Donald Trump Doesn't Use a Computer or Have an Email Address, Former Aide Reveals in Court

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As former president Donald Trump's hush money trial continues, a lot of unusual details are coming to light — including about the former president's unorthodox use of technology.

According to former aide Madeline Westerhout, who testified this week, Trump preferred to have her take notes instead of typing himself.

He even dictated tweets to her, as the BBC reports, or asked her to print out draft tweets that he would then edit by hand.

"My recollection is there are certain words he liked to capitalize," she told the court. "Words like 'country'. He liked to use exclamation points."

Strangest of all, in a country where virtually everybody is now online, she also said that Trump didn't even have a computer or an email address — yet another peculiar twist that highlights just how technologically challenged the former head of state is.

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Westerhout served as the director of Oval Office Operations between February and August 2019. She was fired after telling reporters that Trump didn't want to be seen with his daughter Tiffany Trump because he saw her as overweight.

This week, she was cross-examined by the defense, recalling that Trump was "very upset" about the Wall Street Journal story that broke the news about the Stormy Daniels hush money deal.

The former aide seems to have been close with Trump, calling him a "really good boss." She's a "dream" witness" for the prosecutors, legal analyst Gene Rossi told CNN, because she "still loves Trump."

On Thursday, Westerout suddenly broke into tears on the stand while recalling the time she was fired.

Besides dictating tweets and refusing to use a computer, a different former aide called Natalie Harp used to accompany the former reality TV host on golf trips in a cart "equipped with a laptop and sometimes a printer to show him uplifting news articles, online posts, or other materials," according to 2022 reporting by the Washington Post.

Trump has a long track record puzzling rants on Twitter and now his own competitor, Truth Social. For instance, in 2019, he said that he wants "5G, and even 6G, technology in the United States as soon as possible," even though 6G didn't exist at the time (and still doesn't exist five years later).

For somebody as technologically illiterate as Trump, it shouldn't come as a surprise that he prefers to live as if it were still the 1980s.

And that includes reading the news in the form of stacks of newspapers.

"He would literally sit on Air Force One for, like, 12 hours and go through stacks of newspapers," a former senior administration official told Politico back in 2019. "It was amazing how religious he was about his newspapers."

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