Trump is awfully unhappy that someone keeps leaking his daily schedules — the ones that show him doing next to nothing all day long. After three months of schedules were leaked, Trump launched a hunt for the White House staffer who confirmed Trump’s deep and abiding laziness to the public.
But despite that hunt, even more daily schedules have leaked. And they show the same thing: vast swaths of “executive time” — the code phrase everyone has settled on to describe the many, many hours Trump spends not doing the work of being president.
Over the weekend, Trump went on Twitter to claim that when his schedule says it is executive time, “I am generally working, not relaxing.” He also insisted that the media getting his work schedule was actually “something very easy to do.” Finally, he deployed his characteristic nonsense bombast and declared, “In fact, I probably work more hours than almost any past President.”
He repeated the absurd claim about his work ethic on Monday morning: “No president ever worked harder than me (cleaning up the mess I inherited)!”
Literally none of that is true.
His full schedules aren’t easy to get, for one thing, which is precisely why they only appear when some White House staffer leaks them to the media. The publicly available “official” schedules typically show huge gaps of time unaccounted for.
Compare that to President Obama, whose schedules routinely showed 10-plus-hour public-facing days — and that doesn’t include the fact that he was notorious for working late into the night by himself. Every daily schedule of both President Obama and Vice-President Biden was also publicly available and remains archived for all to see.
But you also don’t need to see Trump’s private schedule to know that he spends his morning “executive time” quite obviously watching Fox and Friends and tweeting about it, rather than working.
Other people in Trump’s orbit also tweeted absurd claims about how Trump is the hardest-working man in politics.
Madeleine Westerhout, the Director of Oval Office operations, first declared that leaking Trump’s ostensibly easy-to-get schedule was a “disgraceful breach of trust.” She went on to hilariously claim that Trump takes “hundreds of calls and meetings” every day.
Setting aside the fact that it is not possible to have hundreds of calls and meetings in a day, it seems like this entire mystery could be put to bed if Trump would just provide a schedule that detailed what he actually did all day.
Instead, the entire country has to coddle a president who behaves like a toddler, reassuring him that yes, he is achieving big things while he sits around watching television.
Published with permission of The American Independent.
