The first hundred days of Trump 2.0 brought forth more material than infinity reporters typing on infinity laptops for infinity years could possibly report. The “flood the zone” strategy—brought to us from the mind of Steve Bannon, the MAGA media strategist—has been around since at least 2018, but now, as the New York Times put it, “the flood is bigger, wider and more brutally efficient”; the same article also included the phrases “overwhelming sensory overload,” “drinking from a fire hose,” and “gasping in outrage.” Each of these metaphors hit the news media directly, and hard. And then, on March 11, they gushed into the Signal chat of one journalist in particular.

Maybe you heard about it . But in case not: I hate to be the one to tell you that Mike Waltz, the national security adviser, joined a bunch of his colleagues—and oh, yes, also Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor of The Atlantic —on a group text message thread on the Signal platform about bombing Yemen. It was a whopper of a story, and a crowd-pleaser, too. It had everything: stunning levels of operational incompetence, JD Vance undermining his boss in writing, the fire emoji. Goldberg even treated readers to a description of himself sitting around in a supermarket parking lot refreshing his X feed, waiting to see if the chat’s plans came to fruition. (They did.) Goldberg, sensing that he’d been invited unintentionally, decided not long after to leave the chat. He published a story about what happened. There were hearings; denials were issued. The memes were tremendous. It would have been funny if the thread in question weren’t about killing people.

The Trump administration, obviously, did everything it could to wave the whole situation away. The president claimed the debacle was no big deal because it’s not like a chat about whether and where to launch an air strike contains classified information. (Two days later, The Atlantic published a follow-up that included, among other revelations, screengrabs from the chat containing information about the precise times American planes were set to descend on Yemen.) The Atlantic ’s reporting rendered Trump’s defense of the chat’s existence and contents ridiculous. But what does that matter to this White House?

The absurdity of the response made sense to Margaret Sullivan—the executive director of Columbia’s Craig Newmark Center for Journalism Ethics and Security, who also writes for The Guardian and her Substack American Crisis . “It doesn’t surprise me at all that the reaction from the Trump administration has been to go on the attack and to criticize Goldberg and to say that he’s sleazy and a bad journalist and all of that,” she said. “Because that’s what they do.” Goldberg “was a model of caution and good judgment,” as she put it in her column. She told me, “There are certainly reporters who would have not left the text loop as soon as he did. There are those who would have maybe published some of the information earlier. I think he handled it ethically.”

Soon, however, there were two conversations happening at the same time: the first about the eye-popping lack of respect for norms that the Trump administration officials displayed in conducting this grim business on Signal, and a second, way quieter one, about the journalistic norms to which Goldberg and The Atlantic adhered in reporting the story. Goldberg’s decision to cut bait set off a cascade of texts in other (ostensibly private) chats, as journalists asked each other, Would you have stuck around longer than Goldberg did?

Goldberg didn’t respond to my request to talk, either, but in early April, he shared his thinking with his colleague Ashley Parker, during a video conversation for Atlantic subscribers. “I take national security seriously,” he said, on why he left the chat when he did. “A reporter’s responsibility in a national security context—and I’m very clear about this, I know there are some people who disagree with me about this, but I’m very clear—I’m an American journalist. I might disagree with a policy, but I’m not going to do anything that could endanger the lives of American pilots or service people.” Whether you found yourself more aligned with Herndon’s or Sullivan’s feelings on his actions, Goldberg’s respect for convention was inarguable.

Indeed, my friend Max Read, who has a Substack called Read Max and an accompanying podcast, discussed the Goldberg-Signal situation on a recent episode, and observed that Goldberg actually seemed to care more about national security norms than Trump’s national security team did. “It actually is a huge bummer to have your suspicions about the operations of power be confirmed,” Read said, referring to the power of the government and the US war machine. In Read’s view, we have a better shot of building a better world—in which, say, civilians might not be killed in military strikes—“where there is at least a nominal commitment to some kind of norms and legal procedure.”

For all the horrors Trump 1.0 visited upon the American people, the administration at least gave the impression of caring about the basic outlines of how things typically go—appearing, for instance, to be aware of the concept of term limits. “Fake news” implied the existence of “real news.” Goldberg, in his talk with Parker, underlined how weird the Trump 2.0 response to him was. He’d expected Waltz to call him up and say something along the lines of “‘Jeff, why are you on this chat?’ Something.” Not what happened. Goldberg contrasted Trump’s cabinet’s baffling lack of concern with what the reaction might have been if an “ordinary administration” were in charge: they’d call the editor and try to talk him or her out of publishing the thing, and the editor would make the “best argument for transparency.” “What happened here was nothing. Nothing. And that was the most surprising thing about my withdrawal from the Signal chat,” he said. “That is something I can’t explain.” In the end, something did happen: on Thursday, the news broke that Waltz was out as national security adviser, and headed to the United Nations. Even so, the new stakes for journalism had already announced themselves: Who gets to set the norms around here?

For weeks leading up to Signalgate, as we began calling it, a sense had been growing that something wasn’t right. Business-as-usual journalism seemed not to be penetrating for all of those people who had consumed the news in greater numbers during Trump’s first stampede through the White House. Nor did the general public seem alarmed by what has felt to some journalists like a sudden onset of increased occupational hazards: in late March, Pew released a study finding that although most Americans were tuned in to coverage of the administration, word of Trump’s attacks on the press wasn’t getting around. Just 36 percent of survey respondents said they’d heard “a lot” about the Trump administration’s relationship with the news media, and nearly a fifth said they’d heard “nothing at all.” That represented a significant drop from Trump’s first term, when 72 percent of Americans said that they had heard a lot about his administration’s dealings with the press. The lack of awareness of the tension—and the way in which the White House has utterly undermined journalistic norms, from populating the briefing room with MAGA freaks to spewing lies—has made it understandably hard for both reporters and followers of news to wring information out of propaganda.

That anxiety hung in the air on a night in early February, as I listened to a string quartet play a medley of business-thriller-inspired songs that included the theme to Succession . The audience wasn’t there for chamber music, exactly—but what the hell, it’s 2025, you don’t always get what you’re expecting. We’d come to drink wine out of little plastic cups and hear Gabriel Sherman, a correspondent for Vanity Fair , discuss the making of his recent movie, The Apprentice . The event, part of a series called The Night Editor, was run by two journalist friends of mine, David Gauvey Herbert and Mitch Moxley. The basic idea is to hang out and hear tales out of school from editors and writers, working mostly in magazines. Some, such as Sherman, have hopped back and forth from reporting to movies.

If you haven’t seen it, know that The Apprentice is a Trump biopic that’s mostly concerned with the president’s early mentor-mentee relationship with Roy Cohn, the lawyer-slash-monster who wielded extraordinary political influence in his time, including by assisting Joseph McCarthy’s persecution of suspected communists. Sherman described him at the event as providing “the link between the underworld and the legitimate world” for a young Trump. Eventually, Cohn succumbed to AIDS as Trump rose to the height of his real estate power and dumped his former father figure. The movie almost—almost—makes one feel bad for Cohn. It’s very Shakespearean.

Sherman spoke of his challenges trying to get The Apprentice made, as the movie “ran into the buzz saw” of what he perceived to be Hollywood’s cowardice. He also talked about the possibilities afforded by stepping outside the confines of traditional journalistic form, even as he based the screenplay on legal documents, interviews, and historical fact. “There’s no shortage of information about Donald Trump,” he told the room, “and yet he’s not known as a human being.” Listening to Sherman, it was easy to see the appeal, to a longtime reporter, of turning to Hollywood to paint a fuller picture of Trump the man. And surely, such a picture would be useful to our collective understanding of this singularly powerful person. For a fleeting moment, I could squint and see a thriving media ecosystem concerned not with exactly what happened, when, and to whom but fundamentally what happened, presented with a little artistic flourish.

The problem is that that’s not journalism. It’s a curious thing that in pursuit of the same goal—to provide as detailed a story of Trump as possible—two forms might have such contradictory methods, such contrasting norms. One goes outside the minute-by-minute facts to reveal a larger, more profound reality. The other is devoted to reporting facts—even if that sometimes smooths over complexity or context. I’m oversimplifying here, but the contrast helps define journalism’s limits. They’re limits that, say, Bannon feels free to get creative with—and, when faced with an administration that flouts those rules, abiding by them can make a reporter’s job so much harder.

And that is what happened to the Associated Press, just days after Trump took office. Trump signed an executive order changing the name of the Gulf of Mexico to—I’m sorry, I’m sorry—the Gulf of America. The AP declined to incorporate his preferred nomenclature into its style guide. Trump responded by giving the AP the boot from the White House press pool. Real nice. The AP has since challenged that decision in court, a move that suggests an enduring faith in norms and institutions that the administration itself lacks. No , the AP seems to be saying, we haven’t given up yet . It also reflects a similar impulse to the one Goldberg described: a refusal to match Trump’s disregard with some disregard of its own.

Administrations have lied to reporters forever, but no one’s ever done it quite like him. “When you’re dealing with Donald Trump,” Sullivan told me, “you are almost always dealing with misinformation, misstatements, and lies. And so journalists have to be attuned to what best serves the public, and that is seeking and publishing the truth and placing that above access.” For Sherman, the answer was to make a movie, to step outside what we’d consider classical journalism norms. But what enables Trump to care so little about convention is, at its heart, a lack of care about what is and isn’t true. A movie such as The Apprentice does care about that distinction, and deeply. At the event, Sherman shared how he had to annotate the script “basically line by line, every scene, every piece of dialogue,” to make notes for the film’s lawyers about what was and wasn’t “real.”

“I thought that a film,” Sherman said, “a dramatic film, could puncture through the culture in a way that journalism couldn’t.” Considering those Pew numbers, it’s hard not to concede that he’s got a point. After Sherman’s talk, I watched two journalists I know get back in line for yet another cup of warm wine. I completely understood.

Then there’s the Bill Maher approach. Maher, who recently dined with Trump at the White House, described the experience on an episode of his show: “The guy I met,” he reported, was not the same as the Trump in public view; he was “gracious and measured.” (Larry David, in a Times satire, reimagined the scenario as a meal with an Adolf Hitler who is much more sensitive than his critics give him credit for, writing that “it wasn’t just a one-way street, with the Führer dominating the conversation.” David concluded that “we’re not that different, after all. I thought that if only the world could see this side of him, people might have a completely different opinion.”)

Maher was only the latest in a string of capitulators—there have been tech barons, law firms, universities doing versions of the same—and I wondered whether news organizations would follow suit. Already, the corporate owners of major newspapers have revealed their interest in trading editorial independence for corporate gain, including Jeff Bezos, of the Washington Post , and Patrick Soon-Shiong, of the Los Angeles Times , both of whom spiked endorsements of Kamala Harris, and have since made moves in support of Trump.

But when I asked reporters whether they thought all of this—the calls coming from both outside and inside the newsroom—merited a change of journalistic tack, they were firm: We have rules for a reason, everyone said. You can’t print what someone said to you off the record if you both agreed to that. You can’t ignore conflicts of interest. You can’t pretend to be someone you’re not. When Karoline Leavitt goes low , you’ve got to go high.

These are the norms that professional journalists continue to follow. But the political ascendancy of Trump upended the popular understanding of who gets to identify as part of that group, as the Bannons of right-wing media have proliferated, and filled the internet with drivel, confusion, and conspiracy. My friend Anna Merlan, a senior reporter at Mother Jones , covers that beat, including how it intersects with extremism. When I asked her about whether journalists need to rethink their approach, she wasn’t sure she agreed with the premise of the question.

“Did journalism not work because Trump is in power?” she replied. “I don’t think that’s the right way to look at it. I think our job requires us to try to understand the factors that led up to Trump being in power.” Merlan’s parents are both historians, and she feels their influence on her work. “I’m doing two things,” she said. “One is creating the historical record—like, news coverage creates a historical record for later generations to understand what was happening. The other thing is that I am hopefully giving people information now about the forces that govern their lives.”

To that end, “the basic rules have served us pretty well,” she said. “Even in situations like this where, you know, we don’t know if our reporting is making an impact, or the people we’re reporting on don’t always respect us, I still think there’s a reason for the rules.”

In the weeks after Signalgate, there were plot twists galore. Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary, has turned out to be something of a Signal power user , and Trump agreed to an interview with The Atlantic . Coverage of Waltz, who will become the ambassador to the UN, doesn’t provide official word on why he lost his last job, though one imagines it may have had something to do with how much room for improvement there was in his opsec. But the further out we get from Signalgate, the less it feels like a news story and more like a news-about-the-news story. After all, Trump has had a trade war to wage, funding for medical research to slash, and American citizens to deport.

The cliché about deks with a question in them is that the answer is always yes. But in the face of the collapse of every norm we know, some of which we love, I find some relief in knowing that journalism isn’t giving itself an overhaul. There aren’t infinity American journalists who can type for infinity years. But maybe we won’t have to. Maybe, if we can just keep typing for the next four, declining to bend to the bullshit, we can meet a humble goal: keeping it to four.