The President’s Concerning Prank Call

You would think, perhaps even hope that a president so concerned with this nation’s security would be difficult to call.  After all, he’s got all those Guatemalans to worry about, to say nothing of the Canadians and the French.  The airtight perimeter around Donald Trump should be impenetrable, you say. Well, sorry to burst your bubble but a comedian placed a prank call to Trump and got through! On Air Force One! Thank goodness it wasn’t Putin. So how did John Melendez, the comedian known as Stuttering John, easily get through to Donald Trump?

The reason people weren’t talking before may have to do with the fact that we didn’t know if the call was real or perhaps edited together. Now the White House has confirmed the call happened while the President was on board Air Force One. Questions are obviously swirling over how Melendez had no problem getting Trump on the phone. Was it as easy as calling and identifying himself as Senator Bob Menendez? Where are the layers of security? It’s pretty embarrasing for the Trump White House that a Democratic senator, who is far from a Trump ally, calls and easily gets to talk to the President. Politico reports:

“The White House is scrambling to figure out how a prank call from a comedian who pretended to be Sen. Robert Menendez managed to get a return phone call from the president, a person inside the White House said Friday.

The person inside the White House said the call was routed to the president by the president’s son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner and that it was not routed through the office of legislative affairs, which had no record of Menendez, a New Jersey Democrat, trying to connect with the president.”

https://twitter.com/rmayemsinger/status/1012455707222814721

https://twitter.com/ikebarinholtz/status/1012795041641742336

What’s interesting is that the real Senator Menendez has now weighed in with a statement that seems more along the lines of how he really would have handled a conversation with Trump. The Senator said:

“As someone who has spent my entire career trying to convince Republicans to join me in reforming our nation’s broken immigration system,“ Menendez said, “I welcome any opportunity to have a real conversation with the president on how to uphold the American values that guided our family-based immigration policy for the past century. Tearing children apart from their mothers is not part of our proud history. Thus far, this White House has only sabotaged every good-faith effort to find bipartisan common ground on immigration.”