Asking for a friend: if a person happened to have the mobile phone number for the most powerful person in the world, how should they save it on their phone?
Popping him into your contacts as “Trump, Donald” would seem a little obvious and ripe for mishaps, for example mischievous kids getting hold of the phone and texting the US president a series of incomprehensible emojis.
Or one might accidentally pocket-dial the leader of the free world and treat him to an earful of domestic banter just as he was weighing up bombing another country.
This is all theoretical of course: none of this means I do have his number. It’s the new worst kept secret in Washington DC, and admitting to possession of the president’s 10 digits could open a person up to all sorts of attempts at bribery and nefarious offers.
Money has been offered; phone numbers of world leaders traded: tickets to the hottest events in town exchanged – it’s the DC journalists’ equivalent of Pokémon card trading, with the promise at the end of it being a few minutes, or seconds, on the blower with Trump.
It is yet another sign of how thoroughly the rule book has been torn to shreds in American politics today, and just how well Trump understands the collective ego of the media.
Access, exclusivity, attention: those are commodities Trump learned to trade in when hustling up the property ladder in New York, and he is sticking to those instincts in his second term, stoking his love-hate relationship with the press, using both carrot and stick.
He may frequently launch tirades – and lawsuits – at non-fawning media outlets, but Trump claims to be the most transparent president in history, and it’s true that he does not like to filter his instincts through a layer of press secretaries. He was the first world leader to govern by social media and he will riff with journalists for hours in the Oval Office.
The phone chats are an extension of this. The number doing the rounds today is the same one he had in his first term, so a fair few veteran White House correspondents already had it.
But then came the unexpected development that he had started picking up and answering questions, and the frenzy began.
The difficulty of getting his number depends on who you ask. A journalist at Semafor wrote a piece saying it took him about five minutes. An article in The Atlantic made out that it was a little more arduous, quoting people who had been offered cryptocurrency, dozens of other phone numbers, or one-on-ones with other world leaders in exchange for Trump’s number.
Then once you have it, how do you safeguard it? Many may go with the ego-stoking ‘Donald Trump, US President’ in the contacts list. Others save it under a codename. Some may decide to scribble it on a scrap of paper and shove it in a biscuit tin.
Then the question is when to call. There are different theories doing the rounds, but the consensus seems to be that he’s a bit grouchy in the morning, so not then. After a round of golf you may catch him in a relaxed mood, while a Truth Social post suggesting he has some opinions to share might also be a good time.
If he picks up (and he often does), don’t spend too long introducing who you are and who you work for: he doesn’t care. Try and find a question he hasn’t been asked 1,000 times already, fire it off, and wait for the answer. Voilà, you have your “exclusive” with the US president.
And by the look of the “exclusives” that have proliferated since the war in Iran began, the number of people with the magic number is multiplying fast.
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In theory, when a commodity floods the market, it should lose its value. But that’s not the case with Trump. And that’s where some journalists have got a little bit worried about it all. If Trump is answering these calls and saying different things to different journalists, his every word broadcast without filter, do we not all become a mouthpiece for his whims?
But what a president says is always going to be news. Maybe it’s not quite the noble pursuit of holding power to account, but perhaps one day, the right person will ask the right question at the right time and glean something resembling genuine insight.
And in a world where we are being told that AI can do all our jobs, it is somehow comforting that a good old phone number remains such a hot commodity in journalism.
So, have I got his number? Well that’s between me and my biscuit tin.
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