Tag: “executive time”

Power Up: ‘Tom Brady’ of leakers roils Trump White House before State of Union

At the White House

STEPPING ON THE SOTU: President Trump is supposed to own the news cycle today, when he will deliver his third joint address to Congress. The occasion is prepackaged to allow the president to sell a positive message around his administration’s successes and lay out a compelling agenda for the year ahead — something for Congress to rally around.

The State of the Union might be a constitutional obligation but it’s a speech that Trump has been looking forward to, according to the New York Times’s Annie Karni and Maggie Haberman, for “all of the pomp and circumstance that accompany it with some reverence.” But behind-the-scenes, chaos is roiling the White House once again after a prolific leak to Axios on Sunday of Trump’s private schedule for the past three months. It showed the president spends 60 percent of his scheduled hours in what former Chief of Staff John F. Kelly dubbed “Executive Time.”

But Trump might want to apply Marie Kondo’s method to tidy up his White House, keeping only those staffers who “spark joy.”

View the complete February 5 article by Jacqueline Alemany on The Washington Post website here.

Trump has spent about 60 percent of his time over the last 3 months in ‘Executive Time’: Leaked White House schedules

Credit: Jabin Botsford, The Washington Post

Donald Trump spent more than 60 percent of his time over the past 3 months in “Executive Time,” according to a White House source who leaked copies of the president’s private schedule to Axios.

“Executive Time” is a loosely-defined title for the time Trump takes to watch television, engage with Twitter and make phone calls to friends and confidants. As Axios reports, Trump “usually spends the first 5 hours of the day” in “Executive Time.”

Six sources also told Axios that while Trump’s schedule claims he’s in the Oval Office from 8 a.m. to 11 a.m. everyday, in reality the president “spends his mornings in the residence, watching TV, reading the papers, and responding to what he sees and reads” in phone calls with associates.

View the complete February 3 article by Elizabeth Preza on the AlterNet website here.

A window inside Trump’s morning ‘executive time’

The following article by Kaitlan Collins was posted on the CNN website January 17, 2018:

Credit: CNN

Washington (CNN) — President Donald Trump rises around 5:30 a.m. and begins making his first calls to aides and lawmakers as early as 6. He’s dressed in his signature dark suit by 8 a.m. at the latest, White House sources told CNN, and although he doesn’t drink coffee, his proclivity for Diet Coke is widely known.

Dr. Ronny Jackson, the White House physician who conducted the President’s first official physical evaluation last week, offered the nation new insights into Trump’s health and daily routine Tuesday. Continue reading “A window inside Trump’s morning ‘executive time’”

Why ‘executive time’ is a particularly bleak scoop about President Trump

The following article by Aaron Blake was posted on the Washington Post website January 8, 2018:

President Trump sometimes seems to miss his “other life” before becoming commander-in-chief. (Jenny Starrs/The Washington Post)

For the past week, all of Washington has been chewing over Michael Wolff’s new book about President Trumpand trying to assess which damning conclusions are actually true. But one of the bleakest scoops about Trump popped up elsewhere on Sunday night.

Axios’s Jonathan Swan reports that Trump has significantly curtailed his official schedule as president — to the point where his first meeting is often held at 11 a.m., and he spends almost the whole morning in his White House residence — rather than the West Wing or the Oval Office — watching TV, tweeting and making phone calls. That chunk of his day, generally between 8 a.m. and 11 a.m., is dubbed “executive time,” a phrase that is bound to become the butt of plenty of jokes. Trump then has other periods of “executive time” sprinkled in throughout his official work schedule, which is usually between 11 a.m. and 6 p.m. (Nice work if you can get it. And a short commute, too!) Continue reading “Why ‘executive time’ is a particularly bleak scoop about President Trump”