White House defends schedule
Trump’s briefings, meetings often start after 11 a.m.
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump’s private schedules, made public earlier this week, show a commander in chief with an unprecedented amount of free time, a sharp departure from predecessors who packed their days with back-to-back events.
They underscore the extent to which Trump chafes at many of the more burdensome and formal responsibilities of his office and prefers a less-structured presidency that allows him to follow his own whims and consume copious amounts of cable television.
“He seems to be on top of the news cycle every day, but what he’s doing administratively is a mystery,” said Douglas Brinkley, a presidential historian who studied President Ronald Reagan’s presidential diaries and edited a book based on them. “That leak makes it appear that he’s a president that’s only working half the time.”
Axios on Sunday published three months of Trump’s private schedules, which the news site said were leaked to it by a White House aide, with charts showing that almost 60 percent of the president’s working days consists of unstructured “Executive Time.” Trump’s earliest scheduled briefings and meetings often start after 11 a.m.
A review of the schedules of recent former presidents released through their presidential libraries and interviews with historians highlight the degree to which Trump’s sparse official schedule appears to be an anomaly.
“The Trump situation is highly unusual,” said Matthew Beckmann, a University of California, Irvine professor who has analyzed several decades of presidential daily schedules and is writing a book about how commanders in chief manage their time.
Reagan often started his day at 7:45 a.m. with a breakfast with first lady Nancy Reagan, before reporting to the Oval Office. He typically ended his workday relatively early in the evening.
President George W. Bush often arrived in the Oval Office before 7 a.m., and he regularly packed his days with dozens of brief meetings and phone calls before retiring to bed late at night, according to diaries released by his presidential library.
President Bill Clinton was perhaps most similar to Trump in scheduling his days.
His presidential schedules show large chunks of “phone and office time,’’ when Clinton would make calls, work on speeches and, sometimes, play golf. Stephanie Streett, who served as a staff scheduler during the Clinton administration, said during a 2002 event at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock that White House staffers tried to give the president at least three hours of “phone and office time” each day.
President Jimmy Carter, whose schedules regularly show 16-hour workdays, sought to cut down on the number of ceremonial events he attended, to devote more time to his policy goals. He took speed-reading courses to help with his consumption of more than 300 pages of official documents each day.
President Barack Obama’s private schedules have yet to be released, but his aides said he often started his day early with exercise and intelligence briefings, and worked until dinnertime, when he would join his family for a meal. Obama has said he often took thick briefing books with him to his study for late-night cram sessions.
Not having a defined agenda can have reverberations beyond the Oval Office and throughout the West Wing, where the daily schedule is distributed widely among staffers, said Alyssa Mastromonaco, Obama’s deputy chief of staff.
“The president’s schedule is an organizing mechanism for the West Wing,” she said in an email.
The White House defended Trump’s use of unrestricted “executive time,” and said he often makes important calls and hosts meetings during time that is not listed on his private schedule.
“President Trump has a different leadership style than his predecessors and the results speak for themselves,’’ White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said in a statement. “While he spends much of his average day in scheduled meetings, events, and calls, there is time to allow for a more creative environment that has helped make him the most productive President in modern history.’’
But some presidential scholars see virtue in “executive time,” given the highly demanding responsibilities of the presidency and both Brinkley and Beckmann said that Trump’s lightly apportioned schedule doesn’t necessarily mean that the president is lazy or working less than his predecessors.
“We shouldn’t fetishize hours logged or other measures of busyness,” said Beckmann. “You need time to stop and think and reflect and eat and laugh — and even watch TV.”