Someone inside the White House is trying to humiliate Donald Trump, again.
The leak of his official schedule yesterday to Axios reveals that the president spends most of his days in “executive time,” which it defines as “watching TV, reading the papers, and responding to what he sees and reads.” According to the schedule, most of this time is spent in the Oval Office.
“A White House source has leaked nearly every day of President Trump’s private schedule for the past three months,” Axios reports. “This unusually voluminous leak gives us unprecedented visibility into how this president spends his days. The schedules, which cover nearly every working day since the midterms, show that Trump has spent around 60% of his scheduled time over the past 3 months in unstructured ‘Executive Time.’”
A White House correspondent for the New York Times reacted with a comment about Trump’s staff:
“A White House aide is weaponizing his (Trump’s) schedules, which says a lot about how people in the White House feel about the man they work for.”
-Maggie Haberman, NYT
Read all 95 pages of the schedules here.
One tweeter characterized the president as “a typical Fox News viewer”:
The hardest evidence yet that he is literally a typical @FoxNews viewer, retired, nothing much to do but yell about what he sees on the TV. His base loves him because he is them. https://t.co/J8c0TPZ1Ik
— Kurt Andersen (@KBAndersen) February 4, 2019
In another tweet, Madeleine Westerhout, the director of Oval Office operations, who sits outside Trump’s door, denounced the leak as “a disgraceful breach of trust.”
In an exchange with Joe Scarborough, MSNBC’s National Affairs Analyst John Heilemann called the revelations “astonishing”:
JS: “There are seniors playing shuffleboard in Boca retirement communities who work more than the President of the United States right now.”
JH: “It reminds me of my senior year in college looked like, although executive time had different names for me but a lot of the same activities, watching television. It’s sort of astonishing.”
Watch more of what they said above.