‘Will you text him?’ Anthony Albanese interrogated over whether he has US President Donald Trump’s personal phone number
Anthony Albanese has triggered a frenzy after making a bold claim about Donald Trump’s phone during the final leaders’ debate.
Anthony Albanese made a huge claim during the final debate about the US President Donald Trump insisting he couldn’t text him because the world leader doesn’t have a mobile phone.
It was enough to prompt Coalition strategists to pump journalists’ phones with late night texts featuring photographs of the President holding an iPhone.
So, does the Prime Minister have a point when it comes to the world leader and whether or not you can text him?
The answer may depend on whether you believe the US President or The New York Times and The Washington Post.
Both publications have suggested Mr Trump does use a personal cell phone while other aides have given evidence under oath that he doesn’t use a computer, dictates Tweets to staff by hand and calls iPad’s “the flat one.”
If the price of a carton of eggs brought Peter Dutton undone during the debate - he prompted audience laughter when he guessed it was $4.20 - it was the PM’s curious answer about Mr Trump that had viewers scratching their heads.
With six days to go in the election, Seven’s debate host Mark Riley suggested that just like Charles, Diana and Camilla, “there’s somebody else in this relationship. His name’s Trump.”
“Okay. You both trust Donald Trump. Just quickly, you got his number, you text him?,’’ Riley asked.
“No. I’m not sure that he has a mobile phone, the US President. Or Joe Biden. It’s not the way it works when you have, with any global leader,’’ Mr Albanese replied.
Shining a light on Mr Albanese’s enthusiasm for texting, the Seven host responded, “That’s the way it works with you though, surely, you text people all the time.”
“We text each other. We do,’’ he replied.
“But global leaders, you set up, there’s people taking notes from either side. It’s not something that’s a casual relationship. It’s at a very different level.”
“Hang on. We’re not good enough to have Trump’s mobile number or he doesn’t have one?,’’ Riley asked.
“I don’t know, but I know that..’’ Mr Albanese said.
“Do you have Keir Starmer’s number?,’’ Peter Dutton interjected, asking about the British Prime Minister.
Mr Albanese insisted that when world leaders have formal discussions, “what we do is we have note takers on both sides. We have them in secure rooms. You don’t have discussions with global leaders - just over the phone.”
“Sorry, I’m aware of the protocols and they are there, but I’m sure on your phone there are lots of text messages from world leaders that are off piste,’’ Riley replied.
“I think the answer was no there, Mark. I think that was the straight answer. We didn’t get it,’’ Mr Dutton said.
“Will you get it? Will he give it to you? His number?,’’ Riley asked.
“Well, as I say, we worked with both Republican and Democrat administrations,’’ Mr Dutton said.
“We were able to negotiate the outcome on AUKUS, the nuclear submarine deal, with both the United States and the United Kingdom, a Democrat administration in the US, a Conservative administration in the UK.
Albo defends phone claim
Speaking on Monday morning, Mr Albanese defended his claim that the US President doesn’t have a mobile phone.
“I don’t have Donald Trump’s number. I didn’t have Joe Biden’s number,” Mr Albanese said.
“It is not the way it works between the Australian prime minister and the US president.
“There are formal processes that take place. I have had two very warm conversations with President Trump.”
But Riley, who hosted the debate, said Mr Albanese’s claim didn’t ring true.
“This guy owns a social media site. We know he tweeted incessantly and uses Truth Social incessantly and uses Truth Social incessantly,’’ he said on Sunrise.
“It didn’t cut the mustard. I know people will say these are minor issues well, maybe, but they connect.”
Does Donald Trump have a mobile phone?
In 2019, CNN reported that President Donald Trump had continued to use his personal cell phone to make calls, despite repeated warnings from his staff that the practice could leave him vulnerable to foreign surveillance.
In response to these reports, the President denied CNN’s report, saying he hadn’t used his personal cell phone for a long time.
“I haven’t had a personal cell phone for years. Only use government approved and issued phones,” Trump tweeted.
According to The Washington Post, Trump was handing out his personal line to conduct one-on-one calls around the same time in his first term as President, a practice that meant he was holding calls that even top White House aides did not know about.
The New York Times reported in 2018 that Chinese and Russian spies had listened in on Trump’s calls on his personal cell phone and the President’s aides had told him that Russian spies were listening in on a regular basis.
There were even reports that President Trump’s cellphone was “left behind in a golf cart” during a visit to his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey.
“Last year, Mr. Trump’s cellphone was left behind in a golf cart at his club in Bedminster, N.J., causing a scramble to locate it,” the New York Times report said, citing two anonymous sources “familiar with what took place.”
Mr. Trump reacted to the report calling it “fake news”
“The so-called experts on Trump over at the New York Times wrote a long and boring article on my cellphone usage that is so incorrect I do not have time here to correct it. I only use Government Phones, and have only one seldom used government cell phone. Story is soooo wrong!” Mr. Trump tweeted.
Trump responded to the Times’ report on Twitter from an iPhone.
It’s not known if he posted the Tweet, or if he drafted it and one of his own staff posted it using their iPhone.
It may well be the latter given the evidence his former aide Madeline Westerhout gave at his hush money trial.
The BBC reported he even dictated tweets to her, or asked her to print out draft tweets that he would then edit by hand.
“My recollection is there are certain words he liked to capitalize,” she told the court. “Words like ‘country’. He liked to use exclamation points.”
She also confirmed that Trump didn’t even have a computer or an email address.
Another aide called Natalie Harp was said to accompany President Trump on golf trips in a cart “equipped with a laptop and sometimes a printer to show him uplifting news articles, online posts, or other materials,” according to 2022 reporting by the Washington Post.
He also liked to read newspapers.
“He would literally sit on Air Force One for, like, 12 hours and go through stacks of newspapers,” a former senior administration official told Politico back in 2019. “It was amazing how religious he was about his newspapers.”
After Trump tweeted about Googling news stories about himself, New York Times correspondent Maggie Haberman said, “He doesn’t use a computer. Someone is doing the googling but not him.”
Meanwhile, an ABC White House reporter Tara Palmeri added to that: “Sometimes Trump reads things on a iPad that he calls ‘the flat one.”.
Originally published as ‘Will you text him?’ Anthony Albanese interrogated over whether he has US President Donald Trump’s personal phone number
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