For most of his 76 years on earth, Donald Trump has famously refused to engage with two popular modes of communication: emails and text messages. In 2007, in sworn testimony, he said he didn’t have a computer at home or at the office. And on the 2016 campaign trail, he called himself “not an email person,” saying he was “not a believer” in it. Later that year, aides told Politico they had never received a text message from him, and during his testimony before the January 6 committee, Donald Trump Jr. told the panel his father “doesn’t text.”
Setting aside that this aversion to technology made Trump look like the luddite he is, it’s actually served him incredibly well by preventing him from creating an electronic paper trail of his (potentially) criminal acts. (Literally shredding documents and possibly flushing them down the toilet helped on the actual paper front.) But apparently the siren song of LOLs and ROTFLMAOs has finally become too strong for him to resist.
The New York Times reports that Trump “has at last become a texter,” according to a trio of people familiar with his new hobby. According to reporters Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman, the ex-president’s text messages “have recently shown up in the phones of surprised recipients,” and while most of them have apparently been “innocuous, such as new year greetings or political observations,” some of his associates are concerned and fearful “about what he might say.” Like, for instance, something about “doing another January 6” if the 2024 election doesn’t go his way, or revealing that he took top secret documents from the White House as some kind of insurance in the event he’s ever prosecuted by the federal government. Things like that!
Indeed, as the Times notes:
The former president’s [previous] 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.
For years, people corresponding with him sent him text messages, which always went unanswered. He was unreachable by email. He sometimes asked aides to send electronic messages to reporters, referring to the missives as “wires,” like a telegram. People who have worked for Mr. Trump in the White House and in his private business say he has prided himself on being “smart” for leaving almost no documentation of his communications and discussions in meetings…. Those who have witnessed firsthand his visceral aversion to record-keeping said they were shocked to learn about his new electronic habit.
For those of you wondering how Trump’s prior lack of 21st-century communication tools jived with his very modern Twitter obsession, that was a rare exception, and it was extremely rocky at the start. As the Times reminds us, “The former aide who helped set up his Twitter account once told Politico that when Mr. 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.”
Anyway, good for the former guy for embracing new things. Would be a terrible shame if it accidentally led to him actually being held responsible for his actions for once!
George Santos, who falsely claimed his grandparents fled Hitler, reportedly joked about killing “Jews and Blacks”
One of George Santos’s biggest and most offensive lies was the one he told, on multiple occasions, about having grandparents who’d had to run for their lives during the Holocaust. In 2021, the then candidate claimed in a campaign video that his “grandparents survived the Holocaust.” Several months later, he told the Jewish News Syndicate: “I’m very proud of my grandparents’ story,” which he said included “fleeing Hitler.” Perhaps laying the groundwork for his explanation in the event he got caught in this specific fabrication, he told Fox News Digital in February: “For a lot of people who are descendants of World War II refugees or survivors of the Holocaust, a lot of names and paperwork were changed in name of survival.”
Like so many things that have come out of Santos’s mouth, the one about his grandparents and the Holocaust does not, in fact, appear to be true, as multiple genealogy records indicate his grandparents were born in Brazil and, according to one genealogist who spoke to CNN, “There’s no sign of Jewish and/or Ukrainian heritage and no indication of name changes along the way.” Perhaps another sign that Santos does not have family members who were hunted by Adolf Hitler? His alleged willingness to joke about Hitler killing Jews, and Black people too.
Patch reports that in March 2011, Santos commented on a Facebook photo shared by a friend showing “someone making what appears to be a military salute with the caption ‘something like Hitler’.” Commenting below, Santos allegedly wrote: “hiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiigh hiiiiiiiiiiiitlerrrrrrrrrrr (hight hitler) lolololololololololololol sombody kill her!! the jews and black mostly lolllolol!!! Dum.” A former friend told the outlet they recalled seeing the offensive comment, took a screenshot and sent it along. Patch says it also “verified through another former friend, Gregory Morey-Parker, that the original Facebook post under which Santos wrote the Hitler comment existed.” Presumably that will not be the case for very long. Morey-Parker, who was also once roommates with Santos, also told Patch that the newly sworn-in congressman would regularly make offensive jokes, typically about paying the bill for meals, “but he brushed it off saying he was Jewish. He’d always say that it was okay for him to make those jokes because he was Jewish,” Morey-Parker recalled. (Santos has copped to the fact that he is not actually Jewish, by insisting he never said he was. “I never claimed to be Jewish,” he said in an interview with the New York Post shortly after many of his lies initially came to light. “I am Catholic. Because I learned my maternal family had a Jewish background I said I was ‘Jew-ish.’”)
In an email, Santos’s attorney claimed to Patch that the comment was somehow fake, writing: “the Facebook comment that you reference…is completely false, absolutely disgusting — There is absolutely nothing to talk about.”
Maybe next he’ll spray them with Agent Orange or place land minds around the Capitol
