masks, home testing kits. most are good at detecting omicron. all these things help as well. very, very good. look, those tests, a lot of people i found don t realize they re available. they re available at your drugstore. they re a little bit of an investment, but not too much. it is definitely worth having on hand. i ve always been grateful when i had any symptoms to be able to do that. sanjay, thank you so much. you got it. thank you. fox is taking its vitriol to another level, comparing dr. anthony fauci to a nazi doctor. we have a reality check ahead on that. plus, donald trump was far and away the most difficult new president to brief for the intelligence community. that s according to the cia del t detailing what went on during briefings. and bahamas declaring rihanna a national hero in the island s first act as a new republic. why they ve left the youunited kingdom and separated from the
good summary. john did a good job with that title because it conveys so much. it wasn t that donald trump was un-briefable. he did have intelligence briefings during the transition, and he did keep them through much of his presidency, but those briefings were decidedly different than with any other president. because donald trump did not want to sit there and listen to the objective facts as judged by the intelligence community. he wanted to talk. he wanted to interrupt. he wanted to ask questions. and not really focus on what the evidence was as much as what he thought the evidence was. that led to a very difficult relationship for an intelligence enterprise that has been built up over decades solely to get objective information before the president. look, you ve written about this, every president is different in their engagement style, but there s this absorbing of the information.
what we can see from this chapter is trump was not doing that nearly as much as previous presidents. the person who was was vice president mike pence. he was kind of receiving these briefings more like a president than even president trump was, it seems. right on. there s a couple of people, other than president trump in the administration, who get some attention in this new material. one of them is vice president pence, who we didn t have much of a window on from the reporting during the administration regarding how he took intelligence. there was an assumption that he was getting the president s daily preebrief and taking the information seriously. frankly, the vice president doesn t have as much to do as the president. and perhaps he d have to step into the president s shoes, perhaps more likely with this president than any other, given the two impeachments. pence should have been doing this, and the material shows he was. he was taking briefings quite regularly and engaging heavi
briefer said, but we didn t actually read anything. so it is a shocking revelation there, too, that the commander in chief of the united states didn t get any material from the pdb for virtually a month at the end of his presidency, in a very chaotic time. yeah. it is staggering. you know, you mentioned, as we see trump s style here, interrupting briefings, what is the matter with that? what is the matter with interrupting a briefer or challenging a briefer? this may be surprising, but there is nothing at all wrong with that. in fact, when i was a briefer, most often for bob mueller and john ashcroft, but a few times into the white house, i actually wanted the customers, as we called them, to interrupt. then i would know what wasn t working for them in the way i was presenting it, and i would know what was of interest to them that i needed to address in the limited time we had together. so there s nothing wrong with interruptions. there is something wrong if the interruptions mean