#NotTheOnion: Trump Tells World Leaders to Call Him on His Cellphone

If this weren’t a matter of national and global security, the jokes would write themselves. Suggested Reading DDG Scores This Rare Win in Custody Battle With Halle Bailey Highlights From Pharrell Williams’ Star-Studded Louis Vuitton Menswear Show in Paris MAGA Trolls are Attacking Disney’s ‘Ironheart,’ But Here’s How Black Internet Is Fighting Back Video will…

If this weren’t a matter of national and global security, the jokes would write themselves.

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President Donald Trump has been handing out his cellphone number to world leaders and telling them to call him “late night when you need my love” directly, raising security concerns for anyone with common sense.

Trump has insisted that Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto use his private line, but only Trudeau has done so, the Chicago Tribune reports.

Trump also gave newly elected French President Emmanuel Macron his cellphone number, according to a French official, but there has been no word on whether or not France’s Hillary Clinton has taken him up on the offer.

“If you are speaking on an open line, then it’s an open line, meaning those who have the ability to monitor those conversations are doing so,” said Derek Chollet, a former Pentagon adviser and National Security Council official now at the German Marshall Fund of the United States.

A president “doesn’t carry with him a secure phone,” Chollet said. “If someone is trying to spy on you, then everything you’re saying, you have to presume that others are listening to it.”

For Trump, someone who mentioned Clinton’s email server whenever the opportunity presented itself—and created opportunities when it did not—this is a rather hypocritical development, i.e., totally expected.

We would text Trump for a comment, but we haven’t been given his cell number.

Read more at the Chicago Tribune.

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