At the best of times, the White House must be a pretty chaotic environment to work in. And whatever your politics, it is probably fair to say that the present is not one of the better times. President Donald J. Trump is having an insanely difficult time both filling his administration with new hires, and keeping those new hires longer than a dishwasher at a chain restaurant. Life inside the White House sure seems to have gotten a lot weirder in the past few months. And we've found the stories that prove it.
7Memos Have To Be Written Like Children's Books
On any given day, a president is typically expected to read about as much material as a college student cramming for an exam, if that exam was about drones shooting up Yemeni villages. But Trump famously doesn't like reading.
So American intelligence agencies have been told to keep their reports short and free of nuance: Trump's intelligence reports are about 25 percent of the length of Obama's and allow no space for dissenting opinions. Policy papers have also been trimmed from 3-6 pages down to a single page, with lots of graphics and maps. Saddest of all, the National Security Council has taken things a step further by "strategically" including Trump's name as often as possible, knowing that he tends to keep reading if he sees his name being mentioned.
Which means we all effectively live in a Choose Your Own Adventure being read by a moron.
A bigger problem than just these oversimplified briefings, as the guy who used to deliver Obama's briefings pointed out, is that apparently Trump often doesn't even bother to read them. Which can lead to Trump embarrassing himself in talks with foreign leaders, or drafting woefully inept executive orders, or signing off on documents he doesn't know the meaning of. It's almost enough to make you want FOX News to start doing a special "Morning Briefing" segment that airs exclusively to the Oval Office.
Fox News
Almost.
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