We Elected Another President Who Doesn't Read and Now We're Facing the Consequences
Longtime viewers of The Great American Shitshow might remember the last time we installed a manifest incompetent in the Oval Office. He lied us into a war that killed hundreds of thousands of people, cost us $2 trillion that we could have spent improving the lives of Americans, and destabilized an entire region of the world. One of the lies was that Saddam Hussein had connections to al Qaeda, which attacked us on September 11. There was no connection—we also never found those Weapons of Mass Destruction—but in this way, the Iraq War became an extension of our frenzied retribution for 3,000 American deaths.
It was also an extension of George W. Bush and his administration's attempts to bury the significant evidence of their own incompetence leading up to September 11, immortalized in reports on a presidential briefing from August 6, 2001, titled, "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S." That was actually just one in a series of briefings to the same effect, all of which Bush at the very least failed to respond adequately to, and at worst completely ignored. It's not like al Qaeda had never attacked us before. It seems the theatrical displays of Man Strength that have long characterized Republican presidential offerings prove less effective in protecting the homeland than reading your intelligence reports.
Since we adamantly refuse to learn from our mistakes, we once again have put a blustering incompetent in charge, and once again the whole reading-and-listening thing has proven an issue. Strangely enough, Donald J. Trump was perhaps the first major Republican figure to publicly trash the Iraq War, and specifically question Bush's record of supposedly Keeping America Safe. This was likely primarily to clown on Jeb(!) Bush on the debate stage, but it was also true. And yet, predictably, Trump learned none of the useful lessons from that scenario, likely because he knew little-to-nothing of the details.
It has been evident since at least 2017 that the current president does not read much of anything, much less the intelligence briefings prepared for him on a daily basis. This was true when we first learned, via The New Yorker, of then-National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster's attempts to brief Trump, which steadily devolved into farce.
When Trump assumed office, N.S.C. staffers initially generated memos for him that resembled those produced for his predecessors: multi-page explications of policy and strategy. But “an edict came down,” a former staffer told me: “‘Thin it out.’” The staff dutifully trimmed the memos to a single page. “But then word comes back: ‘This is still too much.’” A senior Trump aide explained to the staffers that the President is “a visual person,” and asked them to express points “pictorially.”
“By the time I left, we had these cards,” the former staffer said. They are long and narrow, made of heavy stock, and emblazoned with the words “the White House” at the top. Trump receives a thick briefing book every night, but nobody harbors the illusion that he reads it. Current and former officials told me that filling out a card is the best way to raise an issue with him in writing. Everything that needs to be conveyed to the President must be boiled down, the former staffer said, to “two or three points, with the syntactical complexity of ‘See Jane run.’”
https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a32300738/trump-12-coronavirus-warnings-january-february/
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