Donald Trump says “you can do a lot with a telephone,” and social media users very much agree.
Trump made the remark at a campaign rally in Reno, Nevada, on Sunday, while boasting about how much he could get done as president simply by picking up the phone.
As many users of X (formerly Twitter) pointed out, Trump proved that to be true quite a few times, and might face some pretty severe consequences for it.
Among Trump’s famous presidential phone conversations was a 2019 call to Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Trump was impeached over that call, during which he suggested he would release congressionally approved military aid to Ukraine if the country’s leader opened an investigation into Joe Biden, Trump’s likely rival for the presidency at the time.
Another famous call? Trump’s chat to Georgia’s Republican secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, after the 2020 election, urging him to “find” the exact number of votes he needed to overturn his loss to Biden. Trump has been charged with more than a dozen felonies over his attempts to change Georgia’s election result.
Trump has described both of those calls as “perfect.”
Just last week, special counsel Jack Smith, the prosecutor leading two federal criminal cases against Trump, indicated in a court filing that his office plans to present the former president’s cellphone data during his election subversion trial.
The filing said prosecutors plan to call several expert witnesses to explain Trump’s phone use surrounding the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, including the amount of time he spent on Twitter.
HuffPost’s S.V. Dáte, Politico’s Kyle Cheney and Ron Filipkowski of the MeidasTouch network pointed to that development:
Other social media users, including HuffPost’s Jonathan Nicholson, highlighted Trump’s past phone use:
Or, in this case, his lack thereof: