Let the eggs roll where they will

Apr 2nd, 2018 | By
Category: Notes and Comment Blog
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What happens when you let your attention wander for a minute and you elect a toddler to be chief executive of a country with a huge nuclear arsenal:

When Donald Trump was elected president, it quickly became obvious that the traditional national-security briefing a person in his position receives daily would be well beyond his zone of proximal development. The briefings were slimmed down in length, chopped up into easy-to-digest bullet points, and decorated with lots of graphs and pictures. Alas, the Washington Post reports, even the kiddie version of the presidential brief has proven too challenging. Now, Trump gets his briefing verbally.

Michael Wolf is very clear on this in Fire and Fury: Trump won’t read and he won’t listen either.

Trump, the Post reports, “has opted to rely on an oral briefing of select intelligence issues” because reading the brief — which every president has been able to do since its existence began — “is not Trump’s preferred ‘style of learning,’ according to a person with knowledge of the situation.”

Also, Trump does not receive his verbal briefing daily, but instead “about every two to three days on average in recent months, typically around 11 a.m.” That’s when “executive time” ends and Trump has to turn off Fox News to listen to officials for a while, before he gets more screen time later in the day.

So every 3 days or so someone tries to tell Trump a few things, but it’s futile because Trump doesn’t listen. He talks about whatever pops into his head, while the briefers try to use the few minutes left to tell him things, but he doesn’t listen.

Today’s burst of tweets is exceptionally scattershot-plus-obsessive:

An hour later:

Another hour later:

An hour later again:

Scare quotes on the Department of Justice, that’s part of the executive branch, and part of his cabinet.

Then a couple of hours after all that:

Have a productive week.

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