The New York Times reports today that our commander-in-chief uses a personal iPhone that’s insecure and routinely surveilled by Russian and Chinese intelligence agencies. Despite being warned repeatedly about this, he continues to use it to call up his friends and yak all night long:
White House officials say they can only hope he refrains from discussing classified information when he is on them….They said they had further confidence he was not spilling secrets because he rarely digs into the details of the intelligence he is shown and is not well versed in the operational specifics of military or covert activities.
My spirit has been crushed over the past two years and I am no longer truly surprised by anything Donald Trump does or by how the Republican Party collectively shrugs about it. I meet each new revelation with a thousand-yard stare and then a robotic move of the mouse to see if there’s any other news I might be interested in.
And yet. Occasionally something still produces a tiny flicker of neurotransmitters somewhere in the vicinity of my amygdala. When that happens, I blink my eyes as if awakening from a stupor and take a closer look at the text on my computer screen. Text like this:
White House officials say they can only hope he refrains from discussing classified information when he is on them.
Trump is a Republican, right? This is the party that spent two years pretending to be outraged that Hillary Clinton used an unclassified network to respond to an email about a phone call to the newly-elected president of Malawi. But their reaction to the president of the United States chatting merrily away on a phone that we know the Russians and Chinese are listening in on? Apparently nothing.
But, you know, President Obama once saluted a Marine while holding a coffee cup in his hand. So I guess there’s plenty of justified outrage on both sides, amirite?
