this is a president for whom discipline and process are anathema, and in a crisis that relays disaster. president obama, for example, served on the senate armed services committee. donald trump, there is no evidence that he s ever even read an article about any of the subjects that presidents have to deal with on a daily basis. there was certainly no evidence that he had read any new york times article or washington post article or any basic reporting when he was in presidential debates leading up to election night. and so the ignorance we knew about. the willful ignorance that john walcott is describing is something we could have only gotten from the inside. that s right, and it s very frustrating. you think that the intelligence communities have been presenting intelligence briefings to the presidents even before they were sworn in as candidates. at a certain point, both candidates received daily
committee of the house of representatives. john walcott, i want to start with you, and the sources you re using here are people who some of them are people who have actually been in the room briefing the president, is that correct? that is correct. and they are telling you that among other things they have to try to reduce it to a couple of sentences, that there is an attention span issue? what other challenges did they face in that room? surely there is an attention span issue. i think many of us know that from various sources. second, there is a problem getting a president up to speed who has very little experience in foreign affairs. that s not unique to president trump. other presidents, including president obama, have come into office without deep experience in foreign policy. that brings us to the third difference, which is the stubborn disregard for anything he disagrees with. we ve seen that in the intelligence briefings and we ve
office without deep experience in foreign policy. that brings us to the third difference, which is the stubborn disregard for anything he disagrees with. we ve seen that in the intelligence briefings and we ve also seen it on the outside. he tends to reject opinions and analysis that conflicts with his own opinions and beliefs. chris whipple, you ve spoken to people in the trump white house as well as the obama white house. i think in your experience it s impossible to compare donald trump s ignorance to any other president who has preceded him. no, it s true. he s in a class of his own, as we know. and, you know, we ve had three white house chiefs of staff under donald trump who were all of them unable to tell the president what he did not want to hear. and now, according to john in his terrific story, it s the intelligence briefers. and in a way, that s even more disturbing than it is with the
makes a lot of sense. chris whipple, in your study of presidencies, have you ever seen schedules like what was leaked about president trump s schedule now? and i m not counting fdr when he was dying. i m not counting woodrow wilson when he was physically incapacitated. i m talking about physically capable presidents who spent as much lecture time as donald trump. no, nothing like it. even ronald reagan, who was famously detached as president, would show up at 9:00 sharp in the oval office every day, and he would hilt his marks. as long as he had a good director like jim baker around. so it s unprecedented. both of these stories, john s story on the sbel briefings, the story of donald trump unbelievable, quote, unquote, executive time, might have been something we knew each other for
what most workers in america would consider work. for president trump, work is simply sitting and talking and sometimes listening. there is no minimum wage worker in america who gets to call that work. that s what most american workers do on their day off. that s not what high school students call work. serious high school students spend many more hours a day working than president trump does, according to his schedules. serious high school students spend several hours of a day in class, intensely paying attention and taking notes, and then spend more hours on homework. they spend hours studying, they spend hours reading, but even serious high school students don t work as hard as barack obama did in the presidency, putting in 10-hour days routinely of briefings and meetings and study sessions, only then to take home a mountain of homework that he had to master.