As the head of a private business, Donald Trump is known for keeping his employees divided and suspicious of one another, and his White House is not turning out any different. Add an ongoing beef with the intelligence community and the mere existence of civil servants throughout government who aren’t Trump loyalists, and Trump’s people are descending to full-on paranoia. A senior administration aide told Politico that “People are scared” in a White House that’s “a pretty hostile environment to work in.” But there’s more:
In an interview, one White House aide described the elaborate steps he was taking to shield himself. Once he gets home in the evening, he turns off his work phone and stores it in a drawer because, he said, he believes it could be used to listen to him even when it’s off. If he makes a call during off-hours, he uses a separate, personal phone in an adjoining room, where the stowed work device wouldn’t be able to pick up his voice as clearly.
Psst, guy: If they can use your work phone to listen to you while it’s turned off in a drawer, they can probably listen in on your personal phone. It’s also a fascinating thing to be paranoid about after high-level Trump staffers used the lights on their phones to read documents publicly after North Korea tested a missile.
One agency aide said he had become particularly circumspect in meetings and was taking additional steps to protect himself, like keeping his office door closed during the day. He has used his off-time to catalogue the Twitter and Facebook postings of co-workers who he suspects harbor anti-Trump views and could be a threat.
Spending your time away from work to sift through your coworkers’ social media accounts to see who disagrees with you politically is both impressively paranoid and a reason civil service employees should be looking over their own shoulders constantly and refusing to call it paranoia—because the Trump people really are out to get them.
In addition to being afraid that the intelligence community and civil servants are out to get them, Trump’s staff are also engaged in constant infighting and suspicion of one another as they jockey for position. But that suspicion is probably justified, because all the evidence suggests that Trump’s White House is a snake pit stocked with every kind of venomous serpent.