By Steve Benen, a reporter for MSNBC
This [lack of reading and attention] is not, evidently, limited to the hapless FBI chief [Patel]. Politico reported:
Since President Donald Trump was sworn into office in January, he has sat for just 12 presentations from intelligence officials of the President’s Daily Brief. That’s a significant drop compared with Trump’s first term in office, according to a POLITICO analysis of his public schedule. In much of his first term, Trump met with intel officials twice a week for the briefing, which provides the intelligence community’s summary of the most pressing national security challenges facing the nation.
Politico’s report, which has not been independently verified by MSNBC or NBC News, added that the low number of briefings “is troubling to many in and around the intelligence community, who were already concerned about Trump’s act-first-evaluate-after approach to governing.”
It’s worth emphasizing that different presidents have approached these briefings in different ways. George W. Bush received intelligence briefings on a nearly daily basis. Barack Obama received briefings roughly every other day, but he was known to be a voracious reader of the written President’s Daily Brief (often referred to as the PDB). Joe Biden received an in-person briefing once or twice a week, but like Obama, he was also known to read the PDB briefing book.
Trump, meanwhile, reportedly doesn’t read the PDB, and if the Politico report is accurate, he’s receiving in-person briefings roughly once every 10 days.
Broadly speaking, a couple of angles are worth keeping in mind in response to reporting like this. The first is probably obvious: Trump is dealing with serious national security challenges — war in Ukraine, a crisis in the Middle East, China expanding its global influence, domestic security threats, et al. — and the United States is being led by an incurious former television personality who desperately needs — but apparently isn’t getting — valuable information that would lead to better decision-making.
Less obvious, however, is the pattern: The problem isn’t just that Trump is avoiding intelligence he needs; the problem is made worse by the fact that Trump has always avoided intelligence he needs.
During his transition process in 2016, for example, Trump skipped nearly all of his intelligence briefings. Asked why, the Republican told Fox News in December 2016, “Well, I get it when I need it. … I don’t have to be told — you know, I’m, like, a smart person.”
As his inauguration drew closer, Trump acknowledged that he likes very short intelligence briefings. “I like bullets, or I like as little as possible,” he explained in January 2017. Around the same time, he added, “I don’t need, you know, 200-page reports on something that can be handled on a page.”
Things did not improve once he was in power. In early 2017, intelligence professionals went to great lengths to try to accommodate the president’s toddler-like attention span, preparing reports “with lots of graphics and maps.” National Security Council officials eventually learned that Trump was likely to stop reading important materials unless he saw his own name, so they included his name in “as many paragraphs” as possible.
In August 2017, The Washington Post had a piece on then-White House National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster, who struggled to “hold the attention of the president” during briefings on Afghanistan. The article noted, “[E]ven a single page of bullet points on the country seemed to tax the president’s attention span on the subject.”
A Trump confidant said at the time, “I call the president the two-minute man. The president has patience for a half-page.”
In February 2018, the Post reported that Trump “rarely, if ever“ read the PDB prepared for him. Months later, the Post had a separate report noting that the CIA and other agencies devoted enormous “time, energy and resources” to ensuring that Trump received key intelligence, but “his seeming imperviousness to such material often renders ‘all of that a waste.’”
In early 2020, the Post reported that Trump missed the early alarms on the Covid threat, in part because he “routinely skips reading the PDB” and had “little patience” for oral summaries of the intelligence. Exactly five years ago next week, The New York Times had a related report:
The president veers off on tangents and getting him back on topic is difficult, they said. He has a short attention span and rarely, if ever, reads intelligence reports, relying instead on conservative media and his friends for information. He is unashamed to interrupt intelligence officers and riff based on tips or gossip. … Mr. Trump rarely absorbs information that he disagrees with or that runs counter to his worldview, the officials said. Briefing him has been so great a challenge compared with his predecessors that the intelligence agencies have hired outside consultants to study how better to present information to him.
It was an extraordinary revelation to consider: A sitting American president, in a time of multiple and dangerous crises, was so resistant to learning about security threats that his own country’s intelligence officials have sought outside help to figure out how to get him to listen and focus.
Or, put another way, Trump’s indifference to intelligence is a problem, but it’s not a new problem.
Bruce Gerencser, 67, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 46 years. He and his wife have six grown children and sixteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.
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