Jonathan Chait compares Trump to a child in terms of understanding his security briefs, “because reading the brief — which every president has been able to do since its existence began — ‘is not Trump’s preferred ‘style of learning,’”. Honest, Abe.
Dumbed-Down Security Briefings Still Too Difficult for Trump to Read
When Donald Trump was elected president, it quickly became obvious that the traditional national-security briefing a person in his position receives daily would be well beyond his zone of proximal development.
The briefings were slimmed down in length, chopped up into easy-to-digest bullet points, and decorated with lots of graphs and pictures.
Alas, the Washington Post reports, even the kiddie version of the presidential brief has proven too challenging. Now, Trump gets his briefing verbally.
Trump, the Post reports, “has opted to rely on an oral briefing of select intelligence issues” because reading the brief — which every president has been able to do since its existence began — “is not Trump’s preferred ‘style of learning,’ according to a person with knowledge of the situation.”
Also, Trump does not receive his verbal briefing daily, but instead “about every two to three days on average in recent months, typically around 11 a.m.” That’s when “executive time” ends and Trump has to turn off Fox News to listen to officials for a while, before he gets more screen time later in the day.
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- President Donald Trump, in an interview with a British newspaper on Thursday, said he believes he is "the most popular person in the history of the Republican Party."
- During his interview with The Sun, Trump claimed his approval rating among Republicans landed at 92%, "beating [Abraham] Lincoln."
- "I beat our Honest Abe," Trump said. A Gallup poll published last month found Trump's approval rating among fellow Republicans was 90%.
July 2018 — www.businessinsider.com/...
1. Trump made up the country of “Nambia”
2. He confused Iraq and Syria, after bombing the latter
3. He confused North and South Korea
4. He called Belgium “a beautiful city”
5. “I never knew there were so many countries.”
Trump’s desire to call world leaders at awkward hours is just one of many previously unreported diplomatic faux pas Trump has made since assuming the presidency, which go beyond telephone etiquette to include misconceptions, mispronunciations and awkward meetings. Sometimes the foibles have been contained within the White House. In one case, Trump, while studying a briefer’s map of South Asia ahead of a 2017 meeting with India’s prime minister, mispronounced Nepal as “nipple” and laughingly referred to Bhutan as “button,” according to two sources with knowledge of the meeting.
One former National Security Council official told Politico that the president avoids saying certain words and names for fear he will mispronounce them when speaking to other world leaders.
Trump last month made waves by going after historic U.S. allies such as the European Union at a NATO summit, while seeming to align himself with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
"If people are looking for more polish and more kind of conventional statecraft and that’s their metric for Trump learning, I think they’re going to be disappointed,” a former adviser to Trump's State Department transition team told Politico. “I don’t think he sees those as faux-pas, I think he sees them as ‘look, I do things differently.’ If you say, ‘that’s not how things are done,’ he says, ‘who says? Where is it written down that I can’t do that?'"
Of course, those who view Russia as a conservative nirvana are mistaken. Traditional conservative values of small government and individual rights find no home in present day Russia. Abortion is still a primary means of birth control, such that Russia has one of the highest rates of abortions among women of child-bearing age in the world. Christian values are protected as long as you belong to the Russian Orthodox church, and gun rights are severely limited. Tyranny is what Russia does best.
More importantly, Putin’s Russia hates us. Putin’s core interests are directly opposed to those of the United States. He has framed himself as the leader of a global anti-U.S. movement. He doesn’t care a whit about Trump, Republicans, or Democrats; he pursues a zero-sum foreign policy, premised on the belief that anything that hurts the U.S. is good for Russia. When Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov was recently asked which of the two governments in Libya the Russians would support, he answered, “Whichever one the U.S. is against.” Short of surrendering to Putin’s view of the world, no U.S. administration is likely to meaningfully change Russian behavior.
Putin’s goal is to stoke hyper-partisan fighting, weaken U.S. institutions, split the U.S. from its allies, and have the U.S. pull back from its international obligations. The United States, though, remains a more prosperous and more powerful nation, an advantage built on its commitment to its founding values. The greatest concern for Americans shouldn’t be that Trump may have colluded with Russia; it’s that under his guidance, we may be converging.
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