Jeffrey Goldberg, editor-in-chief of far-left propaganda outlet The Atlantic, published an article Tuesday with glaring fabrications about former President Donald Trump’s interactions with the families of fallen service members and his outlook on military leadership.
Goldberg’s dishonest hit piece is the latest in a long line of far-left outlets lying and deceiving the American people before a major election.
Mayra Guillén, the sister of fallen soldier Vanessa Guillén, whose family was featured as proof in Goldberg’s piece, slammed the outlet and Goldberg for exploiting her sister’s death.
“Wow. I don’t appreciate how you are exploiting my sister’s death for politics — hurtful & disrespectful to the important changes she made for service members,” Mayra stated. “President Donald Trump did nothing but show respect to my family & Vanessa. In fact, I voted for President Trump today.”
Mayra’s comments come after Goldberg claimed that Trump displayed “contempt, rage, parsimony, racism” at the thought of helping the Guillén family pay for Vanessa’s funeral. Vanessa was bludgeoned to death by another soldier at Fort Hood, Texas, and her family was invited to the Oval Office to meet with Trump. Her death was also the impetus for military reforms for women at bases at the state and federal levels.
According to Goldberg’s article, upon hearing that the funeral cost $60,000, Trump said, “It doesn’t cost 60,000 bucks to bury a f-cking Mexican!” and told Mark Meadows, his chief of staff at the time, “Don’t pay it!” The Guillén family is of Mexican origin.
While Goldberg’s claims are sourced by “contemporaneous notes” and “a witness,” they were disputed publicly by senior members of the Trump administration who were actually in the room at the time of the alleged incident.
“Any suggestion that President Trump disparaged Ms. Guillen or refused to pay for her funeral expenses is absolutely false,” Meadows said on social media. “He was nothing but kind, gracious, and wanted to make sure that the military and the U.S. government did right by Vanessa Guillen and her family.”
Goldberg’s smear piece is in line with his 2020 lie, the “suckers and loser” hoax that was also heavily rebutted by nearly everyone involved, which he originated late in the election season as well. Conveniently, Democrats have since been rolling that hoax out every time Trump mentions the military, as they did again in the aftermath of Trump attending the Arlington National Cemetery ceremony.
As my colleague Jordan Boyd wrote, “Nearly two dozen Trump White House officials debunked the hit piece, which only received ‘confirmation’ from one source outside of Goldberg.” In the same way, Goldberg’s newest screed is thinly sourced and relies on anonymous testimony while ignoring or devaluing on-the-record statements.
Goldberg also appears to have invented out of thin air a denial from Meadows spokesman Ben Williamson, saying that Meadows “denied having heard Trump make the statement.” In reality, Meadows said Trump “absolutely did not say that.”
“More disgusting lies from the media,” Kash Patel, former Pentagon chief of staff, posted on social media. “I was there, this is the actual truth, from the family of the fallen, @realDonaldTrump put them first, like he always does with our service members: America Always.”
Goldberg even included a statement Patel in his article, but published the apparent fabrications, anyway.
“As someone who was present in the room with President Trump during that meeting on December 4, he strongly urged that Spc. Vanessa Guillen’s grieving family should not have to bear the cost of any funeral arrangements, even offering to personally pay himself in order to honor her life and sacrifice,” Patel’s statement to Goldberg said. “In addition, President Trump was able to have the Department of Defense designate her death as occurring ‘in the line of duty,’ which gave her full military honors and provided her family access to benefits, services, and complete financial assistance.”
Theo Wold, yet another official who was actually in the room came out publicly to debunk Goldberg’s claims, saying “[Mayra] was poised and confident in advocating for her sister then and she’s right again today: The Atlantic hit piece is a lie.”
“I was at President Trump’s meeting with the Guillén family because I assisted with translation that day. President Trump was genuinely concerned about Vanessa Guillén and appalled by the tragedy the Guillén Family were enduring,” said Wold, former acting assistant attorney general in the Office of Legal Policy at the Department of Justice and deputy assistant to the president for domestic policy. “For example, President Trump had zero interest in the cameras. He met with the Guillén family privately for twenty minutes and offered the press gaggle solely if it would assist them in honoring Army Specialist Guillén and raising awareness about her case.”
“He even told them that day that the press are vipers,” Wold concluded. “Boy was President Trump right.”
The Trump campaign also denied the “f-cking Mexican” comment, which was included in Goldberg’s diatribe: “President Donald Trump never said that. This is an outrageous lie from The Atlantic two weeks before the election,” Alex Pfeiffer, a Trump campaign adviser, said.
Goldberg then turned to more unnamed sources, apparently “two people who heard [Trump] say,” “I need the kind of generals that Hitler had.” Pfeiffer once again denied the comment: “This is absolutely false. President Trump never said this.”
Attempting to trash Trump further, Goldberg randomly asserted that “Trump has frequently voiced his disdain for those who serve in the military and for their devotion to duty, honor, and sacrifice. Former generals who have worked for Trump say that the sole military virtue he prizes is obedience. As his presidency drew to a close, and in the years since, he has become more and more interested in the advantages of dictatorship, and the absolute control over the military that he believes it would deliver.”
As one would expect from propagandists like Goldberg, that assertion takes at face value Democrat fearmongering talking points about “dictatorship,” rhetoric that has been tied to the two assassination attempts on Trump.
Goldberg’s propaganda, however, is completely in step with the publication he works for. The Atlantic is owned by far-left funder Lauren Powell Jobs, who has “built out a well-funded network designed to explicitly advance the policy goals of the Democratic Party,” at The Federalist’s Mark Hemingway reported. In addition, The Atlantic formally endorsed Harris for president earlier this month.
Goldberg’s comment about Trump’s “disdain” for the military becomes nearly impossible to believe when read in the context of how Mayra Guillén and other Gold Star families have spoken of Trump.
Notably, the Gold Star families whose loved ones perished at the Abbey Gate during the Biden administration’s disastrous and deadly withdrawal from Afghanistan invited Trump to attend a service honoring the fallen soldiers at Arlington National Cemetery.
Despite the onslaught of criticism Vice President Kamala Harris unleashed in her attempt to play politics with the deaths of 13 service members at the Abbey Gate, many family members slammed the Biden administration for having gotten their children “murdered,” due to their incompetence.
In contrast, the Abbey Gate Gold Star families note Trump’s generosity.
“Trump has reached out when the current admin ignores Gold Star Families,” Christy Shamblin, mother-in-law of Sergeant Nicole Gee, said. “I’ve grown to know him as approachable, honest, knowl[edge]able about our veterans and above all strong in his belief that our armed service members are the finest the world has and deserve to be treated accordingly.”
Coral Dolittle, mother of Corporal Humberto Sanchez, said, “People often ask me why I support Donald Trump. The answer is simple. Media outlets and social media often portray him as heartless and indifferent, especially toward the military. However, after meeting the man behind the name, I saw a different side of him. Donald Trump is caring, compassionate, and has shown our military families how much he genuinely cares about us, our children, and our grief.”
Adding insult to injury with regard to Goldberg’s checkered reporting past in recent years, he is also a major progenitor of the lies that brought the United States into the Iraq War — which destroyed our military for a generation — again on the backs of unnamed sources.
He did this, as Sohrab Ahmari pointed out in the New York Post, essentially at the behest of “pro-regime-change figures, American and Iraqi.”
The Atlantic did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The Federalist.
Breccan F. Thies is an elections correspondent for The Federalist. He previously covered education and culture issues for the Washington Examiner and Breitbart News. He holds a degree from the University of Virginia and is a 2022 Claremont Institute Publius Fellow. You can follow him on X: @BreccanFThies.
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