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 looping Goldberg into a high-security chat about plans to bomb Houthis in Yemen and then repeating his misstep 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, Trump replied, “I think we learned: Maybe don’t use Signal, OK? 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,” Trump said. He 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 internationally headline-making gaffe. “Yeah, he’s safe,” he told Goldberg, insisting that having former 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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