Slacker time
Trump spends most of his time watching tv.
A White House source has leaked President Trump’s private schedules for nearly every working day since the midterms, showing that Trump has spent around 60% of the last three months in “Executive Time.”
They share a doc that shows the details. The first day that shows is all “executive time” apart from one meeting at 11.
They compare this leisure-filled “schedule” to those of his predecessors.
Trump has the least in common with George W. Bush.
- Bush’s calendar was tightly scheduled and booked out months ahead.
- Bush would wake around 5:15 a.m.; have coffee with his wife, Laura; read the newspapers; and get to the Oval Office by 6:45 a.m., per a former top aide who spoke anonymously to avoid offending Trump.
- Bush 43 was assiduously punctual. His schedulers broke his days into 10-minute increments, with the first meeting around 8:15 a.m., according to the former aide.
- A 20-minute meeting would run over two increments; meetings started early and finished on time. If Bush wanted to continue a conversation with an outsider, his staff would schedule a follow-up meeting.
- He sometimes watched sports in the residence, but rarely watched TV in the West Wing.
- After Bush finished his workday, around 5:30 or 6 p.m., he’d do a workout on his stationary bike, finish dinner by 7:30 p.m., read his briefing materials in the Treaty Room, and be in bed reading a book by about 9 p.m., according to the former aide.
Barack Obama was similarly disciplined. But unlike Bush, he would sometimes stay up until 2 a.m. reading.
- His daily private schedule would typically have 6 meetings, as well as intelligence and economic briefings, according to Alyssa Mastromonaco, his deputy chief of staff for operations.
- Obama would usually get to the Oval Office around 9 a.m. and leave around 6 or 6:30 p.m. for dinner with the first lady and his daughters. He would have evening events around 3 nights a week and would travel domestically about 3 times a month, Mastromonaco said.
- “There were unscheduled blocks of time, but they were a rare occurrence, and usually leading into bigger moments — foreign trips, State of the Union, etc.,” she emailed.
In a way, of course, we want a Trump who gives himself a lot of time off (as long as we’re forced to have a Trump at all), rather than one who gets busy breaking more things. But that doesn’t make his lazy ass any less disgusting and contemptible.
Trump has the sort of schedule most people imagine all government employees have. I had a sister-in-law once who constantly ragged on me because I worked for the state, and therefore had an “easy” schedule. Compared to her reported schedule of 3 hour lunches and spending much of the day reading her book in her private job, I had an hour unpaid lunch, worked from 8:00 to 5:00, and did not get any time to “read a book” during my work day. I was required to be at my desk working at all times, except for the brief breaks (which I only took when they made me take them, which was only when some visiting dignitary was paying attention to us, which was rarely). I spent little time “leaning on my shovel”. Currently I work anywhere from 70 to 100 hours a week, with my work bleeding over into weekends, holidays, evening time, and unpaid non-contract days, because we are given little to no time to finish required duties, and have to meet the brutal deadlines we are set by people who don’t actually know what teachers/professors do with their day. Because we are classed as “exempt”, they can work us without overtime pay. (That’s a trick a lot of employers are learning – give your employee the right type of title and salary, and voila! Overtime pay disappears…)
I imagine Trump believes that his day is similar to what others work, or, of course, being Trump, that others work much less than he does, because he is “working hard” as he continues to insist in some of his tweets. If I had a job with as much “executive time” as he does, I could have written hundreds of novels and plays…because I would not use my time watching TV (I rarely watch TV, and probably wouldn’t even have one if it wasn’t for my husband, who is hooked on sports. Who knew I would end up marrying a sports fan? Weird how the world works sometimes, isn’t it?”)
I think that Bush 43’s purported 12-hour-plus-a-day schedule (in the office 6:45 am ~ 5:45 pm, plus another hour or so of reading in the evening) is a little excessive. Obama’s purported schedule is harder to judge because that account is vaguer about how much reading he did on average at night, and how often those 2 am sessions were. I say “purported” in both cases because it’s been my observation that people lie about how long their work hours are, though in the case of presidents we do have documentation.
There’s a lot of research showing that productivity tails off as people work in excess of 40 hours a week (and maybe even before that). But those experts are screaming into the void, because America worships at the cult of “more work is better,” hence the endless magazine profiles of CEOs who claim that they rise at 4 am every day to work 20 hours before reluctantly going to bed. I kind of wish for a president to say “the presidency is a stressful job and at times it’s a 24-hour one, but on a day to day basis there is just no need for a president in a well-run administration who properly delegates to competent people to routinely work 12-hour days. If I thought that spending more hours in the Oval Office would get more Americans jobs or health care or keep us safer, I would absolutely do it, but that’s not how things work.”
But of course any president who said such a thing would be eviscerated by his opponents as lazy. And in any event, none of this applies to Trump, who (1) really is lazy and works far too little even by my standards; (2) isn’t making some principled defense of a less-intense workload but instead is lying and claiming to be super-industrious; and (3) does not have competent people or a well-run administration to whom to delegate.