Jake Tapper and Jeffrey Goldberg, Good Buddies Who Hate Trump

Tim Graham / September 06, 2024

News consumers are often unaware of just how friendly the power players in Washington are, and those relationships are often undisclosed. You can tell that Trump haters have a common cause, but it can go much deeper than that.

On CNN’s “The Lead with Jake Tapper” on Sept. 3, the host brought on Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg to promote his new book (of old essays) titled “On Heroism: McCain, Milley, Mattis, and the Cowardice of Donald Trump.” These two men are obviously allies. But they’re also good friends.

This made me recall the newest season of the Netflix food show “Somebody Feed Phil,” starring Phil Rosenthal, the creator of the sitcom “Everybody Loves Raymond.” In an episode touting food spots in Washington, D.C., he had dinner with Goldberg and Tapper at the Indian restaurant Rasika.

The first clue of the friendship is Tapper walking in and tickling the back of Goldberg’s head. Tapper announced, “His kids babysat for my kids.” This doesn’t appear in an on-screen graphic when Goldberg appears on Tapper’s show. Later, he mocked Goldberg when he started talking about his visit to a nuclear bunker. That’s a Washington flex, Tapper said, like saying, “Once I was talking to Fidel Castro over mojitos … ”

Tapper clearly thrilled Goldberg when Rosenthal asked if they were optimistic or pessimistic about the future. Tapper declared: “I’ve just never been in a time where, like, things that I’ve took (sic) for granted—like democracy, and respecting the right of people to vote and all that—were so just, like, nakedly being torn down by major leaders.”

He clearly wouldn’t include Democrats trying to tear Trump’s name off the ballot and forcing Joe Biden out of the race and then trying to keep third-party leftists Jill Stein and Cornel West off the ballot while, at the same time, trying to keep Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s name on the ballot after he left the race and endorsed Trump.

In Tapper’s latest Goldberg interview, they discussed John McCain’s son Jim endorsing Kamala Harris. Goldberg implied that’s how McCain would have voted this year.

Then they decried Trump visiting Arlington Cemetery with grieving Gold Star families and filming the visit. Neither man acknowledged uncomfortable truths, such as McCain filming a campaign advertisement at Arlington, not to mention the professional photographs Biden had taken there.

All this gave Goldberg the license to repeat his magazine’s most hostile Trump stories: “He obviously, very famously got out of Vietnam. He equally famously has referred to people who get killed on behalf of the country as suckers and losers.”

Goldberg mused to Rosenthal that social media is a “vast unregulated experiment,” but no one regulates Goldberg for repeating claims for which he has no evidence—nothing recorded, just claimed. Many people around Trump said it never happened.

Tapper then asked why Trump-hating generals like [Mark] Milley and [James] Mattis won’t openly come out for Harris. “The military is apolitical,” claimed Goldberg without giggling. Because soon he admitted that generals “let it be known, through journalists and through other means, what happened inside the White House in Donald Trump’s first term.”

“The military is apolitical,” except when it leaks to anti-Trump news outlets about how horrible Trump is. Which makes it political, especially the staying-anonymous part. It’s about as apolitical as Goldberg and Tapper.

When the interview was over, Tapper announced Goldberg’s Trump-the-coward book title again and said, “Congratulations. I read them when you first wrote them. And I’ll read them again. This nice little book, good!”

All we were missing was Tapper tickling Goldberg’s head.

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