This article was first published in The Conversation UK’s World Affairs Briefing email newsletter. Sign up to receive weekly analysis of the latest developments in international relations, direct to your inbox.
Donald Trump likes to use the phone. In his (ghostwritten) bestseller, The Art of the Deal, he talks of making between 50 and 100 calls during the average working day and then going home and picking up where he left off. He found his predecessors in the White House puzzling because, apparently, they didn’t tend to use the telephone: “If you look at President Obama and other presidents, most of them didn’t make calls. A lot of them didn’t make calls. I like to call when it’s appropriate,” he told reporters in 2017.
