The construction boom during the pandemic paid off for OMG Inc.

The Agawam company’s two divisions, FastenMaster and OMG Roofing Products, experienced increases in business the last three years, and, while 2023 is expected to be another good year for both segments, the company is not projecting an increase.

“We’re not projecting a sales increase for next year. We’ve had two very big boom years so maybe for the first time in a long time we won’t really grow (this) year,” said Hubert T. McGovern, president and CEO in a exact interview.

OMG makes fasteners and products for the commercial roofing and residential construction markets.

Its OMG Roofing division specializes in insulation adhesives, technology for installing thermoplastic roofing membranes and technology for commercial roof drains. FastenMaster focuses on fastening solutions for professional contractors including wood-to-wood connections for homes, and fasteners for composite decks and trim.

McGovern said they expect demand for OMG products, which took off during the beginning of the pandemic in 2020, to continue at least through the first half of this year. He noted the company still has a strong backlog. They produce more than 1 billion fasteners annually.

Russell “Web” Shaffer, senior vice president and general manager of FastenMaster, noted the pandemic boom is starting to ebb, and McGovern’s caution on the second half of 2023 is related to uncertainty about the economy.

“The first two years (of the pandemic), business exploded. Roofing was on a tear and will continue into (2023), but in the second half of (2023), nobody knows,” Shaffer said. “A lot hinges on inflation, interest rates and what happens with the economy. Because of that, we tend to be more cautious than overly exuberant.”

It helped that OMG was considered an “essential business” during the pandemic, as its products were considered critical to building facilities such as schools and hospitals.

FastenMaster products can be found at retailers such as Home Depot, Lowe’s, hardware stores and independent lumberyards. And while the business boom took off sooner for FastenMaster, it also slowed down quicker, Shaffer said.

Sales increased 12% overall in 2022 for the private company, which is a division of a public company called Steel Partners, a group of industrial firms. From 2019 to 2020, sales bumped up 5%, then jumped 20% from 2020 to 2021.

Shaffer said they did not know what to expect in the early days of the pandemic.

“The first couple of months everyone was expecting terrible things to happen. The boom sort of didn’t really happen until the middle of the year. That’s part of the reason why the gross in sales that year wasn’t as strong as it could have been,” Shaffer said.

The company benefited, he said, from people working from home who looked around their surroundings and said, “I need to Improve my living space.” That also included their outdoor living spaces because people could not vacation. As a result, some installed swimming pools or built new decks, creating the need for the company’s products, he said.

Added McGovern, “We didn’t expect the home remodeling boom,” noting that FastenMaster “really caters to residential construction.”

Shaffer said FastenMaster has invented a lot of categories in the home improvement space, such as the LOKLine brand of structural wood fasteners, and Cortex, a hidden fastening system for premium decks. Composite decks now comprise a quarter of the market, according to Shaffer, and the company has had a lot of success with selling fasteners for these decks as they require “less maintenance and last a long time.”

“They’ve turned out to be a great investment. There’s low to no maintenance, and you can get them in great finishes now. They’re very appealing compared to the original plastic decks which were cruder in their finish,” Shaffer said.

FastenMaster’s Cortex Hidden Fastening System used for decks was named an innovation award winner for 2022 by Home Depot.

OMG roofing products have been around since the company’s inception in 1981, according to McGovern. Back then, the company was known as Olympic Fasteners and specialized in adhesives. He described OMG as a leader in flat roofing fasteners for membrane roofs and noted the company also sells insulation adhesives for membrane roofs.

And, while OMG may be texting slang today, it wasn’t back in 2004 when the company’s name changed to OMG. Because the company could not use the word “Olympic” in its name - the Olympic Committee would not allow it - it shortened the previous business name of Olympic Manufacturing Group to OMG.

“People remember it,” Shaffer said about the name OMG.

OMG employs the majority of its employees - 450 - in Agawam, and also has a half dozen employees in China and four in Europe.

In addition to their site in the Agawam Regional Industrial Park, the company has a plant in Addison, Illinois, where 50 people make fasteners, and an adhesives plant for the roofing division in Rockford, Minnesota, with 20 employees, and a warehouse and sales office in Charlotte, North Carolina, with approximately 15 people.

The company is “constantly hiring people,” and the executives said they have hired an additional 80 employees since the COVID boom, mostly in Agawam and including some in Illinois. Job openings continue to be advertised on the company website, omgroofing.com.

“As a consequence of the demand increase for the last three years, we have felt a critical need to grow and expand our capacity. We’ve managed to overcome supply chain challenges, and came to the conclusion we need to grow our capacity,” Shaffer said.

To that end, an expansion underway in Illinois, where they are adding a 115,000-square-foot building for more manufacturing and warehousing space. Shaffer said they will have two buildings once the project is completed, noting they invested “millions in manufacturing equipment” at the new leased facility.

He added that they are also planning to expand in Agawam, a project that will cost between $20 million to $30 million. Shaffer said they hope to break ground sometime this year with completion slated for 2024 That will result in a 70,000-square-foot addition to a building they already own, almost doubling the footprint.

“That creates lots of jobs and opportunities for people,” Shaffer said.

Shaffer noted they also added square footage during the pandemic. McGovern said they leased another 60,000 square feet on Bowles Road in 2021. That led to an increase in head count of about 20 people, he said. According to information from the company, that project brought its footprint to 480,000 square feet across six facilities in the industrial park.

The majority of the company’s products are either made in Agawam or the Midwest, with some imported, McGovern said. Shaffer said they are doing the expansion projects so they no longer have to import.

McGovern said that the roofing division sells through distributors and private-label manufacturers to approximately 10,000 customers all over the world. FastenMaster’s business is primarily in North America, in comparison, Shaffer said.

Jeffrey Gelinas, who was hired last year as manager of sales training for its FastenMaster and roofing products divisions, came from Westfield Middle School, where he was a science teacher and helped develop the science curriculum. Gelinas is developing, and will manage, a sales training program. He also will create a curriculum, role-specific sales training and analytics for measuring program effectiveness, and oversee new hire and advancement training.

McGovern said they are excited for the future, and more growth in Massachusetts and the Midwest.

“We think it’s an exciting place to work,” McGovern said. “We have a sign out front that says, ‘We make it happen.’”

Shaffer noted the company has had success both domestically and internationally, the latter, he said, “is a bit unusual for a manufacturing company in Massachusetts, and reinforces the success the company’s had and the unique culture here that’s driven that success.”

“The products we make our highly engineered and don’t sound maybe that interesting to some people,” Shaffer said. “But they’re pretty critical in the role they play in our infrastructure, and we see a lot of opportunity both here and (around the world) to grow our business.”

And while fasteners may represent a small portion of the overall construction cost, McGovern said they are “immensely critical because of course they hold it all together.”

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If it were the 14th century, your name was Robert Clevecunt and you lived on Pissing Alley, you wouldn’t have hesitated to tell anyone your name or address. Such words were common enough to be unremarkable. It is easily offended 21st-century humans who would change our name by deed poll and lobby the council to change its road signs.

However, we may be becoming more relaxed about swearwords. It was reported last week that an employment judge, presiding over a case of unfair dismissal and discrimination, had decided that using the phrase “I don’t deliver a fuck” in a “tense” meeting was not necessarily significant. “The words allegedly used in our view are fairly commonplace and do not carry the shock value they might have done in another time,” said the judge.

Swearing is everywhere. It is on TV, on social media, in music. Young children use “WTF” and “OMG”. For many of us, workplace swearing seems so normal that it doesn’t even stand out any more (this was one theory, in that employment tribunal, as to why others in that meeting couldn’t remember if that particular swearword was used).

Parents report teenage children dropping the F- and C-words at home far more freely than they did at the same age. Dorothy, 65, whose daughter is 22, is shocked by the extent of her child’s swearing. “The F-word is quite common in her conversations. I was concerned she would use it in the wrong situation, but she moderates it around older people. With her friends, and with her brothers, it’s not a thing that bothers them – it’s acceptable.” She used to ask her to stop, but then gave up. Dorothy, who admits to using words such as “bloody”, never swore like that in front of her parents. “Good grief, no.”

A 2021 survey for the British Board of Film Classification found that three-fifths of people said strong language was part of their daily lives, while one-third used such language more than they did five years ago. A 2020 report by Ofcom, the TV and radio regulator, found that swearing-related complaints had halved in five years; a year later, swearing accounted for only 1% of complaints, reflecting a “trend of increasingly relaxed attitudes about the use of swearwords” (this did not include slurs and discriminatory language).

This isn’t to say that anything goes – witness the broadcasters braced for impact whenever they need to mention the chancellor Jeremy Hunt, or Krishnan Guru-Murthy, who was taken off Channel 4 news for a week for being overheard, off-camera, using the C-word to describe Steve Baker, the Northern Ireland minister.

The shambolic few weeks of Liz Truss’s tenure as prime minister gave rise to some good swearing – not quite the magnificent creations from The Thick of It, but punchy nonetheless. “I am fucking furious and I don’t deliver a fuck any more,” the then deputy chief whip, Craig Whittaker, was reported to have said; a German news clip of apolitical correspondent recounting it verbatim went viral. During the economic turmoil that was unleashed, the Financial Times reported that allies of Truss described stories of tensions between her and the then chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng, as “weapons-grade bollocks”.

Has swearing finally lost its power? Timothy Jay, a professor of psychology at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts and a swearing expert, sighs. “I’ve been answering that question for 50 years,” he says. “The offensiveness of any word is entirely dependent upon context. All of us carry the calculus for who, what, where and when. If I went in my dean’s office, I wouldn’t swear in there; a student wouldn’t swear in there, but they would swear in a dorm room or a bar.”

Richard Stephens, a senior lecturer in psychology at Keele University, agrees: “It is nuanced. I think what the judge was saying [in the tribunal ruling] was that, in the specific context of that conversation, the F-bomb wasn’t too offensive, but it’s all about context. Within that situation, it’s using swearing as a linguistic tool, as opposed to using it as an insult, or to offend or belittle people. We swear for many different reasons – to show emotion, to show we really mean it, sometimes for humour, to intensify what we’re saying. It is still very context-driven.” As Karyn Stapleton, a senior lecturer in communication at Ulster University, says, there have always been workplaces where swearing is acceptable and, in fact, “part of the culture”.

“We are exposed to more swearing than ever in history – all of the media that we consume,” says Jay. “However, that doesn’t mean that the average person swears more. Again, it depends on the context.” Language evolves and taboos weaken. Stephens found a copy of Vanity Fair from the early 20th century in which the word “damn” was disguised with dashes. “Then, that was an unprintable word, but now we’re comfortable with that. I think we are more comfortable with the four-letter words now than we have been.” What is driving that? “This is just my opinion, not a research-informed answer, but society is becoming more open and we’re freer with language like we’re freer with lots of other things.”

But it is not right to say swearing has entirely lost its power. “Even though we are in quite a comfortable place with swearing and four-letter words, you’re never quite sure how a swearword is going to land, so it’s still a risk to pop one into the conversation. It’s that unpredictability that helps to keep swearing current.”

In her book Holy Sh*t: A Brief History of Swearing, Melissa Mohr – she of Pissing Alley and many other brilliant examples – writes that, in the English middle ages, there was little taboo around bodily functions or sex, so some of the words we find most offensive now would not have been considered so. Things started to change in the 14th century. “Combined with the rise of Protestantism, and with it a strain of puritanism, this civilising process slowly transformed innocuous words into what modern observers would recognise as obscenities.”

Religious swearwords, or profanities, were considered most offensive. In the early 17th century, Mohr says, parliament passed an act making it illegal to use references to God mockingly, including shortened versions such as “zounds” (meaning God’s wounds). Then, over the next couple of centuries, there was a decline in the shock power of profanities, but a rise in obscenity – anything bodily – that the Victorians considered so horrific that the power in those words lives on today.

The big swearwords are relatively unchanged. “It’s all convention,” says Jay. “Institutions of power – school, church, your parents, the media, the sports team you’re on – set standards, then police these standards and punish people who break the rules. That’s why we’ve maintained all of these words over the years.” The church has lost its power, which is why most people consider it completely harmless to say or hear “oh my God”, whereas you would never have heard it, says Jay, in early radio broadcasts.

What worries Emma Byrne, the author of Swearing Is Good for You, is that as words such as “fuck” lose their impact, worse words might take their place. “Swearing tends to lose its power as it loses its taboo status,” she says. “The terms that remain taboo tend to be slurs, derogatory terms for other people, and I would much rather the bodily functions stayed as our outlet.”

A huge number of racist, homophobic, ableist and misogynistic terms are used regularly online – and the words change, says Byrne, to evade filters and hate speech laws. “The bodily functions unite us – there’s something about ‘fuck’ and ‘shit’ that we can relate to on one level or another. I’m very concerned as to what’s left if those words are no longer considered taboo. Slurs are used as weapons in a way that ‘fuck’ and ‘shit’ never were.”

More encouraging is the emergence of a nuanced approach in professional life, she says. “I think workplaces are becoming more aware of the distinction between swearing and abuse. You can be swearing with your colleagues about ‘how fucking stressful this quarter’s been’, or you can consistently undermine and belittle someone and never use a swearword at all. One of those I would say is OK and the other is not. Taking our focus off swearing and putting it more on bullying and abuse is something to be welcomed.”

Stephens’ research has shown that swearing has benefits – which in itself may make people more comfortable with it. In one study, he got participants to dip their hands into ice-cold water and repeat either a swearword or a neutral word, to see if swearing helped them cope with the pain. It did. “They’ll keep their hand in the water longer in the swearing condition,” he says.

The researchers also tested the effect of swearing on strength, testing the force people create using a hand-gripping device. “People will grip that with more force when they’re repeating a swearword over repeating a neutral word,” says Stephens. “We’re still not sure how it works, but it’s looking like it’s something to do with being disinhibited. People use swearwords to overthrow restraint, stop being so controlled, be a little bit freer, not overthink, that sort of thing. Swearing helps you just nudge over to a bit more of a don’t-hold-back mindset.”

Jay has shown that, contrary to widespread belief, swearing is not the refuge of those who are lacking in vocabulary. “Swearing is a wonderful evolutionary advantage – for humans to be able to express their emotions abstractly. It allows me to vent, it allows me to express frustration, anger, but also surprise, joy. It allows me to express that and communicate it to you very effectively. When you say ‘fuck you’ to someone, it’s almost like punching them, but it’s not punching them.”

Young children, he says, “progressively learn how to express their anger, which originally is very physical – tantrums, biting, scratching – and then it becomes much more abstract. I can yell ‘fuck you’ to someone across the street and I don’t have to hit or bite them.” As offensive or upsetting as it might be, he says, “it’s better than shooting someone. We have enough of that crap here [in the US].”

Swearing can produce responses such as increased sweating and raised heart rate and is thought to be processed differently from other forms of language. “Somebody swearing for humour, or to express frustration with some third party, is possibly processed differently from the automatic, emotional, maybe pain-driven, swearing,” says Stapleton. It may be associated with strong childhood and adolescent memories and the responses to those, he adds. This could include a parent telling you off for swearing, but it could also be positive – “maybe bonding with peers, or receiving acceptance or admiration”.

Children start using swearwords as soon as they start talking, says Jay, but he isn’t convinced this is new, more that now we have more ways of observing them. Different cultures have similar kinds of swearwords. “In places where you have a strong presence of the Catholic church, you have a lot of religious profanities,” says Jay. “But everybody has sexual terms, scatological terms, ancestral allusions – bastard, motherfucker, son of a bitch – and animal names.”

Even chimps might swear. “The two things that are sufficient for swearing to emerge are a taboo and the means to express it,” says Byrne. For the chimps that were studied, that was bowel movements and learning a sign for “dirty”. “They used that sign as a way of expressing frustration, of telling someone they’re not happy with them, and also joking. They have a really scatological sense of humour and would wind up the humans by basically doing what my six-year-old does, which is say ‘poo’ all the time at the table.

“I loved that, as soon as you have a taboo and the means to express it, at least in one other species, we’ve seen that used in the same way as we use it.”

Her favourite example of swearing, though, she says with a laugh, tells us much about how swearwords deliver far more than the sum of their parts – how they can convey frustration, intensity, shock and humour, but also sufficient emotion regulation and language skills, where once there would have been an angry physical reaction. It was when her toddler turned to her, looked her dead in the eye, and said: “Mummy, get me out of this fucking highchair.”

This article was amended on 9 February 2023. An earlier version said that a viral German news clip featured a newsreader. This should have said political correspondent.

Bojana Manojlovic and Anelida Pardini.

Omnicom Media Group’s data and technology offering, Annalect has added two leadership positions.

Bojana Manojlovic re-joins Annalect after a short travelling hiatus in the newly created general manager – advanced analytics role, and is joined by Anelida Pardini, who moves into the director of client services role from sister agency, PHD.

Manojlovic joined Annalect as the head of data science from Commonwealth Bank in 2021, and the Pardini is a PHD veteran, serving as a group business director since 2010, overseeing some of the agency’s premier clients during that time.

Acting lead at Annalect, Schalk van der Sandt said: “Annalect has experienced fantastic growth over the last couple of years, and we have some very positive momentum going into 2023.

"I don’t think we could have done any better than Bo and Anelida. Bojana is an absolute master of her craft, and Anelida is a proven operational powerhouse.”

Pardini said: “It is essential to join the dots, strategically and practically, and set up process and operations that makes delivery simple, but effective.

"I’m excited to bring the expertise I’ve developed in the agency environment to Annalect, and to deliver the advanced marketing solutions that will create the competitive advantage for our clients.”

Manojlovic said: “I could not be more excited to rejoin Annalect.

"With its data and technology offering brought to life by some of the best technical minds in the business, I am thrilled to back at OMG delivering true value to our clients.”

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Jehan Casinader is a Wellington-based journalist, speaker and mental health advocate.

A young woman sits in front of her computer. In just 28 seconds, she creates a TikTok clip called, “What social anxiety can look like at school”.

The symptoms she outlines include: “avoiding eye contact”, “finding it difficult to ask for help”, “forever fidgeting” and “not contributing to group activities”.

Three million people watch this video. With a moody soundtrack and snappy captions, it reels in 532,000 likes and a flood of comments. Many are from teenagers.

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“OMG, that’s me, but the whole time I didn’t think it was anxiety,” says one. “I didn’t know I had that,” writes another. “I figured out I got school anxiety,” says a third.

For some of the 8300 people who commented, there’s an epiphany. “Oh, I have anxiety.” “Literally me.” “This is me.” “Yep.” “That’s me all the time.” “I have it.” “I do all those things.” “I have all this.” “Exactly me.” “Just described me.” “Thank you.”

Perhaps the most revealing comment comes from someone called Anya. “Not to self-diagnose, but why is this so accurate?” she asks.

Self-diagnosis is as old as the Internet. In the 1990s, sites like WebMD allowed people to look up their symptoms before deciding whether to visit the doctor. But in 2023, self-diagnosis is a much wider trend, and it has the potential to help – and to harm.

Across New Zealand, people are struggling to access mental health support. Underfunded public services have months-long wait lists. Private therapists and psychologists can be expensive. There simply aren’t enough trained professionals to meet demand.

While adults can be resigned to this, teens are more resourceful. On social media, they can find millions of bite-sized pieces of content about mental health conditions, learning disabilities and trauma.

On TikTok alone, the #adhd hashtag has 20 billion views, while #anxiety has 22 billion. Even a less common condition, borderline personality disorder (#bpd), has 8 billion views.

Most of those clips are not created by mental health experts. Rather, they’re homegrown – made by ordinary people. Some have become online celebrities by sharing their experiences and opinions.

This can be useful. Over the past 15 years, social media has helped to remove stigma and shame around mental distress. After hearing other people’s stories, many of us – including me – have accepted that it’s OK to seek help.

Using online content, we’ve learnt about how our brains work. We’ve gathered tools – like mindfulness and gratitude – from the clips we have watched, the Instagram influencers we have followed, and the Reddit discussion threads we have perused.

Today, a young person can access a wealth of information for free, without leaving their bedroom. They don’t need to risk shame or rejection by speaking to a parent or teacher. Their mates won’t find out. They may find comfort by connecting with complete strangers online.

At its best, social media makes people feel like they aren’t alone in their darkest moments. That can save lives. But there’s a shadow side, and it’s becoming harder to ignore.

The causes of mental distress are complex. A teen who self-diagnoses may rely on limited or misleading information, and come to inaccurate conclusions about their wellbeing.

They may label themselves as “mentally ill”, when in fact they are experiencing normal, healthy emotions that relate to challenges in their home or school life.

Social media can magnify a teen’s emotions and make them seem bigger and scarier than they actually are. Algorithms learn what you’re interested in, and then feed you an endless stream of similar content. If you click on videos about depression, you’ll gradually find your timeline filled with more and more of them.

If that content is focused on other people’s problems, rather than tools or strategies to Improve wellbeing, a young person may be left feeling even more hopeless.

Academics share these concerns. Last year, a paper published in the British Medical Journal highlighted an “explosion” of verbal and physical tic disorders in children and adolescents. The authors noted a coinciding increase in popularity of Tourette’s-related content on TikTok, with 2.5 billion hits for the #tourettes hashtag.

The researchers suggested that, although TikTok allows teenagers to find peer support, the content they watch may also be “inadvertently reinforcing and maintaining [their] symptoms”.

While social media can empower young people, it can also trap them in harmful feedback loops.

Is this common? I believe so. I travel around New Zealand speaking about mental health. I regularly meet teenagers who have self-diagnosed.

They often speak about mood disorders in a very casual way: “Oh, yeah, I’ve had depression my whole life.” “I can’t do that because of my depression.” “All my friends have anxiety.” “Anxiety is just part of who I am.”

Many do not view depression or anxiety as an “event” in their life, or even a “period” of distress. Rather, a diagnostic label has become part of their identity. And that scares me – especially if they are the author of their own diagnosis.

If you’re a parent, be aware that your child may have diagnosed themselves with a disorder – and you don’t know about it.

What can you do? Have regular, open conversations about terms like depression and anxiety. Ask your children age-appropriate questions about how they understand those words. Do they identify with them?

Parents can share their own experiences of navigating mental distress, and talk about how they make sense of difficult emotions. If you have a clinical diagnosis, explain to the child what it means, where it came from, and how it helps you to look after your wellbeing.

It’s important for young people to understand that it’s common to feel depressed or anxious for a period – without “having” clinical depression or anxiety.

Without prying, be curious about the content your child is consuming on platforms like TikTok, Twitch and Netflix. School up on popular media content that may be influencing their knowledge of mental distress. When you spend time together, expose them to different perspectives and forms of storytelling.

Most of all, it’s important to make it easy for your child to ask for help. Often, young people try to sort out their mental health issues in secret, because they’re ashamed.

Remind your child that you’re happy to support them if they ever want to speak to a professional. Explain that counsellors and psychologists are trained to provide support in a safe, structured way. For those living in remote areas, online counselling may be an option too.

Many local websites provide useful resources. The Lowdown contains stories and information for youth, covering Topics like body dysmorphia, drugs, bullying and grief. For older teens, Small Steps and Just a Thought offer mini courses and tools to help you to calm your mind.

Young people can easily get hung up on whether they meet the criteria for a particular condition. It’s worth teaching them that the purpose of a diagnosis isn’t just to deliver a label to a problem – it’s used to provide a signpost to appropriate treatment options.

Rather than fixating on a diagnosis, it’s more helpful to focus on the tools, actions or strategies that contribute to their wellbeing on a day-to-day basis.

Finally, young people need to be relieved of their self-imposed pressure to have all the answers.

As you get older, you realise that it’s not always possible to stick a nice, neat label on your mental health challenges. Some things can’t be diagnosed – and nor should they be.

Adulthood is about learning to be comfortable with being uncomfortable, and recognising that no matter what challenges you’re facing, it’s your choices that matter.

For some, that choice could be as simple as logging off TikTok for a while.

One of former President Donald Trump’s most consistent personal traits — one that his advisers say has helped keep him out of even worse legal jeopardy — has been his refusal to communicate by text or email.

Until now.

Trump, 76, who is heading into his third presidential campaign and is still under scrutiny by investigators on multiple fronts, has at last become a texter, according to three people with knowledge of his new habit. His messages have recently shown up in the phones of surprised recipients, they said.

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The former president’s resistance to texting frustrated investigators for the House Jan. 6 committee as they tried to track his thoughts and actions when he worked to overturn the 2020 election. In his testimony before the committee, the former president’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., said he texted the White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, during the Capitol attack because his father “doesn’t text.”

That changed around the beginning of this year. Friends, confidants and even people not especially close to Donald Trump began receiving text messages from his cellphone, most of them described as innocuous, such as new year greetings or political observations. A spokesperson for Trump declined to comment.

The former president has long been constantly on his phone, but only to talk into it — or, before he was kicked off Twitter, to send streams of tweets. (The former aide who helped set up his Twitter account once told Politico that when Trump, who initially relied on aides to write his posts, began to tweet on his own, it was akin to the scene in the film “Jurassic Park” when the velociraptors learned to open doors.)

For years, people corresponding with him sent him text messages, which always went unanswered. He was unreachable by email. He sometimes asked aides to send electronic messages to reporters, referring to the missives as “wires,” like a telegram.

Story continues

Now his delayed embrace of what has long been a default mode of communication spanning generations signals not only a willingness to join in the world of LOLs and BRBs but also a small shift from his aversion to leaving paper or electronic trails.

People who have worked for Trump in the White House and in his private business say he has prided himself on being “smart” for leaving almost no documentation of his communications and discussions in meetings. That included snatching notes being taken in real time by a junior legal associate in his offices in the 1990s, when Trump spotted the man scribbling, according to a consultant working for him then.

Those who have witnessed firsthand his visceral aversion to record keeping said they were shocked to learn about his new electronic habit.

“Has he now also started to take notes?” John Bolton, Trump’s former national security adviser, dryly texted when told about the former president’s texting.

Trump upbraided Bolton, who wrote one of the most searing book-length accounts of the Trump presidency, for taking notes during meetings.

Trump also chided Donald McGahn II, his first White House counsel, for notes he took. McGahn, when interviewed by special counsel Robert Mueller during the Russia investigation, described informing Trump that he took notes because he was a “real lawyer.”

“I’ve had a lot of great lawyers, like Roy Cohn. He did not take notes,” McGahn recounted Trump saying, referring to his ruthless longtime fixer and mentor who became the prototype for what Trump sought in a lawyer.

A former Trump White House official, who asked not to be identified in order to speak candidly, described the former president’s penchant for avoiding leaving records so there was “nothing to follow” as a possible “parable from Roy Cohn’s time.”

The fact that Trump is now sending texts has caused alarm among some of his associates, who are concerned about what he might say. Still, they have been relieved about another shift: His phone now sends calls that are not from numbers in his contacts to voicemail, according to two people familiar with the change.

That shift occurred this month after an NBC reporter called Trump directly during Rep. Kevin McCarthy’s desperate fight to be elected speaker of the House. Trump picked up, giving a brief interview that created some political heartburn for Republicans.

Still unclear is Trump’s position on emoji.

© 2023 The New York Times Company

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