"Smart person" Trump has his intelligence briefings read to him

The president of the United States reportedly watches about 4 or more hours of TV a day, but he doesn’t read — not even his daily intelligence briefings, which could have serious consequences.

President Trump is getting his top-secret updates from the intelligence community orally rather than on paper, according to a new report in the Washington Post. That’s quite a departure from the way the last seven presidents have kept up to date with critical intelligence. And the oral briefings he does get are cut short and tailored so as to not upset Trump.

Trump’s expressed his impatience with lengthy, detailed intelligence briefings. After his election, he was offered the same briefings that then-President Barack Obama was getting. He declined, preferring to be briefed once a week.

“You know, I’m, like, a smart person,” Trump told “Fox News Sunday” host Chris Wallace in December of 2016. “I don’t have to be told the same thing and the same words every single day for the next eight years. It could be eight years — but eight years. I don’t need that.”

Trump stresses that his deputies, whether Vice President Mike Pence or National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster, are getting detailed briefings, and that they’re good at their jobs.

Intelligence experts warn that a summary version of the intelligence briefing could leave the president ill-informed during a crisis. “You can have the smartest people around you — in the end, it still comes down to his decision,” Leon Panetta, former CIA director and defense secretary to Barack Obama, told the Washington Post.

The president’s supporters say that he asks the tough questions — like “Why are we even in Somalia?” or “Why can’t I just pull out of Afghanistan?” Daniel Coates, the director of national intelligence, stressed to the Post that “any notion that President Trump is not fully engaged in the PDB,” the top-secret written intelligence report, “or does not read the briefing materials is pure fiction and is clearly not based on firsthand knowledge of the process.”

And even during his oral briefings — which have been spruced up with “killer graphics” — Trump’s still thin-skinned. He’s reportedly complained that the intelligence community is “talking down to him,” one of the Post’s sources said, and has accused Obama-era intelligence officials of playing up Russian interference in the 2016 election in order to delegitimize his presidency.

This is far from the first time Trump’s reading ability has come under scrutiny. Michael Wolff, whose months of access to the West Wing last year yielded his political blockbuster “Fire and Fury,” wrote that some of Trump's staff believe him to be only “semi-literate.”

Cover: President Donald Trump listens during a meeting with law enforcement officials on the MS-13 street gang and border security, in the Cabinet Room of the White House, Tuesday, Feb. 6, 2018, in Washington. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)