Since the United States first attacked Iran two weeks ago, Trump has answered more than three dozen phone calls from journalists representing at least a dozen outlets, including ABC News, Axios, CBS News, CNN, The Daily Mail, The Daily Telegraph, Israel’s Channel 14, Fox News, MS NOW, NBC News, The New York Times, the New York Post, Politico, The Times of Israel, The Washington Post, and, yes, The Atlantic. A journalist from The Washington Reporter, a small conservative outlet, has repeatedly called, and the administration officials say Substack authors have started to call, forcing White House staff to look up names they don’t recognize.
One fear in the West Wing: that someone will give Trump bad information, or sell him on a conspiracy theory, provoking a reaction aides will have to clean up. Another concern: that the president will waste his time responding to meaningless trifles that distract from the arguments that the White House wants to make. Reporters have asked in recent calls for Trump’s opinion on his son-in-law Jared Kushner, and whether his decision to launch a massive air attack on Iran would win him the Nobel Peace Prize. “I don’t know,” the president responded to that last question, from the Washington Examiner on Thursday. “I’m not interested in it.”
“Believe it or not, you can just call the president,” the Politico reporter Sophia Cai explained in a December Instagram video that ended with her crowdsourcing questions for the commander in chief. “What should I ask him next?”
Early last year, even as Trump’s cellphone number began to more widely circulate, calling the president was a privilege and a flex—the sort of move that lent routine stories a bit more buzz and offered instant street cred for White House reporters (I just got off the phone with the president of the United States!). The White House team would privately tell reporters they were not happy with the direct line, and vaguely warn that if the phone number was used too often, there could be a cost. But Trump made the rules, and Trump liked the calls. World leaders, lobbyists, and executives relished the connection to the president, if they were lucky enough to land his personal number. The prime minister of Australia, Anthony Albanese, was roundly mocked in his home country when he said in a campaign debate last year that you can’t just call the president’s cellphone: “I’m not sure he has a mobile phone,” he asserted, incorrectly.
Here we must confess our own complicity: We first called the president while reporting our June Atlantic cover story on Trump’s return to power. He had agreed to an interview with us, then abruptly canceled via an angry Truth Social post. So we called him, chatted for roughly 20 minutes, and then got invited into the Oval Office, after all, for a second, longer interview. We’ve since called him occasionally after major news breaks, like when he first struck Iran last summer, when he captured Venezuela’s leader, and when he more recently waged war with Iran. And, if we’re being honest, we will obviously call him again.
