The real reason Donald Trump prefers to make phone calls on his unsecured personal cellphone

| 10:55 pm EDT October 24, 2018
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For quite some time now, there have been scattered media reports that Donald Trump was making important phone calls on an unsecured personal cellphone, in defiance of all possible security precautions. Now tonight we’re learning that – to the surprise of no one – Russia and China have been spying on his calls all along. The big question is why, and frankly, the answer isn’t all that difficult to parse.

According to the New York Times, Donald Trump has three iPhones in his possession. The first two have been properly secured by the federal government, while the third is straight off the shelf. People around Trump are insisting that he prefers using the unsecured phone because it’s the only one that he can store his contacts on. But this is frankly kind of nonsensical, and the obvious real explanation is a far darker one.

We all know that Donald Trump regularly makes phone calls to get advice from the scuzziest of his political advisers – the ones who became so scandal plagued during the election, he couldn’t get away with giving them White House jobs. There has been widespread reporting that after Trump took office, he was even calling up Paul Manafort to discuss strategy. Manafort has since pleaded guilty to several felonies.

So why does Donald Trump prefer to use an off-the-shelf cellphone to make so many of his phone calls? He obviously thinks that people like the U.S. intel community and/or federal prosecutors can monitor what he’s saying on the government-provided phones, and so he’s making his phone calls to his criminal buddies on a regular phone. If anything that just makes it easier for the Feds to listen in, but don’t tell that to Trump, whose stated understanding of technology is pathetic at best. Trump doesn’t want to use a government phone because he’s been using his phone to criminally plot with his criminal pals.