Yesterday, the New York Times published an article asserting that Donald Trump has a habit of making calls on unsecured cell phones, allowing Russian and Chinese spies to listen in—and they do. Trump has, of course, insisted that the story is false, as have Chinese officials, although they managed to do it with a more insulting tone that would make International-Level Troll Vladimir Putin proud.
Gizmodo reports that, according to a Washington Post researcher, China spokeswoman Hua Chunying said, “If they are very worried about iPhones being tapped, they can use Huawei.” What he’s taking a dig at there is a ban on U.S. government use of Huawei phones that Trump himself signed, amid national security concerns over potential spying through hardware produced by the smartphone maker that U.S. politicians have called “essentially an arm of the Chinese government.”
Knowing Trump’s fragile ego, we’re probably actually lucky that Trump himself will probably never hear of that obvious taunt, nor understand what it’s getting at if he did.
Trump’s own denial, on the other hand, is still kind of funny, if for entirely unintentional reasons—well, if you can call it “Trump’s denial” when it was obviously written either by one of his aides or by committee, which you can always kind of tell when they poorly replicate his capitalize-random-words style and the wording seems a little too thoughtful to have come from Trump himself:
The New York Times has a new Fake Story that now the Russians and Chinese (glad they finally added China) are listening to all of my calls on cellphones. Except that I rarely use a cellphone, & when I do it’s government authorized. I like Hard Lines. Just more made up Fake News!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 25, 2018
He can feel free to rebut the idea that anyone else is writing his tweets for him, but then he’d have to admit that he sent this tweet personally from an iPhone, fairly well in line with the Times reporting he claims is so fake, so … I’m good either way.
Trump tweet with “Twitter for iPhone” tag. (image: screengrab)
That aside, reports have been circulating, since Trump got into office, that he’s reluctant to give up his own phone, with Twitter platform tags like this to back it all up, not to mention that if The New York Times’ story even were false, it would be because members of Trump’s own administration lied about it, not because the Times is lying. If their sources inside the administration are feeding them false information, it’s not the journalists who are the ones doing something wrong.
That hasn’t stopped Trump from blaming the media for sowing anger and division, amid ongoing reports of bombs being sent to prominent Trump critics and those he’s actively stoked hate for.
(via Gizmodo, image: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
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