TRUMPING THE WORK ETHIC
The US president walked away while then speaker of the House of Representatives Paul Ryan was explaining the health-care bill
The people of Botswana should sue the World Economic Forum. Really they should. Every year since 2008 the organisation’s Global Competitiveness Report fingers Botswana’s
“poor work ethic in the national labour force” as the biggest challenge to doing business in that lovely country. In plain terms, they are saying the Batswana are the laziest workers on the planet.
Last November, after yet another dispiriting report, the country’s permanent secretary to the president, Carter Morupisi, slammed the alleged poor work ethic and productivity in the public service, saying it’s of huge concern. As most governments tend to do, the
Batswana immediately set up a “national transformation team” to sort out the problem.
Anyway, I think the Batswana should sue because it’s just not true that they are the laziest workers in the world. Turns out that Donald J Trump, the president of the US, isn’t clocking up as much time at the office as most world leaders or his predecessors have done.
A leak of his diary to the website Axios showed that since November 7, the day after the US midterm elections, the president has spent almost 300 hours in relatively unstructured “executive time” and only 77 hours in scheduled meetings covering policy planning and legislative strategy.
What is executive time, you may ask. The publication says it “almost always means TV and Twitter time alone in the residence”. The man with the nuclear codes, it turns out, is just messing about with social media and watching Fox News.
It’s not just that he has a lot of free time. It’s also that he starts late. Though known as an early riser, he pitches up at the office only at about 11am or 11.30am for an intelligence briefing or to have a 30-minute meeting with his chief of staff. The muchderided George W Bush typically got to his desk by 6.45am. Trump’s nemesis, Barack Obama, would be at his desk between 9am and 10am after a gym session.
What’s the Donald doing with his time, then? The hours before that first meeting, reports Axios, are spent “in the residence, watching TV, reading the papers, and responding to what he sees and reads by phoning aides, members of Congress, friends, administration officials and informal advisers”.
It’s nice in the White House. Axios reports that on some days the president enjoys more “executive time” than scheduled time. In fact, sometimes he takes the whole day as “executive time”.
On January 18, for example, Trump had just one hour of scheduled meetings and the rest of the day was “executive time”.
On February 4 The New Yorker reported that “of his 745 days in office, Trump has spent 222 days unwinding at Trump-branded properties and 168 days golfing”.
Now, you might say that he is allowed all the executive time he needs so long as he is effective in the time that he does actually work.
Turns out he is not. “According to the testimony of numerous West Wing staffers, he struggles to focus in meetings, largely ignores intelligence briefings, and tunes out policy minutiae. Once, according to former White House aide Cliff Sims, Trump got up and wandered away while then House of Representatives speaker Paul Ryan was in the Oval Office attempting to explain the Republican health-care bill. While Ryan was still talking, Trump walked down the hall to his private dining room and turned on the TV,” wrote The New Yorker.
Oh, and about actually reading those intelligence reports?
NBC News reported last week that Trump isn’t just skipping the daily intelligence summary prepared for him, he’s also participating in “relatively few in-person briefings from his spy agencies”.
That has consequences for the US and for the world. Here is a man who does little work and when he does he opts not to read daily intelligence reports, often and volubly rejects what his own country’s intelligence agencies tell him, and takes sides — despite his own intelligence chiefs’ briefings — with dictators such as Kim Jong-un of North Korea or Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia.
This laziness, and what Time magazine called his “wilful ignorance”, pose a real and present danger to the stability of the world.
It’s not true that the Batswana are the laziest workers. US president Trump is hardly at his office