For Spy Agencies, Briefing Trump Is A Test Of Holding His Attention
Julian E. Barnes and Adam Goldman, New York Times, May 21, 2020
President Trump has blamed many others for his administration's flawed response to the coronavirus: China, governors, the Obama administration, the World Health Organization. In recent weeks, he has also faulted the information he received from ... his intelligence briefings.
Mr. Trump has insisted that the intelligence agencies gave him inadequate warnings about the threat of the virus, describing it as "not a big deal." ... Mr. Trump [also] ignored a host of warnings he received around that time [mid-to-late January 2020] from higher-ranking officials, epidemiologists, scientists, biodefense officials, other national security aides and the news media about the virus's growing threat. Mr. Trump's own health secretary had alerted him ... to the potential seriousness of the virus. ...
Mr. Trump ... is particularly difficult to brief on critical national security matters, according to interviews with 10 current and former intelligence officials familiar with his intelligence briefings.
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 he hears from the former casino magnate Steve Wynn, the retired golfer Gary Player or Christopher Ruddy, the conservative media executive.
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.
Working to keep Mr. Trump's interest exhausted and burned out his first briefer, Ted Gistaro, two former officials said. Mr. Gistaro did not always know what to expect and would sometimes have to brief an erratic and angry president upset over news reports, the officials said. ...
Mr. Trump's demeanor is hardly judicial, former officials said, but they acknowledged he occasionally asks good questions.
Mr. Trump ... publicly belittled his intelligence chiefs last year after a congressional hearing where they offered assessments at odds with the White House, directing them to "go back to school." ...
"How do you know?" is Mr. Trump's common refrain during his 30- to 50-minute briefings two or three times a week. He counters with his own statistics on issues where he has strong views, like trade or NATO. Directly challenging him, even when his numbers are wrong, appears to erode Mr. Trump's trust, according to former officials, and ultimately he stops listening.
H.R. McMaster, the former national security adviser, would sometimes interject during intelligence briefings to correct Mr. Trump, but the president would ignore him. The corrections contributed to the president's growing irritation with Mr. McMaster, according to people familiar with the briefings. ...
[G]etting Mr. Trump to remember information, even if he seems to be listening, can be all but impossible, especially if it runs counter to his worldview, former officials said. ...
Mr. Trump has also shown interest in foreign leaders, particularly autocrats like President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi of Egypt ... While Mr. Trump does not appear to read the intelligence reports he is given, he will examine graphs, charts and tables. Satellite pictures clearly interest him, too: He tweeted one from his intelligence brief, revealing the capabilities of some of the government's most classified spy assets.
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Trump's Lethal Aversion To Reading
Windsor Mann, The Week, May 21, 2020
If you're reading this sentence, you've read more than the president has today.
Last month, The Washington Post reported that President Trump ignored "more than a dozen" intelligence briefings in January and February warning him of the coronavirus. They were in the President's Daily Brief, which the president doesn't read.
White House trade adviser Peter Navarro wrote a memo in January warning of "a full-blown coronavirus outbreak on U.S. soil." Trump said he didn't see it because "Peter sends a lot of memos," none of which he reads.
After failing to read about the coronavirus, Trump failed to respond to it. It's not a stretch to say that if the president read, thousands of lives might have been saved.
Trump's ghostwriter for The Art of the Deal, Tony Schwartz, speculated that Trump has never read a single book in his adult life, not even a book about him or "by" him, of which there are 17. Trump pretends to have written more books than he pretends to have read.
In an interview on Crossfire in 1987, Trump mentioned Tom Wolfe as one of his favorite authors. Seconds after saying he had not read The Bonfire of the Vanities, Trump said, "I really like Tom Wolfe's last book," which was The Bonfire of the Vanities.
In 2015, Joe Scarborough asked Trump if he could read. After some awkward silence, according to Scarborough, "Trump quietly responded that he could while holding up a Bible."
When Megyn Kelly asked him about the last book he read, Trump replied, "I read passages. I read areas. I'll read chapters. I don't have the time." Trump didn't have time to read the last book he read.
Reading – even about oneself – requires focus, and Trump has none. "It's impossible to keep him focused on any topic, other than his own self-aggrandizement, for more than a few minutes," Schwartz said.
Trump's non-reading evinces not stupidity so much as incuriosity. Narcissists are easily bored, and Trump is no exception. In his 1990 book, Surviving at the Top, which he didn't write, Trump says that travel, exercise, and successful people bore him. "I get bored too easily," he says. "My attention span is short."
Trump's former National Economic Council director Gary Cohn allegedly wrote in an email, "Trump won't read anything – not one-page memos, not the brief policy papers; nothing. He gets up halfway through meetings with world leaders because he is bored."
The only information that interests Trump is information that affirms his self-image. He's rich, handsome, and popular – that's what he wants to hear, which is why he regularly says it himself.
Trump, we are told, processes information orally. If you process information orally, you likely process little information. And if you process little information, you exude even less. Every time Trump comments on a subject, he reveals how little he knows about it. He wondered aloud why the Civil War was fought. He said he's been treated worse than Abraham Lincoln, who was assassinated. He didn't know what happened at Pearl Harbor. He's too dumb to know he's ignorant, and he's too narcissistic to care.
As John McWhorter, a linguistics professor at Columbia University, observed, oral communication is personal, focuses on emotions, and "reinforces what you know," whereas the written word "collects information we don't memorize." The latter is conducive to prolonged thinking.
Trump, putative author of three books with "think" in the title, doesn't like to think. He doesn't even think about himself – his favorite subject – much less about public health. He lives and acts in the moment, chasing instant gratification, which reading does not provide. That's why he prefers television and Twitter to reading and thinking: they are immediate, visceral, and cognitively undemanding. ...
In his book Call Sign Chaos, former Secretary of Defense James Mattis writes, "If you haven't read hundreds of books, you are functionally illiterate, and you will be incompetent, because your personal experiences alone aren't broad enough to sustain you." Trump's personal experiences include being on TV a lot and watching a lot of TV.
One of the purposes of reading is to learn, but it's pointless to learn if you already know everything. Trump is convinced of his own omniscience. Last month, he claimed to "know a lot about helicopters" and to "know South Korea better than anybody," right before he got the population of Seoul wrong.
"I know windmills very much," he said in December. "I've studied it better than anybody." The president has claimed to possess superior knowledge about drones, ISIS, courts, lawsuits, America's system of government, trade, renewable energy, banks, taxes, tax laws, debt, campaign finance, money, infrastructure, construction, technology, the economy, Democrats, polls, steelworkers, the word "apprentice," environmental impact statements, "the power of Facebook," "offense and defense," Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.), COVID-19, and "things."
None of this is true. Trump is a know-it-all who knows almost nothing and refuses to read anything except his own name. His bibliophobia would be funny if it weren't so deadly.
Trump just retweeted his polling post less than 25 minutes after first posting it. That has to be some kind of record. pic.twitter.com/bYplujnW5n— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) May 22, 2020
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