The Tiny Tyrant’s Intelligence.


Trump. AP News.

It seems the Tiny Tyrant shares Bush Jr.’s love of comic style intelligence. Oh, yay. Not only a fucking idiot, but proud of it.

President Trump consumes classified intelligence like he does most everything else in life: ravenously and impatiently, eager to ingest glinting nuggets but often indifferent to subtleties.

Most mornings, often at 10:30, sometimes earlier, Trump sits behind the historic Resolute desk and, with a fresh Diet Coke fizzing and papers piled high, receives top-secret updates on the world’s hot spots. The president interrupts his briefers with questions but also with random asides. He asks that the top brass of the intelligence community be present, and he demands brevity.

As they huddle around the desk, Trump likes to pore over visuals — maps, charts, pictures and videos, as well as “killer graphics,” as CIA Director Mike Pompeo phrased it.

“That’s our task, right? To deliver the material in a way that he can best understand the information we’re trying to communicate,” said Pompeo, adding that he, too, prefers to “get to the core of the issue quickly.”

The fawning ass kissing of Pompeo and Coats is sickening, to say the least.

Yet there are signs that the president may not be retaining all the intelligence he is presented, fully absorbing its nuance, or respecting the sensitivities of the information and how it was gathered.

Goodness. Perhaps I’ll find time to be shocked after I make every effort to recover from this near-fatal eyeroll.

Intelligence officials were prepared to deliver daily briefings to Trump throughout the transition period, but the president-elect often turned them away, usually agreeing to sit for briefings only once or twice per week.

“You know, I’m, like, a smart person. I don’t have to be told the same thing in the same words every single day for the next eight years,” Trump told Fox News last December.

If you need to, like, tell people you’re smart, like, all the time, you’re a fucking idiot.

Trump prefers free-flowing conversations over listening to his briefers teach lessons. “It’s a very oral, interactive discussion, as opposed to sitting there and reading from a text or a script,” Pompeo said.

I’ll refrain from the easy joke here. I. Will. Refrain. I. Will…

When he took office, Trump signaled to his national security team that he favors concise points boiled down to a single page.

“I like bullets or I like as little as possible,” he said in a pre-inaugural interview with Axios. “I don’t need, you know, 200-page reports on something that can be handled on a page.”

Trump also has encouraged his briefers to include as many visual elements as possible. This is a reflection, aides said, of Trump’s career as a real estate developer who evaluated blueprints and renderings to visualize what a property eventually would look like.

Oh yes, being a sleazy, mobbed up real estate con, why that’s just like presidenting! Golly, there must be an easy peasy blueprint for everything!

The Washington Post has the full story.

Comments

  1. johnson catman says

    I don’t need, you know, 200-page reports on something that can be handled on a page.

    The problem is that complicated issues can’t really be handled on a page.

    Trump also has encouraged his briefers to include as many visual elements as possible.

    I think this is more to do with the fact that the idiot in charge has a cartoon brain and zero reading comprehension.

  2. says

    Someone in the WaPo comments quoted a bit from one of “his” books, where he states he has a short attention span, and thinks that’s a great quality, because … he knows what people are going to say after their first 3 words, and he’s 40 words ahead. Yep.

    We are so fucked. Fuckety Fucked Fucked.

  3. johnson catman says

    He couldn’t possibly be 40 words ahead. That’s way more than 140 characters.

  4. The Mellow Monkey says

    Someone in the WaPo comments quoted a bit from one of “his” books, where he states he has a short attention span, and thinks that’s a great quality, because … he knows what people are going to say after their first 3 words, and he’s 40 words ahead.

    So he brags about never actually listening and making all of his decisions off of his own preconceived ideas. Gosh. I’m shocked.

  5. rq says

    he knows what people are going to say after their first 3 words, and he’s 40 words ahead

    So remember that Lewis and Quark tumblr you featured a short while ago? It talks a lot about neural networks and teaching them to make recipes, etc., and how there’s a set number of previous words they remember, so when they’re ‘creating’ a recipe, they can only remember, say, up to 35 words ago, and by the end they’re guessing about what kind of recipe they’re actually creating.
    Anyway, this reminded me of that, because I’m pretty sure he thinks he’s 40 words ahead, but he can’t remember past 40 words ago, so really, he’s just guessing. It would explain a lot of the nonsense that comes out of his mouth.

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