Sources: US intelligence has determined that China and Russia spy on phone calls Trump makes using his iPhones instead of his secure White House landline
WASHINGTON — When President Trump calls old friends on one of his iPhones to gossip, gripe or solicit their latest take on how he is doing …
Context & Ripple Effects
This report lands after months of documented friction between the president and his own security apparatus: he was still tweeting from an unsecured Android phone in early 2017, and by May 2018 sources said he had rebuffed efforts to improve security around his phone use, going months without letting experts check the devices. Today's disclosure adds the adversarial dimension — US intelligence concludes both China and Russia exploit the habit.
The significance is that the exposure isn't hypothetical: the same personal-device pattern reappears six years later when Chinese hackers hit Verizon and the phones of Trump and JD Vance, and a White House official confirms the Salt Typhoon campaign recorded calls of very senior US political figures.
First-order effects
- Trump's call partners — old friends and advisers reached on his iPhones rather than the secure White House landline — are talking over lines US intelligence believes Chinese and Russian services are listening to, meaning their own remarks are compromised collateral.
- White House security staff face a confirmed foreign-intelligence problem they had already flagged and been unable to fix, since the president had resisted device checks and upgraded procedures.
Second-order effects
- Foreign counterparts and domestic interlocutors learn to assume anything said to Trump outside the landline reaches Beijing and Moscow, degrading the candor of informal calls that presidents traditionally use for unscripted diplomacy.
- The finding shifts defensive attention from the handset to the network behind it — a shift borne out in 2024 when Chinese hackers went after Verizon systems to reach Trump's, JD Vance's, and Harris campaign staff phones.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds from 2017 through the Salt Typhoon recordings, adversary services will keep treating senior US officials' personal devices and their carriers as standing collection targets regardless of who holds office, making carrier-grade security a national-security requirement rather than a consumer matter.
- Presidential communication discipline becomes a recurring institutional problem that outlasts any single administration, pressuring each White House to formalize rules for personal devices that so far have depended on one principal's cooperation.
The trend: Espionage against US political leadership is migrating from exploiting one official's personal phone habits to systematically compromising the telecom infrastructure all senior officials depend on.