One of the most consistent personal traits of former President Donald Trump – something that, according to his aides, helped him avoid even worse legal problems – has been his refusal to communicate via text messages or emails. Yet.
Trump, 76, is starting his third presidential campaign and is still under investigation on multiple fronts. Now, according to three people who are privy to his new habit, he’s finally become a texter. The republican’s messages would have recently appeared on the phones of people surprised by this.
The former president’s resistance to texting has frustrated House committee investigators investigating the events of January 6, 2021, when they sought to track Trump’s thoughts and actions as he sought to overturn the results of the 2020 election.
In his testimony before the committee, the former president’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., said that during the attack on the Capitol he communicated with the then White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, because his father “did not send text messages”.
That changed around the beginning of the year. Friends, confidants and even people not very close to Donald Trump began to receive text messages from his cell phone. Most messages were described as innocuous, like New Year’s greetings or political remarks.
It is not new that the former president uses his cell phone constantly, but only to talk – or, before he was expelled from Twitter, to send torrents of tweets. (The former aide who helped create Trump’s Twitter account once told Politico that the former president initially asked aides to write his posts and that when he started to do it himself, it was like the scene in movie “Jurassic Park” in which velociraptors learn to open doors.)
For years, people who corresponded with Trump sent him text messages, which were never answered. It was impossible to communicate with him by email. Trump sometimes asked aides to send e-mails to reporters or cables.
Now his belated adoption of a mode of communication that has for years been the most common among several generations signals not only a willingness to enter the world of “kkkk” and “pft”, but also a small change in his aversion to leaving electronic traces or on paper.
People who worked for Trump in the White House and on his private business say he prided himself on being “clever” by leaving virtually no documentation of his communications and discussions at meetings. That included confiscating notes taken in real time by a junior legal adviser in his office in the 1990s when Trump caught him writing, according to a consultant who worked for him at the time.
People who have witnessed firsthand his visceral aversion to leaving written traces said they were shocked when they learned of his new electronic habit.
“Did he start taking notes too?” asked John Bolton, Trump’s former national security adviser, when he learned that the former president had started writing text messages.
Trump has severely criticized Bolton for taking notes during meetings. Bolton has written one of the most powerful books about the Trump presidency.
Trump also berated Donald McGahn II, his first White House counsel, for notes the latter took. Interviewed by Special Counsel Robert Mueller during the Russia interference investigation, McGahn said he informed Trump that he took notes because he was “a real lawyer”.
“I’ve had a lot of great lawyers, like Roy Cohn. He didn’t write anything down,” Trump reportedly said, referring to the mentor and “irregular facilitator” who worked for him for years, backed down from nothing and became the prototype of what Trump was looking for in a lawyer.
The fact that Trump is now texting has spooked some of his associates, who are worried about what he might write. But they are relieved by another novelty: Now, when Trump receives calls from numbers not on his contact list, the former president’s phone sends them directly to his answering machine, according to two people familiar with the change.
The change came this month after an NBC reporter called Trump directly during Kevin McCarthy’s desperate fight to be elected Speaker of the House. Trump answered the phone and gave a brief interview that provoked political heartburn in the Republican field.
It remains to be seen what Trump’s stance is on emojis.
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