Far be it from us to accuse anyone of being lazy, as we do enjoy our ample amount of leisure time, but President Donald Trump’s workday strikes us as a bit short for the job he holds.
Someone in the White House leaked the president’s daily schedule for the past three months to the Axios.com web site, and it reveals that more than 60 percent of it was spent on what the White House likes to call “executive time.” This presumably means time for the president to read the voluminous reports that cross his desk, but all theleaks from past and present administration officials suggest he’s not much of a reader, and to phone advisors about the pressing issues of the day, but the leaks indicate he’s mostly talking to his Mar-a-Lago pals, and his own quotes in the rest of the news suggest he’s not paying much attention to the advice of his administration’s national security and economic experts. Educated speculation is that he’s mostly spending the time watching Fox News, and his numerous “tweets” responding to what was just said on the network seems to back this up. Some harsher critics are speculating that much of it is spent on Trump’s elaborate comb-over and acquiring his yearlong orange hue, and there seems to be evidence for that as well.
On several of the leaked daily schedules Trump didn’t take a meeting until 10 or 11 a.m., and was off the job by 5 p.m. or so, which is admittedly pretty ambitious by our standards but less than what one should expect of a president. President Bill Clinton would typically start his workday at 9 a.m., and was famous for working late into the night, although he was also infamous for spending some of his “executive time” with interns. President George W. Bush would routinely wake up at 5:15 a.m., about the same we time usually finish throwing up, and would be in the Oval Office by 6:15 a.m., poring through what he needed to know for his first meeting of the day at 8:15 a.m., and he wouldn’t call it quits until 5:30 or to 6 p.m. and be back in bed by 9 p.m., which is about when we get started on our big ideas. The record shows that President Barack Obama was a relative slacker, usually getting into the office around 9 a.m., but he usually logged about six meetings along with hour-long intelligence and economic briefings in a workday, and was known to say up late reading all those voluminous reports.
Back when he was getting elected Trump loved to ridicule Obama’s laziness and penchant for golf, and vowed that he would eschew golf and spend all of his time in the Oval Office making great deals for America, but Trump has logged more time on Trump-owned golf courses in his first two years than Obama spent on various links in eight years, and has spent far less time in the Oval Office.
Trump doesn’t deny the veracity of the leaked schedules, but instead his administration offers a novel spin. White House press secretary Sarah Sanders explained that “President Trump has a different style of leadership than his predecessors and the results speak for themselves. While he spends much of his day in scheduled meetings, events and calls, there is time to allow for a more creative environment that has made him the most productive president in modern history.” She went on to cite the booming economy and low taxes, America’s position as the biggest producer of oil and natural gas, the remaking of the American judiciary, renegotiated trade deals, and that “it’s indisputable that our country has never been stronger than it is today under the leadership of President Trump.”
The economy has indeed continued along the same trajectory that belatedly started in the last years of that lazy Obama’s presidency, although that tax bill has the budget deficit back to the worst of the Obama years. America was the world’s biggest oil and natural gas producer before Trump took office, despite Obama’s best efforts, and the remaking of the judiciary can mostly be credited to that hated establishment Republican Sen. Mitch McConnell, who ruthlessly kept those seats open in the last years of Obama, and to the establishment Republican Federalist Society, which made all the picks. The recent revisions to the renamed North American Free Trade Americans yielded some gains for America’s dairy famers, but hardly amounts to the difference between the worst trade deal ever and the best one ever, and it’s yet to be ratified, and it remains to be seen if Trump can win his thus-far disastrous trade war with China. According to all the opinion polls, most Americans dispute that the country has never been stronger, and we’re inclined to agree.
We’ve always agreed with the old American maxim that the government which governs least governs the best, however, so we’ll not dare suggest that Trump become any more ambitious. We’d rather he didn’t spend so much time “tweeting” schoolyard taunts and obvious falsehoods against his critics, and suggest he’d do better to spend that time chilling out. Those energetic types always worry us, as they so often tend to do more harm than good, and we think that in the case of Trump less truly is more.
— Bud Norman
The Central Standard Times 