Donald Trump has once more attracted ridicule over an off-the-cuff remark made at a political rally, this time bragging about the power he once wielded from the White House with the declaration: “You can do a lot with a telephone.”
Addressing supporters at the Reno-Sparks Convention Center in Reno, Nevada, on Sunday evening, Mr Trump said: “I got a thing called a telephone. You can do a lot with a telephone. You can do a lot. I did it with France. They were going to put taxes on American companies…”
The Republican was reflecting on the glory days when he could simply reach across the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office and influence another country’s economic policies with a few forceful words.
However, the remark only served to remind political observers of several of the more ignominious episodes from Mr Trump’s one-term presidency – and a few notable phone calls that have since landed him in legal trouble.
Many social media users pointed to his call threatening to withhold $400m in congressionally-approved military aid from President Volodymyr Zelensky’s Ukraine unless his counterpart in Kyiv committed to a bogus investigation into Joe Biden.
This call famously became the subject of his first impeachment in 2019 after it was reported by a whistleblower.
Another example was the notorious call he made to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger in January 2021 in which he demanded that the official “find” the 11,780 votes he needed to overcome Mr Biden’s presidential election victory in the crucial swing state the previous November.
Anti-Trump commentators wasted no time in reposting their own favourite examples and reminding him that the telephone can also be a powerful weapon in the hands of his enemies, not least Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith.
Elsewhere in Mr Trump’s Reno speech, he compared himself to what he described as the “great” Chicago Mafia boss Al Capone, saying the notorious Prohibition gangster had only been indicted once, whereas he himself had suffered the same fate four times this year alone.
“Did anybody ever hear of the great Alphonse Capone, Al Capone, great, great head of the mafia, right? Mean, Scarface. He had a scar that went from here to here, and he didn’t mind at all. But he was a rough guy,” Mr Trump said.
“Now, I heard he was indicted once – a couple of people told me a few times more – but I was indicted four times.
“If he had dinner with you and if he didn’t like the way you smiled at him at dinner, he would kill you. You’d be dead. By the time you walked out of the nice restaurant, you would be dead.
“He got indicted once. I got indicted four times. Over bulls***, I got indicted.”
The front-runner for the Republican Party’s 2024 presidential nomination is already facing backlash over his comments at an earlier event in New Hampshire on Saturday in which he claimed immigrants were “poisoning the blood of the country”.
“They’re poisoning the blood of the country. That’s what they’ve done,” the former president said.
“They poison mental institutions and prisons all over the world. Not just in South America. Not just the three or four countries we think about. But all over the world they’re coming into our country, from Africa, from Asia.”
He was duly rebuked by the White House for “echoing the grotesque rhetoric of fascists and violent white supremacists” and “threatening to oppress those who disagree with the government”.
Former New Jersey governor Chris Christie, one of Mr Trump’s rivals for the GOP nomination, also condemned his comments.
Speaking to CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday morning, Mr Christie said that Mr Trump’s language was “disgusting”, warned that he was getting “worse and worse by the day” and accused him of engaging in the tactics of “dog whistle” racism.
