Former President Donald Trump has finally started texting, the New York Times reported, citing three people with knowledge of his newfound pursuit.
Trump’s texts recently have hit the phones of “surprised recipients,” the Times said, according to the sources.
The reason why it’s all so head-turning is that Trump to this point has consistently refused to communicate by text or email, the paper said.
Trump’s disciplined avoidance of texting in particular apparently had been a maddening habit in the minds of those looking to bring him down.
More from the Times:
The former president’s resistance to texting frustrated investigators for the House Jan. 6 committee as they tried to track his thoughts and actions when he worked to overturn the 2020 election. In his testimony before the committee, the former president’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., said he texted the White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, during the Capitol attack because his father “doesn’t text.”
The paper said there was a shift around the start of 2023, when “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.”
Not that Trump never used his phone, of course — far from it. But the Times said he had been willing only to speak on his phone and send tweets from it. The paper added a rather humorous aside, noting that “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.”
Worries
The Times reported that a text-savvy Trump “has caused alarm among some of his associates, who are concerned about what he might say.”
It’s quite a shift, apparently, as the paper noted that individuals who have worked for Trump in the White House and elsewhere said he believed he was “smart” for “leaving almost no documentation of his communications and discussions in meetings.”
The Times noted an occasion during which he actually took possession of physical notes created by someone during a meeting — and Trump reportedly ripped the likes of John Bolton, his former national security adviser, for taking notes during meetings.
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