at some level, but although the lack of trust in other stock markets, like the Russian stock market and others, has created a tiny stock market. Ours is roaring because people

• 18:11Kara Swisher?

  do have trust in the idea of it. So, how do you think this brazen sort of corruption is going to play out?

• 18:18Speaker 04

  Well, deeply corrupt governments and societies don't work very well.

• 18:24Kara Swisher?

  They don't.

• 18:25Speaker 04

  And sometimes they bring themselves to a crisis point, at which point the people say enough, and something good happens out of that. So, I mean, I think that's ultimately where we're heading. Unless, unless, um, the American people who are supplied with cheap calories, abundant video entertainment, and actual drugs, just have given up on the idea of standing up for American, traditional American principles. I mean, we have to consider that. As long as you, as long as you feed people enough food and give them enough diversion, um, I mean, it sounds very Roman, because it is.

• 19:03Kara Swisher?

  Right. Bread and circuses.

• 19:04Speaker 04

  Yeah, bread and circuses. Um, maybe it won't. But, you know, there's this, you know, generally speaking, um, corruption means that, um, things don't get done that the people want to have done, but building roads, to having good schools, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So, maybe that leads it. In the meantime, I, I think, it's very interesting. I think that, that many of the people around Trump believe that it's not corruption because it's transparent.

• 19:25Kara Swisher?

  Right. They've said that to me.

• 19:26Speaker 04

  It's really interesting theory. It's like, we're not hiding anything. We're just taking the plane. And he was asked the other day, I, I forgot which foreign leader said, "If I had a plane, I would give it to you." This was just last week.

• 19:38Kara Swisher?

  South African.

• 19:39Speaker 04

  Was it the South African president?

• 19:40Kara Swisher?

  Yeah.

• 19:41Speaker 04

  And, and Trump said, "I would take it."

• 19:43Kara Swisher?

  Right.

• 19:44Speaker 04

  I mean, it's a very, let's, I don't think Abraham Lincoln would have the same reaction.

• 19:48Kara Swisher?

  Right. Right.

• 19:49Speaker 04

  To that kind of, that kind of transactional cynicism.

• 19:52Kara Swisher?

  So, explicit corruption.

• 19:53Speaker 04

  Or Richard Nixon, by the way. I don't think Richard Nixon would have the same reaction to that kind of transactional cynicism.

• 19:58Kara Swisher?

  Yeah. I like my money under the table is, would be his policy.

• 20:01Speaker 04

  Hypocrisy is actually useful in some way. At least it's a recognition that I'm doing something wrong. I think that he literally doesn't, Donald Trump doesn't think there's anything wrong with enriching his family openly by using the White House as a kind of, as a kind of money-making.

• 20:19Kara Swisher?

  Yeah, I've called him a coin-operated president.

• 20:21Speaker 04

  Right, that's funny.

• 20:22Kara Swisher?

  But, thank you.

• 20:23Speaker 04

  Yeah, you're good with those phrases.

• 20:25Kara Swisher?

  Do you know what tech bro stands for? Technically broken.

• 20:30Kara Swisher?

  I have a lot of them.

• 20:31Speaker 04

  That was good.

• 20:31Kara Swisher?

  Thank you, thank you. Feel free to use them. But what does that, what does that do? How do you then investigate that when they're doing the criming in plain sight?

• 20:40Speaker 04

  You know, it's hard because-

• 20:41Kara Swisher?

  And by the way, they're pretty competent at it. I wish they were as competent at governing as they are at criming.

• 20:45Speaker 04

  No, like, building bridges would be cool, too, right?

• 20:48Kara Swisher?

  Yeah.

• 20:49Speaker 04

  The, it's interesting because a lot of the energy in investigative journalism comes from exposing the cover-up, not the crime. I mean, there's cliches around this, right? So, they don't give you any room for your big revelation. It's like, imagine how much power there would be in the headline, "Trump Secretly Takes 747 From Cutter Dictator."

• 21:15Kara Swisher?

  Right.

• 21:16Speaker 04

  There's no, there's none of that power and none of that energy because he just-

• 21:19Kara Swisher?

  He says, "Yeah, I took it."

• 21:20Speaker 04

  Because he says, "Yeah, I took it." I mean, that, by the way, that's one of his, that's one, one manifestation of his political genius. It's like, he doubles down on the thing that ordinary people would be embarrassed about or have to explain, right? That this is why he's, this is why he is successful. He has figured out something in the, in the shamelessness and in the sort of the, again, the cynical transactionalism that is his actual ideology to the extent that he has an ideology.

• 21:46Kara Swisher?

  So, again, like, Signal Gate, is there any accountability then, in the end? Or is at some point it gets to be too much? Or just voted out of office?

• 21:55Speaker 04

  Well, if you don't fix these problems and they don't take that problem seriously, eventually something bad happens. There's a non-zero chance that something bad happens because they're sloppy, unserious, incompetent, blasé, whatever you want to call it. Somebody, God forbid, will get hurt or killed because they have no control over their information flow. Just to use in the narrow Signal Gate sense of the question.

• 22:24Speaker 04

  There are real world consequences to incompetence and this kind of cynicism. And on the one hand, we know that Donald Trump is above all else, lucky. He's the luckiest man in America, right? But on the other hand, eventually, you know, you come to a situation in which real lives are affected. On the other other hand, I have to say, serious studies have shown that had Trump's reaction to the pandemic been different early on and throughout the pandemic, and if the Republican Party or elements of their own party hadn't convinced large numbers of their own followers

• 23:10Speaker 04

  that vaccines are something to be wildly distrusted, many more Americans, and by the way, Republican voters, would be alive today.

• 23:17Kara Swisher?

  Right.

• 23:18Speaker 04

  And so like, there doesn't seem to be a consequence for, I mean, I've never seen a political party

• 23:26Kara Swisher?

  Hurt so many people.

• 23:28Speaker 04

  Of their own followers. It doesn't make any, nothing.

• 23:31Kara Swisher?

  Makes sense.

• 23:32Speaker 04

  Here's the thing, when you just accept the fact that nothing makes sense, it becomes easier to understand.

• 23:36Kara Swisher?

  Okay, got it, okay. So we're living in a simulation. So speaking of that.

• 23:40Speaker 04

  Through the looking glass.

• 23:41Kara Swisher?

  Right.

• 23:41Speaker 04

  Like, it's just, it's Reed Allison Wonderland.

• 23:44Kara Swisher?

  Right. So, speaking of incompetence, Elon announced he's leaving Doge and the administration. He badmouthed the president's deficit busting bill on the way out. He hasn't deposited the 100 million he pledged to Trump. It's not surprising, I did notice that they were eventually bound to leave each other. That said, they are declaring it a victory, of which it is not. It probably has cost the American people more money than it's saved. I think the White House is sending a $9 billion rescission package to Congress, which is how much we spend on probably paperclips. Talk a little bit about Doge and Elon's effect. And I will note that today in the New York Times, something else we've talked about a lot on Pivot, according to the reporting, Elon is taking recreational drugs like ecstasy

• 24:28Kara Swisher?

  and psilocybin mushrooms on the campaign trail. He was also using so much ketamine that he told people it was causing him bladder issues. How do you look at this Elon period in the Trump administration, which is supposedly ending, but definitely began with his $280 million he spent on getting President Trump elected?

• 24:49Speaker 04

  I did not know that ketamine has bladder side effects, by the way, until this morning.

• 24:54Kara Swisher?

  Well, now you do.

• 24:55Speaker 04

  Yeah. It's good knowledge to have.

• 24:57Kara Swisher?

  Yeah.

• 24:58Speaker 04

  I get it, in theory.

• 25:00Kara Swisher?

  Yeah. Have you taken ketamine? I'm just curious.

• 25:03Speaker 04

  I have never taken ketamine.

• 25:04Kara Swisher?

  I have.

• 25:05Speaker 04

  What's it like?

• 25:06Kara Swisher?

  Not good.

• 25:07Speaker 04

  Not good?

• 25:08Kara Swisher?

  No.

• 25:08Speaker 04

  Disassociates yourself?

• 25:09Kara Swisher?

  Yes, indeed, yeah.

• 25:10Speaker 04

  Why do you want to be disassociated?

• 25:12Kara Swisher?

  I was doing it for a TV series, but, and I want to understand what Elon's going through, honestly. I didn't like it.

• 25:20Speaker 04

  I'm not going to ask about bladder problems.

• 25:22Kara Swisher?

  Okay. I only did it once, so I'm fine.

• 25:24Speaker 04

  Well, good, I'm glad. Um, I think Doge is a sideshow.

• 25:29Kara Swisher?

  Yeah.

• 25:29Speaker 04

  I honestly think, like, one of the tricks of populism is to, is to conduct these performances of prestidigitation, like, "Look over here, look at the bird over here." Meanwhile, over there, like, Elon's doing all this crazy, like, "We're invading VOA."

• 25:46Kara Swisher?

  Right.

• 25:47Speaker 04

  And we're gonna throw all the journalists out the window, and saying, "Okay, fine." In the meantime, you have a serious person named Russell Vogt, who runs the OMB, that's Management and Budget, who is one of the primary authors of Project 2025, which is being systematically carried out. And he has, and others associated with that project, have a view that government should be radically smaller, the executive should be primary, right, the executive should not have a co-equal, they have a philosophy here.

• 26:18Kara Swisher?

  The unitary executive theory.

• 26:20Speaker 04

  The unitary executive, and that, you know, they're very happy that Congress is acquiescing, and they want to keep that. Russell Vogt is a serious man who doesn't take ketamine and cocaine and all the rest, and has a vision, and is, and has staying power, and has patience and focus, and is going to carry out that vision. I'm not judging it, I'm just saying that this is what's actually happening.

• 26:45Kara Swisher?

  Right, and so Elon is a-

• 26:47Speaker 04

  Russell Vogt is as boring as Elon Musk is exciting, right?

• 26:49Kara Swisher?

  Right, with the chainsaw and the distraction.

• 26:51Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, Russell Vogt just goes to work every day and works. One of the things that you find is that, and this is true of the Hegseth's and the Dan Bongino's and the Elon Musks, government is actually hard, right? Running things is hard, bureaucratic complication is hard, dealing with the law is hard. They're not equipped for that. Dan Bongino was almost crying yesterday on TV about how hard it is to be the Deputy Director of the FBI. It's so much harder than being a Fox host. And I'm like-

• 27:18Speaker 04

  You know, really, Deputy Director of FBI is a hard job. Who would have thunk?

• 27:22Kara Swisher?

  Yeah.

• 27:22Speaker 04

  Right? So Elon Musk is saying, "This is boring. This is annoying. People are actually not letting me do what I want to do all the time."

• 27:28Kara Swisher?

  Right, which he's allowed to do at his own company.

• 27:30Speaker 04

  The Treasury Secretary is cursing me out in the White House. I'm the world's richest man. I have my bag of drugs, and I have my electric cars and rocket ships.

• 27:38Kara Swisher?

  Right.

• 27:39Speaker 04

  And I'm just gonna go have fun. Watch OMB. Don't watch Doge.

• 27:43Kara Swisher?

  Right.

• 27:43Speaker 04

  That's the show. I mean, I'm not saying that they didn't do... They didn't have an effect in various departments.

• 27:49Kara Swisher?

  Damaging, right.

• 27:50Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah. But the interesting thing is that... And I don't know the percentage to which the vision of Project 2025 has already been fulfilled. Maybe they're at 15%. Maybe they're at 20%. I don't know. But they're moving.

• 28:05Kara Swisher?

  Mm-hmm.

• 28:05Speaker 04

  And they're gonna create conditions in which, over time, the government is not capable of doing what the government was once capable of doing. I'm not saying that government was perfect. Far from it, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But their project is to unravel the New Deal. Their project is to unravel the idea of a civil service, and they're moving. So pay attention.

• 28:27Kara Swisher?

  So how do you stop the distraction? Because, again, this is something we talk about a lot, because there's a distraction a day, whether it's Greenland, or Canada's the 51st state, or the plane, all of which are serious issues. How do you get away from the distraction, then? Well, Russell Vought, and I think you're absolutely right, it's about making government smaller and rewarding wealthy people with tax breaks that will sit very heavy on future generations. It's about the money and the getting rid of government.

• 28:57Speaker 04

  Yeah, in ideology. And I have to be honest, I don't really understand the impetus for the ideology. Better government, sure. No government doesn't make a lot of sense to me. And it doesn't make a lot of sense even from a red state perspective. Most of the things that the government do are purely a political meat-safety.

• 29:16Kara Swisher?

  Right.

• 29:17Speaker 04

  Tornado prediction, you know, and on, and on, and on, and on, and on. So I don't understand it. The question is, how did...

• 29:25Kara Swisher?

  How do you ignore the distraction, given the distractions are so pretty, from a media perspective?

• 29:31Speaker 04

  Donald Trump, again. Is a genius of attention, a genius of attention grabbing. So and so good and natural at it. I mean, he's like, you know, what a leopard is to hunting prey on the savanna. He is to grabbing attention. Right? So like you're dealing with a guy who's better at this than anyone. And he's trained up a bunch of people who understand, oh, it turns out you can get away with this. Turns out you can get away with that, you know. Um, I, I don't know the answer. I, I do. Here's one challenge, just from an editor perspective. Um, when the Greenland thing started, I thought it was hysterical.

• 30:14Kara Swisher?

  Yeah.

• 30:15Speaker 04

  Right? What, what are we talking about? But he's serious. He keeps bringing it up. He can move 50,000 soldiers to Greenland tomorrow and say, it's ours. I mean, that'll destroy NATO. Denmark's a member of NATO. We're a member of NATO. He's invading another NATO country, not something that you had on your bingo card either. Right? The unserious thing becomes the serious thing. So it's very, very hard to know. I didn't think in, in December that the executive branch was going to go to war against Harvard University. That was not something that we could have predicted. Um, and then when he starts complaining about things, it's, it's, it's amazing because he puts so many words out into the universe. Um, it's very hard to, to pick what to do.

• 30:56Speaker 04

  Um, I actually don't know the, I don't know the answer from a, from a, from a, no, from a citizen perspective. I know from a journalism perspective, it means that we have to do triage all the time. We do sit around and say, what's actually important and what's entertainment?

• 31:14Kara Swisher?

  It's entertainment.

• 31:15Speaker 04

  And that's why we covered Doge. Obviously we wrote about it, but I think that Russell Vought is a more interesting consequential person in the government.

• 31:36Speaker 01

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• 32:07Kara Swisher?

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• 32:52Kara Swisher?

  and keep your private life private by signing up for Delete Me. Now, at a special discount for our listeners, get 20% off your Delete Me plan when you go to joindelete.me/kara and use the promo code Kara at checkout. The only way to get 20% off is to go to joindelete.me/kara and enter the code Kara at checkout. That's joindelete.me/kara, code Kara.

• 33:20Kara Swisher?

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• 34:26Kara Swisher?

  We get an expert to send us a question for our guest, so let's hear yours.

• 34:30Speaker 05

  Hi, I'm Chris Krebs, First Director of the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. The big question I would ask is in the context of the current state of technology in the U.S. Federal Executive Branch. From the Trump Administration to the Biden Administration, the U.S. Government has encouraged the use of encrypted messaging apps like Signal, particularly in the wake of the Chinese spy services' compromise of government networks and telecommunications providers. The most recent episode with this app creates an opening to have a serious discussion about how to safely and securely use technology to communicate even at the highest levels of government. So what is your sense of the U.S. Government's current efforts to adopt new technologies to ensure our civil servants,

• 35:13Speaker 05

  our leaders, our government employees have the connectivity they need to communicate in a secure way? Thanks a lot.

• 35:20Kara Swisher?

  So this is Chris Krebs, who was fired for saying the election was secure. He worked for Trump, and now there was an executive order which forced Chris out of his job.

• 35:28Speaker 04

  By the way, the Chris Krebs episode is among the most serious. We're ranking what represents an actual threat to the American way of life, the American system of accountability and governance. It's the attack on Chris Krebs, very Hungarian vibe here. And the craziest part of that is, in the actual order, it said, in enumerating his alleged sins, it said, "Chris Krebs denied that Donald Trump won the 2020 election."

• 36:01Speaker 04

  Come back to Alice in Wonderland, right?

• 36:02Kara Swisher?

  Right.

• 36:03Speaker 04

  Um, you know, listening to, and I don't have a specific, I have a general answer, which is like, obviously, even if you had serious people in government, I mean, we know that, we know that communication systems because of the acquisition process, because of all of the, the problems of enormous bureaucracies and the lobbying power of, let's say, larger traditional firms in Washington, like, by the time many agencies adopt systems, the systems are outmoded and they can't talk to other systems, we know, we know all that. But what, what his question reminds me of is, is one of my favorite quotes from E.O.

• 36:42Speaker 04

  Wilson, who said that the, I'm mostly paraphrasing, but the, the central challenge facing Americans, or facing all humans, is that we have paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology.

• 36:57Kara Swisher?

  Mm-hmm.

• 36:58Speaker 04

  Right? So, the, the connective tissue between our own lizard brain and the technology that somehow we've created are these institutions that are not capable of mediating between the two.

• 37:10Kara Swisher?

  That's correct.

• 37:11Speaker 04

  And, um, again, I come back to the human failure that we see in Signal, which is not taking it seriously, not taking what they're doing seriously.

• 37:21Kara Swisher?

  Yeah.

• 37:22Speaker 04

  Um, and again, what are the eventual real world consequences of that? We don't know, but there will be real world consequences.

• 37:28Kara Swisher?

  Let's talk about the Democrats for a minute. You recently interviewed Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson about their book Original Sin, whether or not you agree that Biden's team engaged in a cover-up, Democrats clear of a problem with voters and their handling of Biden's decline is part of it. You interviewed Trump in the White House when you did. He said, "I don't think they know what they're doing. I think they have no leader." And he told you he didn't see anyone on their rise, and you suggested Governors Wes Moore, Josh Shapiro, Andy Beshear. Talk about where they are right now.

• 37:54Speaker 04

  Actually, that was a very interesting conversation with, you know, there's, there's two Donald Trumps. There's Donald Trumps with the cameras on, and then it's professional wrestling, and then when the camera is off... People don't understand this, those who haven't met him, but he, in a strange way, is smaller than life. When you go in, he's like, "Oh, hi, hi, nice to see you. Oh, yeah, what's..." And we had this conversation about the Democrat. It wasn't like the Democrats are scumbags, or the Democrats are this. It was, he was doing political analysis, and it wasn't bad. And one of the things he said, by the way, and he was asking this with what I took to be almost genuine, like, "I don't understand the answer to this question."

• 38:29Kara Swisher?

  Correct, yeah.

• 38:29Speaker 04

  He said, "Eighty, ninety percent of Americans are opposed to trans girls in girls' sports. So why do the Democrats keep pushing that? It's killing them." I mean, he's just asking, like, as a political question. I think that gives you an insight into where he, you know, what he thinks are important issues. You know, that could break the Democrats.

• 38:49Kara Swisher?

  Right.

• 38:50Speaker 04

  I think, writ large, the Democrats aren't really good at politics, which is probably a problem, because that's their business. They're at risk of becoming, basically, a regional party. Coastal California, New England, New York City, and environs, some, you know, Austin, Texas, and whatever. They've learned nothing, it seems to me. I'm just trying to be analytical about it. They don't seem to have learned how to figure this out. Any party without power, which is what they are, they don't have any branch of government, is gonna have a bunch of, and we'll see this in the upcoming primaries, I mean, the 27, we'll see it. You know, everybody will use these derogatory terms for all these governors who are like, come out and try to convince you. There's a lot of talent on the bench.

• 39:33Speaker 04

  The question is, who breaks out and how they break out. They have, there's almost this, there's this sort of funny thing going on now, where it's like, they have study groups to figure out how to talk to men.

• 39:44Kara Swisher?

  Mm-hmm.

• 39:46Speaker 04

  You know, I mean, it sounds like a joke. It's like, maybe just talk.

• 39:51Kara Swisher?

  Yeah.

• 39:51Speaker 04

  You know, use regular, Andy Beshear is very interesting, obviously, one of the, a very successful Democrat in a red state, when Trump.

• 39:58Kara Swisher?

  Right, or Laura Kelly from Kansas.

• 39:59Speaker 04

  You know, he will say things like, you know, "They want me to, they want me to use the term," I've heard him say this, "They want me to use the term 'justice-involved individual.'" And I said, "What is that?" And they said, "Someone in prison." And I said, "Well, why can't we just say, you know..." Inmate, I mean, I've heard this from a lot of politicians. It's like the imposition of academic language or specialized occult sensitive language on things turns people off. I don't think they've gone through a process yet where they're figuring out how to be effective.

• 40:28Kara Swisher?

  How does that happen? Because there's a war of ideas happening. Ezra Klein and Atlantic writer Derek Thompson are championing abundance agenda. Jonathan Chait points out in the magazine, a lot of progressives less vehemently opposed. If Trump is this existential threat that you've just discussed, why is the argument so academic? And where do you see anyone breaking out? And how far does he have to go before the Democrats actually mobilize? Or does that just play into his hands?

• 40:55Speaker 04

  I'm just surprised by everything. I mean, it is, it is obviously a democratic crisis. It's multi-democratic crisis we're in. The country's never seen anything like Trump or Trumpism. I mean, maybe Andrew Jackson, but very few people in this room remember Andrew Jackson.

• 41:20Kara Swisher?

  Jimmy Long, had he lived?

• 41:21Speaker 04

  Jimmy Long, yeah, but that was a local variant. I mean, he had a national following, but he didn't become president. There's a larger question, which, these are questions I would ask you, but I'm not, because it's your podcast. I don't know if we can have a democracy the way we understand democracy in an age of social media. I don't know. You know, one of the things, I always say this to, it's funny, I always say this to younger journalists. You know, it's okay to say, I don't know, when you're being interviewed. You know, and then when I'm being interviewed, I'm always hesitant to say, I don't know, but I can't explain to you.

• 42:01Kara Swisher?

  Which is an answer in and of itself.

• 42:02Speaker 04

  I can't explain to you why.

• 42:06Speaker 04

  The Democrats aren't in the street. I don't mean in a violent way, but I mean, I just assumed, I just assumed that Lafayette Square would be filled every day with people protesting on behalf of academic freedom, or immigration, or rule of law, or against corruption. I, I don't know. I mean, I think, I think a lot of people are still paralyzed and in shock. They don't have organizing principle. They don't have people who are organizing them. And I don't necessarily-

• 42:41Kara Swisher?

  Is there anything you see at all? It could happen all of a sudden. You know, these things sometimes happen all of a-

• 42:46Speaker 04

  Something breaks. I mean, you know, you would have, nobody understood that the George Floyd moment was coming until George Floyd happened, and then all of a sudden the dam broke. I mean, obviously, people who studied it carefully know that there was a welling up of frustration and various factors that led, led to that break. So maybe something will, maybe something will occur. It's, I don't, I don't know.

• 43:13Kara Swisher?

  That's a very good answer, actually.

• 43:14Speaker 06

  We'll be back in a minute.

• 43:26Speaker 06

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• 44:08Speaker 06

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• 44:37Speaker 03

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• 45:59Kara Swisher?

  I want to talk about the news media business. The Atlantic is doing great. This has been actually a good time for you. In fact, for people who don't know, David from wrote a piece for The Atlantic in 2017 called "How to Build an Autocracy," which was very prescient, actually. And you've been unequivocal about the danger. You keep bringing up the dangers that are posed. Having a strong editorial voice has certainly worked for you guys. You've profitable, you have over 1.1 million subscribers.

• 46:25Speaker 04

  1.3.

• 46:26Kara Swisher?

  What? 1.3, okay. Sorry. Excuse me.

• 46:30Speaker 04

  It's okay.

• 46:31Kara Swisher?

  That fixed.

• 46:32Speaker 04

  I check my phone. I check my phone every 10 minutes to see how many new people come on.

• 46:34Kara Swisher?

  Talk about the lessons you've learned.

• 46:35Speaker 04

  Not too late for all of you, by the way. Those who don't have it.

• 46:39Kara Swisher?

  You've learned as a media operator. Now, you didn't, you have an owner who's, who's been willing to endure the lean years in Lorraine Powell Jobs, someone who is actually not a fucking asshole, I would say, like, certain people who own the Washington Post. So can you talk about that and then maybe a look just very briefly about how you think that will change with AI affecting the news? I don't, I know you've seen this recent Google Veo, VO, excuse me. I know you have partnerships with OpenAI, so does Vox Media. So, talk a little bit about what the, how you've done this here, very quick. I'll give you a chance to celebrate yourself.

• 47:19Speaker 04

  I don't need to.

• 47:20Kara Swisher?

  Especially when Trump is threatening news organizations. He's, and they're obeying them.

• 47:26Speaker 04

  You know, the truth is, I mean, this is the thing, and, and like, we have to acknowledge it's true. Trump is my circulation manager in some, in some ways. I mean, after Signal Gate. Look, going back five, five years ago, he, you know, in, in, six years ago, whatever it was, when I wrote a piece about how he referred to American soldiers as suckers and losers, they went ballistic and whatever, and all it did was generate interest and subscribers for, so, so, you know, he calls me scumbag and sleazebag and this and that and the other thing. Then we also have a nice time talking in the Oval Office. It's a very strange thing right now, obviously. But he calls me these names and all it does to serve is, is, is

• 48:06Speaker 04

  to build up the Atlantic. I mean, it's not the only reason. Look, I mean, so when I became editor nine years ago, I was told that BuzzFeed, Vox, Vice, HuffPo, Insider, Business Insider, Mike, they were all gonna eat our lunch and, you know, we were gonna die. We're a 168-year-old magazine founded right here in the great city of Boston. And they were all gonna eat our lunch and, you know, and I went to so many presentations and so many PowerPoints and slide decks and theories of the case. And my theory is always make the best, I'm not like, this is not the baker praising his own bread, but like, the theory was the

• 48:51Speaker 04

  only, my theory was the only thing I actually wanted to do. Make the best possible quality, highest quality stories.

• 48:59Speaker 04

  As many of them as you can make by writers who are known and appreciated by literate audiences and then convince those literate audiences to pay for the privilege of reading them, just like any other business.

• 49:12Kara Swisher?

  Right. You're making a good product by using reporting.

• 49:14Speaker 04

  Make a high-quality product. I thought the other places, all those web operations, were doing like mass plays, like we'll get 100 million readers and we'll get all this programmatic advertising revenue. And that works until it doesn't work, but I want to have a, I much prefer to have a direct relationship with 1.3 million smart people who subscribe to The Atlantic and the number just goes up and up and up, knock on wood, I hope it keeps going. But like, it's like, make a, make, make a good product and then have a, have a smooth system for bringing that product to audiences that will pay you for it is like the business plan.

• 49:49Kara Swisher?

  Is the basic business plan.

• 49:50Speaker 04

  Is the basic business plan.

• 49:51Kara Swisher?

  Is there something to, to make this good reporting more relevant to larger audiences?

• 49:56Speaker 04

  I, I hate, I hate all this sort of new agey storytelling, this, narrative.

• 50:02Kara Swisher?

  Snackable content?

• 50:03Speaker 04

  No. We're not a snack.

• 50:05Kara Swisher?

  Yeah.

• 50:06Speaker 04

  I mean, we have, we have shorter stories.

• 50:08Kara Swisher?

  Oh, come on, there's good Atlantic and bad Atlantic, you have snack in there.

• 50:11Speaker 04

  No, we have, we have shorter stories, but, but they're delicious snacks.

• 50:15Kara Swisher?

  Delicious snacks.

• 50:16Speaker 04

  And they, yeah.

• 50:17Kara Swisher?

  You know what I'm talking about.

• 50:18Speaker 04

  Not just like Kind bars, but like, you know, Ho Ho's and Ring Dings.

• 50:23Kara Swisher?

  Right, you do have Ring Dings, don't you?

• 50:24Speaker 04

  No, we have, yeah, this is going down a weird path.

• 50:28Kara Swisher?

  Okay.

• 50:29Speaker 04

  Um, the only choi, we don't have a choice except to keep going and going and going and, and, you know, I wish more journalism organizations would join us. You're right, we have an owner who is smart and tough, unlike the owner of the Washington Post or the people who run CBS or the people who think that they can make side deals with Trump.

• 50:49Kara Swisher?

  Trump and get away with it, yeah.

• 50:50Speaker 04

  Yeah. Um, that's, that's, that's just silly and it's not good thinking. But I think we just have to get better and better and better. And one of the things I tell, this is a little bit of, you know... Goldberg J. School, which would take six minutes to run. This is my, you know, my understanding of journalism and people don't seem to understand as much as they should, is that if the story isn't actually interesting to read, people aren't going to read it. If your podcast isn't interesting, isn't entertaining, people aren't going to go to the second paragraph. You know, I mean, there's this expression in journalism, after the lead, it's just typing. And that originally meant, work on your lead so that people read the story and then just put the rest of the stuff in. I interpret that a different way now, which is like, if you don't have an excellent lead

• 51:35Speaker 04

  that gets you to the second paragraph, and the second paragraph doesn't interest you enough to go to the third paragraph, it's all just typing. It's meaningless. So we have to do, we have to do a better job of telling our stories and presenting this information in compelling and interesting ways. But that's a craft issue as much as anything else.

• 51:53Kara Swisher?

  Yeah, there's a lot of thriving media now, actually. So we're going to finish up with this quote, something someone named Jeff Goldberg wrote, "The leaders of the Republican Party, the soul-bladed Donald Trump and the satraps and lackeys who abet his nefarious behavior are attempting to destroy the foundations of American democracy." He wrote that in 2021. Let's assume a Democrat wins the White House in 2028, maybe they win in 2026, and Donald Trump and the Republicans haven't managed to destroy the foundations of democracy. What is the first step people do? Or do you think we are really in a situation of civic catastrophe and authoritarian creep?

• 52:29Speaker 04

  I mean, we're heading towards civic catastrophe for really quotidian reasons. I haven't gone there to talk to people yet, but I want to. But like, let's take the Kennedy School at Harvard. It used to be that people would want to go into civil service and go into government work because they're idealistic. They know they're not going to make a lot of money, and they want to do things, and many of them are good. Some of them are bad, but many of them are great at their jobs. I think we are rotting out the core of what government does, because it's going to be harder and harder and harder to convince people to apply. To go into this work and personnel is policy and personnel is destiny. And so that's actually the thing that I kind of worry about the most right now is

• 53:14Speaker 04

  that we're going to have, we're going back to the 1880s before there was a civil service. And that's not a great thing. And I don't think you just fix that by having the Democrats win Congress. I don't know how long the half-life of this is. Here's the thing, and I've said this in talks in Europe, people, you know, they're obsessed. Can I just finish with one?

• 53:35Kara Swisher?

  Sure.

• 53:35Speaker 04

  I don't know if we're having, as we approach our 250th birthday, I don't know if we're having a midlife crisis, a nervous breakdown, or experiencing a terminal illness. I just don't know. It's too early to say. So, but you can change the course of these things. That terminal illness is not hospice-ready. It's just might be, you know, it might be a very serious illness, but I just don't know which one we're doing yet. And I think it's too early to say.

• 54:03Kara Swisher?

  All right. We'll leave it at that. Jeffrey Goldberg everywhere.

• 54:06Speaker 04

  Thank you.

• 54:16Kara Swisher?

  On with Kara Swisher is produced by Christian Castor-Rosell, Kateri Yocum, Dave Shaw, Megan Burney, Allison Rogers, and Kalen Lynch. Nishat Kurwa is Vox Media's executive producer of podcasts. Special thanks to Eric Littkey. Our engineers are Rick Kwan, Steve Bone, and Fernando Aruda, and our theme music is by Trakademics. If you already follow the show, you get to be in the new secret Signal chat with Elon Musk and all the ex-employees of Doge. If not, you also get to be in the Signal chat with Elon Musk and all of the other ex-employees of Doge. Go wherever you listen to podcasts, search for On with Kara Swisher and hit follow. Thanks for listening to On with Kara Swisher from New York Magazine,

• 54:58Kara Swisher?

  the Vox Media Podcast Network, and us. We'll be back on Thursday with more.

• 55:08Speaker 01

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