Trump Officials Trolling Journalists is Just the Tip of the Iceberg

Behind the harassment of individual reporters is a full-scale assault on media freedom

By Liam Scott

When The Atlantic’s editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg revealed last month that he had inadvertently been invited into a Signal group chat of senior U.S. national security officials, the news dominated headlines, cable broadcasts and social media for several days.

While Democratic lawmakers called for an investigation into the incident, Trump officials set their sights elsewhere: on Goldberg himself.

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, who faced calls to resign over revealing detailed attack plans in the chat, called Goldberg “a deceitful and highly discredited so-called journalist” who “peddles in garbage.”

Vice President JD Vance, who was also in the chat, claimed that Goldberg “oversold what he had.” And White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said that Goldberg, who is well-respected in mainstream media circles, was “well-known for his sensationalist spin.”

The harassment Goldberg faced was an unusually intense pile-on, but it underscores the increasingly common trend of targeting individual journalists by administration officials and even President Donald Trump.

“It’s clearly an effort to intimidate and silence journalists,” Kathy Kiely, chair in free press studies at the Missouri School of Journalism, told me.

Goldberg’s targeting validates concerns about the Trump administration’s broader assault on media freedom, press freedom experts said, and it echoes similar attacks on reporters in authoritarian countries around the world.

For years, Trump has accused the mainstream media of bias and has even referred to it as “the enemy of the people,” in an increasingly contentious relationship that has also long featured journalist harassment. Leading up to and during Trump’s first term, the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker documented more than 2,000 anti-media posts by Trump made on the social media platform X, then known as Twitter. In more than 500 of those posts, specific journalists were the primary targets. (The Tracker said it would have likewise monitored anti-media posts from President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris if those kinds of posts actually existed.)

This trolling may be more of the same from Trump, but familiarity should make it no less alarming that the president of the United States regularly lashes out against individual journalists.

And now, it’s not just Trump. Others, including Vance, Hegseth, Leavitt, White House Communications Director Steven Cheung, Special Envoy Richard Grenell and DOGE’s Elon Musk, have all targeted journalists online — with varied frequency and intensity — since Inauguration Day three months ago.

The cost for those targeted can be high. Online abuse is far from a new phenomenon, especially for reporters; backlash and criticism are often considered part of being a journalist with a social media presence. But “the fallout is much higher” when it’s a public official who is the perpetrator, according to Ela Stapley, digital security advisor at the Committee to Protect Journalists. When an official harasses a journalist, it can trigger an avalanche of intense harassment — and sometimes even doxxing, and death and rape threats — from other social media users, she said. The impact disproportionately impacts women, according to multiple studies. In the longer term, it can push journalists to self-censor or leave the media profession entirely.

In February, after Grenell (in a since-deleted post) called a social media post critical of Trump "treasonous," the critical post's author, Voice of America reporter Steve Herman, received a flurry of attacks, including death threats, from other social media users. Herman, whom I worked with at VOA, said he observed these kinds of attacks on journalists during the first Trump administration. But this time around, it feels more intense, he said. “It appears that the officials are more emboldened this time around. It seems almost part of the job description,” Herman told me.

Elisa Lees Muñoz, executive director of the Washington-based International Women’s Media Foundation, agrees. The harassment has become “extraordinarily ordinary now,” she said. “This tactic has been deemed to be successful and is being adopted by everybody around the president.”

When government officials target journalists online, the goal is often to discredit them and, by extension, their work, according to Stapley. The end game is to “sow distrust in the media,” she said.

While historically rare in the United States, the strategy is more common in other countries with historically poor press freedom records, like Brazil, Mexico and the Philippines, according to Muñoz.

For the Trump administration, this harassment is taking place within the context of a broader assault on the media and press freedom. Lawsuits, investigations and blocked media access are other weapons in the arsenal, according to Clayton Weimers, the U.S. director of Reporters Without Borders. “It’s open season on journalism,” Weimers told me. “Insults are just a symptom of the broader attitude toward the press.”

In response to a request for comment, White House spokesperson Anna Kelly said, “Many so-called ‘reporters’ will lie or spin because they hate the President” and that “those individuals will be rightfully called out for failing to be neutral arbiters of truth.” The Defense Department said it had no comment.

Some U.S. news outlets have stood up against the harassment. When Trump attacked New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Peter Baker in late March, the newspaper said in a statement that “intimidation tactics against Times reporters or their family members have never caused us to back down from our mission of holding powerful people to account.”

Baker told me that he doesn’t want to minimize the problem, but he also said the harassment he experiences doesn’t really bother him. Ignoring the harassment is his strategy. “We’ve got to be careful not to let it get in our heads too much, because we can’t let that stop us from doing our jobs,” Baker said. “It’s not our job to make him happy, just as it’s not our job to make any president happy.”

There are steps journalists can take to protect themselves, according to Stapley, including signing up for data aggregate removal sites like DeleteMe, which make it harder for would-be perpetrators to find an individual’s personal information online. Stapley also recommended that journalists separate their professional social media presence from their personal one, and have a plan in the event that they’re doxxed.

“The more you can do in advance, the better,” she said.

As concerning as the problem is, Muñoz proposed that the harassment also affirms the power that journalists wield.

“You can be a little heartened by the extent to which the administration is going after the news media, because it is probably the biggest threat to their agenda,” she said. “It does speak to the power of the news media as the ultimate source of holding people to account.”

---

Liam Scott is an award-winning journalist who covered press freedom and disinformation for Voice of America from 2021 to 2025. He has also reported and written for outlets including Foreign Policy, the Columbia Journalism Review, New Lines, The Diplomat and Coda Story. He received his bachelor's degree from Georgetown University, where he served as executive editor of the student newspaper The Hoya.