Trump Tells The Atlantic What He Learned From Pete Hegseth’s Signalgate Scandal: ‘Maybe Don’t Use Signal, OK?’

In his post-Signalgate meeting with The Atlantic’s editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg, Donald Trump admitted that the scandal was “real,” but that Pete Hegseth’s job is still safe despite accidentally looping Goldberg into supposedly top-secret chat about plans to bomb Houthis in Yemen and then repeating his mistake by copying his own wife into another classified chat on Signal.

Goldberg met with the President at the Oval Office on Thursday, as did his Atlantic colleagues Ashley Parker and Michael Scherer. When Goldberg asked what Trump took away from the historic security breach, the president replied, “I think we learned: Maybe don’t use Signal, okay? If you want to know the truth. I would frankly tell these people not to use Signal, although it’s been used by a lot of people. But, whatever it is, whoever has it, whoever owns it, I wouldn’t want to use it.”

The Atlantic editor asked, after Trump and his administration had dismissed the outlet’s “many fictional stories,” why the president had described their story about Signalgate as “somewhat more successful.”

“Are you saying that Signalgate was real?” asked Goldberg.

“Yeah, it was real,” said Trump, who went on to say that he considered the story successful because “you got it out very much to the public… It became a very big story.”

Trump said he does not use Signal himself. He added that he has no plans to fire Hegseth despite the global gaffe. “Yeah, he’s safe,” he told Goldberg, insisting that having the previous Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin “missing in action for a week” was a far greater scandal.

Trump also bragged about his gold-plated makeover of the Oval Office to the Atlantic staffers and asked if they thought he should install a chandelier next. The outlet noted: The Atlantic takes no position on that matter.

You can read the entire interview at The Atlantic.

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