President Trump isn't the computing type. The word is he has an iPhone with just one app on it—The Tweet Machine—and he doesn't use email. So while Trump is likely totally hopeless when it comes to computers, he's also not a direct cybersecurity threat. But you'd think the people below him—many of whom are younger—would be more tech-savvy, and that they might be a little more hip to the cybersecurity dangers for our nation. After all, the head honcho can't seem to come to grips with the fact that the Russians used hacking as part of their influence campaign in the last election. Hopefully, others in the administration are picking up the slack.

It appears not. According to Jake Tapper at CNN, some high-level White House officials were done in recently by an "email prankster" with a sadly primitive scheme. Basically, some British bloke started emailing White House officials posing as other White House officials, except he was using Outlook and mail.com accounts. The list of victims includes Homeland Security Adviser Tom Bossert, who heads up cybersecurity initiatives for the administration, and whom the prankster, posing as the Son-in-Law-in-Chief Jared Kushner, easily duped into giving up sensitive details—in this case, his personal email. And no modern White House tale would be complete without an appearance from The Mooch, whom the same prankster roped into a fight with "Reince Priebus" that ended with the real Scaramucci telling a fake email alias to read Shakespeare's Othello.

The classical theater references from the White House Scaramouche notwithstanding, this was a bit of a fuck-up from the administration—though not an overly dangerous one. According to CNN, the prankster didn't have particularly nefarious intentions: He told the network he tries "to keep it on the humorous side of things." (As a Brit, perhaps he might also say he's "taking the piss.") Of course, other times these kind of "spear-phishing" schemes have been destructive, including when Hillary Clinton campaign chair John Podesta fell for one last year and ended up seeing his emails plastered all over the national news media.

Of course, this being the Trump administration, that last episode presents a bit of hypocrisy. Trump and his surrogates savaged Hillary Clinton and her campaign on the topic of cybersecurity throughout the presidential contest, declaring her unfit to hold the office because she had a private email server which she used to mishandle classified information. Trump also blamed the Democratic National Committee for getting hacked, citing "gross negligence." Even if these claims are true—and that's murky at best—they're absurd now that we've seen the cyber warriors Trump has recruited for his administration. After all, this is a White House that started out by keeping the official @POTUS Twitter account tied to a (private!) Gmail address that random Internet users saw when they tried to reset the account's password.

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The root of the problem is that the federal government is brimming with bureaucrats who don't know the first thing about computers or what it takes to survive online. The president, as we've seen, essentially lives in a pre-computer world that somehow has Twitter. Lindsey Graham, one of the chief Republican defense hawks, proudly claims to have never sent an email. Congressional subcommittees on cybersecurity can involve witnesses trying to explain the technology at issue to their questioners, who might be better served by a visit from the Geek Squad. This all points to the vulnerability of some of our most powerful public servants to attacks from people who are Extremely Online—like, say, Russian hackers. This is an issue the American people are concerned about: 51 percent of respondents told Pew that they think cyberattacks are "a major threat to our country." Perhaps it's time for our representatives to log on, or for us to find some who will. After all, the Russians will almost certainly be back for the 2018 midterms.

Jack Holmes Politics Editor Jack Holmes is the Politics Editor at Esquire, where he writes daily and edits the Politics Blog with Charles P Pierce.

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