JANUARY 2026 – NYT White House correspondent Tyler Pager, after reading reports of an overnight military action in Venezuela on Jan. 3, made a direct phone call to Donald Trump at 4:30 that morning. And the President picked up and spoke to him for a minute.
In that brief call Trump told Pager that he had made the decision to go extract Nicolas Maduro from a fortified military base near Miraflores Palace in Caracas, and the apprehension of Maduro and his wife was a success.
Of those dizzying events, Pager’s direct call to the president is one of the most extraordinary in the annals of modern journalism. There is no comparable incident – at least one publicly acknowledged – that’s taken place since the cell phone was invented. Sure, Time Magazine founder Henry Luce likely called Eisenhower for a golf game, but even that call would’ve required getting though the White House switchboard. Pager, barely 30, had Trump’s cell number, and Trump picked up.
I just called him directly and he picked up. I wasn’t that surprised because the president’s phone habits are pretty well-documented — he regularly picks up calls from reporters.
That might be true, but there’s little record of any late-night phone call to a president, and the contents of that call hitting the news screens almost instantly. And Pager, barely 30, is a cub reporter compared with the Jeffrey Goldberg’s of Washington press coverage.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/03/insider/trump-interview-venezuela-nyt-reporter.html