Are you there White House? It’s me, Sha- oh that’s alright I’ll wait. The White House comment line, activated and working during President Obama’s administration, has been shut down since President Trump’s election.

As Blue Virginia reported last week, the phone numbers provided on wh.gov to “Call the President” are out of service. When calling the number, an automated voice comes on with a delightfully polite but unhelpful message: “The comment line is currently closed, but your comment is important to the President, and we urge you to send us a comment online at www.whitehouse.gov/contact or send us a message through Facebook Messenger.”

There may be some of you out there who are genuinely wondering if this busted White House phone line is even worth reporting on when there’s so much else that Trump is doing. Stay with me, I’m getting there.

Alright, here’s the problem with blocked phone access to the president: A democracy demands to be heard.

To cut off the communication option for an estimated 13 percent of Americans is to deny a basic facet of our democracy – the ability for an ordinary citizen to contact their commander-in-chief. Or, as he’s known to many, the People’s President.

Five days into the new administration, there’s been much non-stop discussion on falsehoods (i.e. flat-out lies) the Trump team has stood by and how the American people should react to the new norm of being inundated with easily provable lies that are repeated daily by the most powerful people in this country.

Having a dead White House phone line? Not that big of a deal. But the only reason we know about it is because it’s on the official White House site. It’s easily verifiable to check the phone number. Go ahead, call it now. I can wait.

Why the White House comment line matters

This is one of the few things the Trump administration has been transparent on and that’s only because the number is left over from the Obama team. This isn’t something built by the Trump team to allow public access to the White House. The dead phone line is just collateral from a new administration taking over.

And yet, it’s too much of an inconvenience to feign transparency by offering a functioning number to the White House.

If Trump and his White House inner circle are willing to show defiance in the face of transparency in such obvious way, what could they possibly be doing behind closed doors?

Take another example.

Sean Spicer, press secretary to the White House, said in a meeting with reporters on Jan. 23 that the administration’s “intention’s never to lie to you.”

Now, take a listen to what he said the next day at another White House press conference. Despite heads of agencies and Democrats and Republicans alike finding no evidence of voting fraud, Spicer says that Trump still  “maintains that belief based on studies and evidence that people have presented to him.”

For the love of all that is holy, is this grown-ass man serious?

Firstly, promising never to lie to someone and doing it again in a span of 5 minutes is not how adults do things. Spicer’s behavior reminds me of elementary school, where you’d swear up and down to never tell a soul your friend’s secret.

Until you see your other friend and think “eh, screw it” and do it anyway.

It’s like we’re the adults trying to teach the kids to tell the truth and get along with one another, and they can’t even do that. Except the kids have all the power somehow in this case and we play by the rules of a thin-skinned man-baby.

If the Trump administration is this comfortable with lying outright when it can so easily be proven wrong, imagine how much they could lie about things that the average American cannot fact check. It’s the kind of stuff we won’t know about until shit hits the fan to affect our reality as well as theirs.

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