Donald Trump spends his time gabbing on the phone to his rich friends and rage-tweeting, and while he does those things, he may also be doing a third thing: exposing himself to surveillance and compromised information. That’s because Trump refuses to give up his convenience for greater security. He has two phones, Politico reports: one that makes calls and one to tweet and read news on.
While aides have urged the president to swap out the Twitter phone on a monthly basis, Trump has resisted their entreaties, telling them it was “too inconvenient,” the same administration official said.
The president has gone as long as five months without having the phone checked by security experts. It is unclear how often Trump’s call-capable phones, which are essentially used as burner phones, are swapped out.
Even better, Trump’s call-capable phone has a camera and microphone, so if anyone managed to hack into it, it would be an extra-special source of information on Trump’s movements and what was going on around him. But an anonymous White House official insists that the camera and microphone are no problem, because “Due to inherent capabilities and advancement in technologies, these devices are more secure than any Obama-era devices.” Mind you, “Obama-era” doesn’t just mean 2009, it means 2016. So … Trump entered office and within months, a phone with a camera and microphone was suddenly more secure than a phone without those features had been months earlier?
It’s almost too easy to contrast this with Trump campaigning on the idea that Hillary Clinton’s email security practices disqualified her from being president and in fact probably meant she should be jailed, and yet how can you not draw that contrast? Trump is intentionally disregarding security advice because it’s “too inconvenient” to have staff briefly take his Twitter phone away and swap it out once a month.
But since none of his supporters actually care about the disconnect between his campaign words and his actions in office any more than Trump cares about being truthful or consistent, there won’t be any political consequences until hacked information is used against him by a foreign government. Which he’ll blame on the FBI and Democrats, anyway.