For a few weeks now, several rehashes of the same disconcerting back and forth have taken place on various cable news programs. The host will ask Kellyanne Conway about reports that President-elect Trump hasn’t been attending all of the daily security briefings received by President Obama, and she’ll respond with a vague deflection and the assertion that he is receiving all the information he needs. They’ll push back, and the veteran political operative will inevitably squirm her way out of the question, leaving it unanswered.
That pattern was clearly unsustainable, and now thanks to Reuters we have some more concrete information regarding Trump’s security briefings: he has been attending one a week, while Vice President-elect Pence has been attending the other six.
This revelation should make for some interesting conversation on Sunday’s talk shows, maybe there will even be a new headline about the issue by the time this article is published. There have also been numerous recent reports that the President-elect plans to stay on as an executive producer of The Apprentice despite his upcoming responsibilities. It all ultimately begs the question of just how much effort Trump plans to put into his new job. Will he be our first part time President?
The evidence thus far seems to suggest so, while Trump’s business experience might lend some insight into his self-image as the “head” of an organization, delegating responsibilities and setting the overall course without becoming too tangled up in the weeds. His calls with an eclectic group of world leaders including Russia’s President Vladimir Putin, Taiwan’s President Tsai Ing-wen, Pakistan’s Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, and President Duterte of the Philippines as well as his conversations with them raise an almost endless list of questions as to the direction he intends to steer our foreign policy.
Trump’s self-congratulatory “victory tour”, his highly publicized interventions into business deals, and the numerous feuds he has engaged in with various public figures and private citizens alike since winning the election reflect his strong tendency to utilize the bully pulpit. This makes sense in light of his long relationship with the media, as he grew up in the New York tabloid world and fought his way up every rung of the latter from there, gaining a deep understanding of the modern media landscape along the way (which also proved a crucial element of his successful campaign).
Some have pointed out, probably rightly so, their concerns that President-elect Trump has time to hold rallies and critically evaluate every episode of Saturday Night Live but is apparently too busy to attend more than one security briefing a week. The more worrisome among us might wonder whether the commander-in-chief of our armed forces ought to be more concerned with threats to our national security from ISIS than threats to his ego from Alec Baldwin, but it should be clear by now that those voices have long since been drowned out.
At a time when the mountain of “unknown-unknowns” as to what will happen after January 20th still dwarfs the few “known-unknowns” we can identify and ponder today, one of the most concerning “known-unknowns” remains whether our President-elect has come to terms with the full weight of his responsibilities. His behavior over the past month has been that of the same freewheeling, self-promoting dealmaker who won the election by first being the loudest voice in the room, then landing solid counterpunches, and ultimately with a little help from the funhouse-mirror of the electoral college.
The long awaited “pivot” has still yet to arrive. We've still got the same old Donald who's angry at celebrities and just this week he couldn’t help but pick a fight with a union boss from Carrier who pointed out that he exaggerated the number of jobs staying in the country. Nobody has taken away his Twitter yet, and the inauguration is less than six weeks away. The state of the union is entirely uncertain, with the only certain thing being that we truly will be living in “Trump’s America” soon – whatever that looks like.