That changed around the beginning of this year. Friends, confidants and even people not especially close to Donald Trump began receiving text messages from his cellphone, most of them described as innocuous, such as new year greetings or political observations. A spokesperson for Trump declined to comment.
The former president has long been constantly on his phone, but only to talk into it — or, before he was kicked off Twitter, to send streams of tweets. (The former aide who helped set up his Twitter account once told Politico that when Trump, who initially relied on aides to write his posts, began to tweet on his own, it was akin to the scene in the film Jurassic Park when the velociraptors learned to open doors.)
For years, people corresponding with him sent him text messages, which always went unanswered. He was unreachable by email. He sometimes asked aides to send electronic messages to reporters, referring to the missives as “wires,” like a telegram.
Now his delayed embrace of what has long been a default mode of communication spanning generations signals not only a willingness to join in the world of LOLs and BRBs but also a small shift from his aversion to leaving paper or electronic trails.
People who have worked for Trump in the White House and in his private business say he has prided himself on being “smart” for leaving almost no documentation of his communications and discussions in meetings. That included snatching notes being taken in real time by a junior legal associate in his offices in the 1990s, when Trump spotted the man scribbling, according to a consultant working for him then.
Those who have witnessed firsthand his visceral aversion to record keeping said they were shocked to learn about his new electronic habit.
“Has he now also started to take notes?” John Bolton, Trump’s former national security adviser, dryly texted when told about the former president’s texting.
Trump upbraided Bolton, who wrote one of the most searing book-length accounts of the Trump presidency, for taking notes during meetings.
Trump also chided Donald McGahn II, his first White House counsel, for notes he took. McGahn, when interviewed by special counsel Robert Mueller during the Russia investigation, described informing Trump that he took notes because he was a “real lawyer.”
“I’ve had a lot of great lawyers, like Roy Cohn. He did not take notes,” McGahn recounted Trump saying, referring to his ruthless longtime fixer and mentor who became the prototype for what Trump sought in a lawyer.
A former Trump White House official, who asked not to be identified in order to speak candidly, described the former president’s penchant for avoiding leaving records so there was “nothing to follow” as a possible “parable from Roy Cohn’s time.”
The fact that Trump is now sending texts has caused alarm among some of his associates, who are concerned about what he might say. Still, they have been relieved about another shift: His phone now sends calls that are not from numbers in his contacts to voicemail, according to two people familiar with the change.
That shift occurred this month after an NBC reporter called Trump directly during Rep. Kevin McCarthy’s desperate fight to be elected speaker of the House. Trump picked up, giving a brief interview that created some political heartburn for Republicans.
Still unclear is Trump’s position on emoji.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman
Photographs by: Doug Mills
©2023 THE NEW YORK TIMES
