HOW TRUMP SPENDS HIS DAY
TWO-THIRDS OF HIS SCHEDULE IS ‘EXECUTIVE TIME’
This week an unnamed presidential aide leaked to the media schedules for the Trump White House. The schedules start just after the Nov. 6 midterm elections and show Trump’s every move over the past three months.
But as the summary below indicates, there may not have been that much movement at all. An incredible twothirds of Trump’s schedule is set aside for “executive time.” Throw in “lunch” and the equally vague “policy time,” and Trump’s presidency is mostly unstructured time.
THIS IS A REALLY VAGUE WAY TO SCHEDULE A WHITE HOUSE
George W. Bush was famous for keeping a strict, disciplined schedule while president. Bill Clinton was a bit less uptight, and often demarcated large chunks of his schedule for “phone and office time” (some of that time may have even included his trysts with Monica Lewinsky). But even Clinton looks like an obsessive when compared to Trump.
On Clinton’s third January as president, a routine day in the White House could include 15 itemized tasks, starting with a morning jog and moving on to a morning meticulously broken into 15-minute increments of briefings and meetings. Compare that to Dec. 5, the day Trump attended the funeral of George H.W. Bush. The 90-minute funeral was Trump’s only official event, with the rest of the day set aside for seven hours of executive time.
IF HE CAN HELP IT, TRUMP DOESN’T SCHEDULE ANYTHING BEFORE 11 A.M.
With few exceptions, nothing important happens in the Trump White House before noon. Unless Trump needs to board Air Force One for a foreign trip, the hours between eight and 11 a.m. are strictly reserved for executive time. Notably, mornings are when Trump’s TV-watching is particularly heavy. In late 2017, White House sources told the New York Times that Trump was spending between four and eight hours every day watching cable news. The president’s TV-filled executive time each morning will often spawn his most acerbic tweets, usually fired out in response to something he’s just seen on Fox and Friends. In early 2018, Trump’s boast that he had a “much bigger and more powerful” nuclear button than Kim Jong Un happened to perfectly coincide with a Fox News segment on the North Korean dictator.
‘EXECUTIVE TIME’ MAY NOT BE ALL TWEETING AND FOX NEWS
“He’s always up to something; it’s just not what you would consider typical structure,” one White House official told Axios, the U.S. news website that published the schedules on Sunday. The implication is that Trump is indeed spending his executive time in phone calls and meetings, but the chaos of his schedule means that almost all of these are spur of the moment.
“You can’t be imaginative or entrepreneurial if you’ve got too much structure,” Trump wrote in his 1987 book The Art of the Deal. “I prefer to come to work each day and just see what develops.” Ironically, Trump might also be publishing vague schedules in part because he wants to conceal them from his staff, who obviously have a habit of constantly leaking everything they come across.
THE PRESIDENT DOESN’T SEEM TO BE TALKING TO ALL THAT MANY PEOPLE
On the third year of his presidency, Ronald Reagan spent the last week of January in a flurry of meetings with a guest list that included civil rights leader Ralph Abernathy, boxer Muhammad Ali, Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak, 135 Vietnam veterans and several dozen mayors, advisers, corporate leaders and campaigners. During that period, Reagan also fit in a national security briefing every single morning.
Over the equivalent week in Trump’s presidency, by contrast, the president only officially had two meetings with people who don’t work at the White House: the vice-premier of China and a panel of American manufacturers. Although Trump may be speaking to a wider group of people during executive time, most of his scheduled interactions are limited to cabinet members, staff and various White House liaisons.
TRUMP’S BUSIEST DAYS ARE RALLY DAYS
Trump doesn’t really work weekends, and the leak doesn’t include any schedules for Saturday and Sundays. He’s also generally off work by 5 p.m. Given the vagaries of “executive time,” meanwhile, a typical day in Washington can include as little as two hours of officially scheduled presidential duties.
On Jan. 28, for instance, Trump’s only scheduled events were lunch with Vice President Mike Pence and brief meetings with his chief of staff and press secretary. The rest of the day was a massive seven-hour, 15-minute block of executive time. The longest days Trump appears to have worked since the midterm elections were Nov. 26, when he worked 8 a.m. to 1 a.m. due to a pair of Make America Great Again rallies in Mississippi, and a few days later, when his attendance at the G20 required a 7 a.m. to 10 p.m. day.
TRUMP STILL HAS A LONG WAY TO GO TO QUALIFY AS LAZIEST PRESIDENT
Trump is definitely pursuing a more leisurely presidency than is typical, even if the timing of his tweets seem to indicate that he doesn’t sleep all that often. But in the annals of presidential history, Trump is still a workaholic compared to some of the loafers that have occupied the Oval Office. Most notable is Calvin Coolidge, who usually worked a sixhour day, took long afternoon naps and was known to issue one-sentence press releases. Of course, Coolidge was doing it out of principle: As a committed defender of small government, he generally believed that a president’s highest and best use was to stay out of the way.