These two words should never be used in close proximity, and that is the problem. The first function of the president is to protect the United States and its people from “all enemies, foreign and domestic.” The President’s Daily Brief, the collection of the best intelligence, is the daily summary of what our enemies are up to. It is the crown jewel of the intelligence community; being on the list of people who get a copy is one the main status symbols in Washington.
Unless you’re Donald Trump.
Trump Has Nearly Eliminated Intelligence Briefings From His Schedule Entirely
President Donald Trump’s interest in taking intelligence briefings has been declining steadily since his first months in office and has dropped to near zero in recent weeks, according to a HuffPost review of all of his daily schedules.
Trump went from a high of 4.1 briefings per week on average in March 2017 to 0.7 per week since July 1, shortly after it became public that he had ignored intelligence reports about Russia offering bounties to the Taliban for each American soldier killed in Afghanistan.
Monday’s briefing, in fact, was the first in August and the first since July 22. That month had only three briefings scheduled.
The story notes that George W. Bush had his daily briefings before 7 in the morning. (He may have ignored the Bin Laden warning, but at least acknowledged getting it.) Obama had his PDB downloaded on an iPad so he could read at 6 AM. Trump, however, doesn’t want his daily dose of Fox and Friends interrupted by trivia like existential threats to the country, and rarely sees or hears the PDB before noon — on those days when he bothers to hear it at all.
