The return of the Luddite president

Whether Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump wins the White House, one thing seems sure: The US will get a president with scant first-hand understanding of modern technology. Clinton's tech travails are all over the headlines, including the lax security of her home-brewed e-mail server and her documented struggles with fax machines — and the recently disclosed hacking of the Democratic National Committee's e-mails won't do much to burnish her party's image of cyber competence.

But Trump's hardly a candidate for the Geek Squad either, despite the prolific round-the-clock tweeting strategy he uses to dominate the headlines. He has boasted that he hardly ever sends e-mails — and, like Clinton, he often relies on staff to print news articles off the Internet. “I’m just not a believer in e-mail,” Trump said during a news conference during which he criticized Clinton's use of a private server when she was secretary of state. The tech-aloofness of the two nominees marks a sharp break from President Barack Obama, who fought to keep a mobile phone when he entered the White House, spends downtime surfing his iPad and wrote about his awe at the power of the Internet in his 2006 book “The Audacity of Hope.” That raises the prospect that the next occupant of the Oval Office — charged with making decisions on issues like encryption, the fight against a social-media savvy Islamic State, and the growing automation of the American economy — will be less familiar with consumer technologies than the average citizens who use them.