There is little that can even be said about this. Trump’s obsessive attachment to his personal phone has been long known; it has also been known since day one that his personal phone was insecure, and government officials have been asking him to use secure versions instead.
The New York Times now reports that U.S. intelligence officers now know that Chinese and Russian officials have in fact been listening to Trump’s calls—and that Trump refused to change his behavior to prevent it. He is still being spied on even now.
Mr. Trump’s aides have repeatedly warned him that his cellphone calls are not secure, and they have told him that Russian spies are routinely eavesdropping on the calls, as well. But aides say the voluble president, who has been pressured into using his secure White House landline more often these days, has still refused to give up his iPhones. White House officials say they can only hope he refrains from discussing classified information when he is on them.
That’s all the White House staff can do: “hope” that the dementia-addled incompetent does not discuss classified information on the insecure phone that they know for a fact is being monitored by foreign spy agencies.
The reason he is refusing to take action, according to the officials speaking to the New York Times: because he has his personal contacts in this phone, so he demands to use this phone. That’s it. That’s all.
He has dementia. He is either a new level of stupid never before seen in the human race, or he has genuine, uncontrolled, incapacitating dementia. He is unfit for White House duties in every last way—and still, his Republican hangers-on do nothing but protect him, even at the expense of the country.
Can you even begin to imagine the furor that would erupt if any other past government official ever, ever ignored secret intelligence community warnings that their calls were being spied on by multiple foreign powers but let it keep happening, on purpose, because switching to a new phone was too inconvenient? Can you even begin to imagine that? Can you imagine Clinton, Bush, Obama, or even some low-level White House coffee-fetcher doing that, and how many Republicans would go absolutely bald within five minutes from their hair-pulling panic?
And what to make of this leak? The New York Times is an extremely reliable source for things that White House officials themselves want to leak to the public, so it is 99% certain that White House officials are now leaking ongoing, successful foreign espionage against the sitting president because they are frantically scrambling to force the tremendous bloated idiot to stop letting it happen. And it will probably not work, because he doesn’t care, not even a little. All he has to do is switch from one iPhone to another, and the problem would be solved; it is too much for him. It is more than he can handle, because he is either stupid or egregiously mentally ill.