The Secret History of Trump’s Private Cellphone

Does the world need another profile of Donald Trump? Almost certainly not. And yet the details from Ashley Parker and Michael Scherer’s study of Trump’s cellphone habits have a way of lingering in the mind. The president’s personal number is “broadly circulated.” He picks up calls from unknown numbers, and keeps a photograph of his own face on his lock screen. The Cellphone in Chief is a “portal,” Parker and Scherer write, but it’s also a mirror, a security blanket, and a vulnerability. Their short psychological study suggests a man who is occasionally disembodied: more of his phone than of the world.

For more than a decade, the once and future president had been warned of the enormous risks he took—as perhaps the top global target of foreign intelligence services—by using a personal iPhone with a broadly circulated number to keep in touch with dozens of friends and colleagues. His phone was a lifeline, though. He wasn’t going to give it up.

Days later, when he won the presidency for the second time, his phone lit up, just as it had eight years earlier on Election Night 2016. “You won’t believe it,” Trump marveled in early-morning phone calls after the race was decided last year, according to an adviser. “I’ve already had 20 world leaders call me. They all want to kiss my ass.”

A little more than four months into his second term, the president’s personal cellphone has become, in many ways, the most pivotal technological device in the federal government, directly linking Trump to the outside world. Lawmakers, friends, family members, corporate titans, celebrities, world leaders, and journalists regularly call it, knowing that, unminded by aides, Trump remains open to picking up the phone, even when he does not recognize the number.