Trump carries an iPhone just for Twitter

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This is the Trump iPhone, but not Trump's iPhone.
The President doesn't actually use Caviar's commemorative Donald Trump iPhone 7.
Photo: Caviar

Possibly everyone on Earth knows that President Donald Trump uses Twitter, but you might not know that his many tweets are coming from an iPhone. The commander in chief actually has at least two: one that’s just for Twitter, and one or more others only for voice calls.

While Apple makes devices that are unusually hard to hack, there are questions about whether the president is hampering White House efforts to keep the Trump iPhone secure.

The devices are issued by White House Information Technology and the White House Communications Agency. The phones he uses for making calls are incapable of doing anything else. The only app on the other iPhone is Twitter. The GPS on all has been disabled.

An unnamed senior official in the Trump White House told Politico that the voice-only device is “seamlessly swapped out on a regular basis through routine support operations. Because of the security controls of the Twitter phone and the Twitter account, it does not necessitate regular change-out.”

Securing the Trump iPhone

However, other sources told Politico that Trump’s aides would like him to swap out the Twitter phone each month. The President has refused, saying it’s “too inconvenient.”

By way of comparison, President Barack Obama always swapped out his phones on a monthly basis so they could be checked for security leaks.

Trump left himself open to criticism in this area by saying that Hillary Clinton’s use of insecure communications methods when she was secretary of state made her unfit to be president.

Part of the concern about whether Trump is sufficiently security cautious about his iPhone is that he’s literally the most valuable phone-hacking target in the world. It’s inconceivable that China, Russia, North Korea and others aren’t constantly trying to gain access to his devices.

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