Donald Trump’s briefing debacle just got even uglier
For a long time, the White House has insisted that Donald Trump receives his daily intelligence briefings. On June 30, after reports surfaced that Putin placed bounties on American troops in Afghanistan, Kayleigh McEnany, the liar-in-chief for the Liar-in-Chief, doubled down. McEnany claimed that Trump is “constantly being informed and briefed on intelligence matters,” calling him “the most informed person on planet Earth when it comes to the threats that we face.” A new HuffPost analysis, however, paints a very different and disturbing picture.
According to the analysis, Trump’s receipt of intelligence briefings was never reliable or consistent and has slowed down steadily over his presidency. When McEnany uttered her big lie, Trump was already averaging less than one briefing per week. In the past month and a half since, Trump has managed to bring the frequency down to near zero. President Obama and even George W. Bush, by contrast, read their classified intelligence briefings first thing every morning. (Whether Bush acted on them is, of course, a different story.)
The petulant child can’t be bothered with slogging through hard, boring grownup work such as reviewing detailed intelligence briefings. When he’s not golfing, our Russia-installed “leader” prefers spending his mornings watching TV and tweeting (during cherished “Executive Time”) instead of ensuring that the country he swore an oath to protect stays safe and American lives are not at risk.
Trump’s mounting dereliction of duty with receiving intelligence briefings persists even as serious threats across the globe continue to grow. His alarming laziness is also an insulting waste of the tens of billions of annual taxpayer dollars that are allocated toward enabling intelligence analysts to prepare comprehensive and accurate briefings for the (presumably receptive) Commander-in-Chief.
On July 1, the day after McEnany’s big lie, Joe Biden tweeted, “I’ll read my daily briefings” (as if there had been ever any doubt). Biden was actually able to quickly prove his tweet true because he soon began receiving briefings from the intelligence community. Given the fact that Trump has received only one briefing since July 22, Biden should be far more up-to-date with national security matters than the current dunce who keeps conjuring up new ways to scare Americans and derail the upcoming election. January 20, 2021 cannot come soon enough.
Ron Leshnower is a lawyer and the author of several books, including President Trump’s Month