Former White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders is one of a handful of Trump officials who left on good terms. Even after her return to life as a private citizen, she's still playing defense for the president.
Speaking to Steve Hilton on Fox News Sunday night, Huckabee lashed out at the numerous reports that Trump requires his intelligence briefings reduced to one page per topic, including images and graphics. "I've watched this process play out so many times, sat in hundreds of meetings with the president, and the idea that he can only take in one or two bullets is absurd. I've watched him consume a massive amount of information, process it quickly, and make decisions," she said.
She continued: "He reads more than anybody I know. Every single foreign trip we actually would laugh about the fact he has boxes upon boxes, file boxes where he reads for hours. The rest of us want to take a break, we wanna sleep, the president works the entire time."
This is the same Trump who once claimed that "my primary consultant is myself" when it comes to foreign affairs. In 2017, The Washington Post reported that Trump told his subordinates that "he favors concise points boiled down to a single page," and "also has encouraged his briefers to include as many visual elements as possible."
Vice later reported that Trump received twice-daily briefings of 20- to 25-page documents that consisted of "screenshots of positive cable news chyrons (those lower-third headlines and crawls), admiring tweets, transcripts of fawning TV interviews, praise-filled news stories, and sometimes just pictures of Trump on TV looking powerful."
Sanders also spoke to The New York Times for a lengthy profile that came out Sunday, and along with dropping more hints that she may run for governor of Arkansas, she repeated her primary complaint from her time as press secretary: "I don’t like being called a liar."
Sanders drew criticism after the president fired former FBI director James Comey. Defending Trump's decision, she told reporters, "We’ve heard from countless members of the FBI" that Comey had lost the trust of the agency. That was a lie. When Sanders was interviewed by the FBI as part of Robert Mueller's investigation, she admitted that claim "was not founded on anything." She apologized, sort of, in an interview with George Stephanopoulos on Good Morning America, saying the comment was a "slip of the tongue" that she made "in the heat of the moment, meaning that it wasn’t a scripted talking point. I’m sorry I wasn’t a robot."
Despite her claims that she made a mistake in the heat of the moment, Sanders repeated the claim multiple times, doubling down when reporters asked her for clarification.
Trump_Is_The_Swamp on November 26th, 2019 at 02:23 UTC »
1. During the president’s briefings, aides were told to reduce information down to PowerPoints with a single bullet point
Early in Trump’s presidency, the author said that Oval Office briefers were first told not to bring “lengthy documents” or “summaries” and, if they had to bring paper to their meeting with Trump, to use PowerPoint slides. But that soon proved to be too much information for the president, who “couldn’t digest too many slides.” Briefers were then told to keep things to a maximum of three bullet points, even for complicated issues, like “military readiness or the federal budget.” And when the president still struggled to comprehend the three bullet points, briefers were advised to keep their meetings with Trump down to just a single bullet point.
“Come in with one main point and repeat it — over and over again, even if the president inevitably goes off on tangents — until he gets it. Just keep steering the subject back to it. ONE point,” the author wrote of the advice West Wing aides gave briefers. “Because you cannot focus the commander in chief’s attention on more than one goddamned thing over the course of a meeting, okay?”
For those who ignored this advice and came in prepared to have “robust policy discussions on momentous national topics,” the official wrote, “they invariably paid the price.”
“‘What the f— is this?’ the president would shout, looking at a document one of them handed him. ‘These are just words. A bunch of words. It doesn’t mean anything.’ Sometimes he would throw the papers back on the table. He definitely wouldn’t read them,” the official recalled.
Source: https://www.thewrap.com/warning-anonymous-trump-official-highlights-takeaways/
CankerLord on November 26th, 2019 at 00:38 UTC »
The next time a reporter asks Trump a question it better be "what are the titles of the last two books you read?"
And they better repeat it when he rambles for five minutes instead of answering the question.
freddygurkin on November 26th, 2019 at 00:24 UTC »
She made her own bed, she can lie in it.