Trump’s clear double standard between Hillary Clinton’s emails and his own cell phones

You'd think a guy who felt so strongly about that would go above and beyond to protect his personal communications once he became president. But apparently you'd be wrong.

Politico is reporting that Trump has eschewed the normal security procedures when it comes to his personal cellphones. He has at least two — one for making calls and one for Twitter — but the call-capable phone has a camera and a microphone, which was against protocol in the Obama administration because those things could be used to monitor a president's activities and movements. As for the Twitter phone, Trump reportedly refuses to swap it out and has gone as many as five months without having it checked by security experts, despite phones being checked every 30 days during the Obama administration.

Trump's reasoning for resisting the regular security sweep? It's “too inconvenient,” one official said.

That sound you hear is 60 million Clinton supporters tearing out their hair. You may recall that this was exactly the justification Clinton used for her private server: convenience. “When I got to work as secretary of state, I opted for convenience to use my personal email account, which was allowed by the State Department, because I thought it would be easier to carry just one device for my work and for my personal emails instead of two,” she said.

On the campaign trail, Trump was very worried about revealing America’s secrets

Whether convenience was truly Clinton's reason for the private server is up for debate (it certainly seems possible that she was attempting to avoid disclosure). But even if you set that aside, there are eerie parallels between what Trump attacked Clinton for and what he's doing now.

“Clinton’s home email server that she lied to the American people about was a profound national security risk,” Trump wrote in one Facebook post. “Hillary Clinton has bad judgment and is unfit to serve as President.”

He said in July 2016 in a campaign speech: “This is not just extreme carelessness with classified material, which is still totally disqualifying. This is calculated, deliberate, premeditated misconduct.”

He added on the eve of the election: “It's believed that no less than five foreign intelligence agencies successfully hacked into Hillary's illegal insecure server. In other words, Hillary's corrupt criminal scheme put the safety of every American family in danger; that's what's happened.”

A lack of regular security checks on Trump's cellphone may not be on the same scale as a “home-brew” private email server, but the practical implications are similar: The possibility that foreign actors could gain access and use it against Trump and the United States. Trump seemed very bothered by that possibility as a candidate; he seems far less bothered as president — almost as though he wasn't really that concerned in the first place. And this is hardly the first time he has seemed cavalier about protecting America's secrets; there was, of course, that time he blurted out classified information in a meeting with Russian officials.

A White House aide insisted to Politico that technological advances have made for more secure devices and perhaps necessitate less procedural security. But Trump went big on the importance of taking every precaution as a candidate. Matching the Obama administration's protocols would seem a very basic way to avoid any possibility of the “great danger” Trump warned about as a candidate.