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Reporters ushered into the Oval Office to look at President Trump meeting with health-care executives on Monday tried to wring a little news out of the moment, asking the president as they were being shuffled back out the door if he thought there should be a special prosecutor to look at Russias role in the 2016 election. According to the pool report, Trump waited until the media was almost gone and then mouthed no to the executives who were still there.

Then he said something weird: I havent called Russia in 10 years.

A normal person would hear that and blink for a few seconds. It has the fingerprints of a guy who is denying accusations of marital infidelities by saying specifically that he had not ever driven another woman in his car. There are other ways to shuttle around love interests; there are other ways of contacting foreign powers and their representatives.

Its also weird because its not true. Trump spoke with Russian President Vladimir Putin earlier this month. When he was still just Businessman Trump, he held the Miss Universe pageant in Russia that was 2013. Maybe theres a loophole at play here: Trump didnt place that call to Putin and, sure, he showed up in Moscow but he didnt telephone anyone beforehand. Or maybe its hyperbole.

Or maybe its another example of how Trump assigns a weird moral calculus to the giving and receiving of phone calls.

Here, for example, Trump dismisses fellow wealthy-guy Mark Cuban by noting that Cuban tried to call him, but he didnt take the call.

We can use this tweet to theorize an aspect to telephone-based relationships in Trumps eyes: The person making the call is the person in the weak position.

Remember that, for Trump, there are three ways of being in touch with other people. There are in-person meetings, there are tweets and there are phone calls. Trump doesnt use email, and its safe to assume that he also therefore doesnt use direct messages on Twitter. So for him to hold a relationship with another person who isnt standing in front of him, its by phone.

He became a tabloid sensation by calling up the New York Post, often pretending to be his own publicist. The effect of that? Trump isnt the weak person making the call to try to gin up attention for himself hes the strong person who has a weak person make the weak move of calling a reporter. I mean, hes both, but thats one reason for the fiction.

Another example came after Election Day, when Bill Clinton mentioned having spoken on the phone with Trump. What did Trump correct? Who called who.

When Trump was pushing back against an unflattering New York Times story about his relationship with women in his business life, he dismissed one critic by pointing out that shed called him.

When he came under fire for speaking with Taiwan, he twice pointed out that hed been the recipient of a call, not the originator of it.

Granted, that was more to establish that he was not in the wrong by breaching American diplomatic tradition, but it also established that the foreign leader was calling him, establishing the direction of the flow of power in the relationship.

How important is the placing or receiving of calls to Trump? He spells out that bidirectionality in a tweet from shortly after the election, where he only has 140 characters to use. (Or, here, 280.)

Who did he call (weak) and who called him (strong)? Hard to say. We know, though, that Russia must have called him (as per the first tweet) since he hasnt called Russia in 10 years.

But we also now know why he told the audience in the Oval Office that he hadnt called Russia: To demonstrate that Russia isnt even important enough for him to call. Clearly he couldnt have been aware of a Russian effort to get him elected; he doesnt even care enough to pick up the phone!

Or maybe that tweet from November was the equivalent of a blurry photo of Trump in his car, Russia in his passenger seat.

See the article here:
The telephone protocol of Donald Trump, explained - Washington Post