Day 693: What Trump is consumed with while ignoring national security
Hint: scandals, staff and vacation
Donald Trump couldn’t care less about intelligence briefings, according to a report by The Independent, continuing a trend that started even before he was inaugurated. Despite national security threats and other important information being passed along, Trump has tuned out vital briefings and has relied on his “very good brain.”
According to The Independent, the friction between Trump and the U.S. intelligence community has only gotten worse over time.
Donald Trump continues to reject the judgments of US spy agencies on major foreign policy fronts, current and former US officials said, creating a dynamic in which intelligence analysts frequently see troubling gaps between the president’s public statements and the facts laid out for him in daily briefings.
The pattern has become a source of mounting concern to senior US intelligence officials who had hoped Mr Trump would become less hostile to their work and more receptive to the information that spy agencies spend billions of dollars and sometimes put lives at risk gathering.
The CIA and other agencies continue to devote enormous “time, energy and resources” to ensuring that accurate intelligence is delivered to Mr Trump, the official said, but his seeming imperviousness to such material often renders “all of that a waste”.
Trump’s time is consumed by other things, like the many investigations taking place and those that he knows are imminent. His obsession with the Robert Mueller probe seems to drive him up the wall every minute. Additionally, while the ink on his former lawyer Michael Cohen’s sentence for campaign finance crimes dries, and the fallout from a conspiracy between Trump, Cohen and the National Enquirer continues to take shape, new reports say prosecutors are looking at potential shady donations to the Trump inaugural committee.
At the same time, Trump is desperately trying to find someone — anyone — to take the White House Chief of Staff role. Embarrassingly turned down by presumed shoo-in Nick Ayers, Trump has been publicly rebuffed by the likes of Rick Santorum and quietly declined by Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin.
Trump was previously critical of Barack Obama hiring a third Chief of Staff in three years, yet Trump is presently consumed with finding a third person willing to take the thankless gig in less than two years.
He does appear to be able to focus on one additional thing: vacation. Trump, it appears, is readying to take his longest vacation to Florida since taking office, at a whopping 16 days.
Donald Trump could be spending up to 16 days at Mar-a-Lago over the holidays, an alert issued by the Federal Aviation Administration indicates. If he spends the full time there, it will be the US president’s longest stay at the Florida members-only resort Trump owns since he took office in January 2017.
Apparently there’s no time to focus on national security when there are so many investigations, so much staff turnover and so much vacation planning to be done.
693 days in, 769 to go
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