How does Trump spend his time? What does his schedule look like? I mean, we’ve talked about things laddering up to him, but it’s sometimes not obvious to me how actually inside these policy debates and processes he is compared to recent previous presidents. He wakes up late. Obama would start work very early in the Oval Office and work until dinnertime. And then he’d go back to the residence. Trump comes down later in the morning. I think on an average day he’s in front of live cameras, if he’s at the White House, I don’t know, one to three hours in a day. I mean, that’s a lot of time to be just talking on the record to somebody or doing something like that. And I think the rest of the time is much more freeform. I don’t think that structure, that drive towards efficiency and structure is something that interests him. I think what interests him is how much he can get out of every day, what transaction he can have and what he gets out of each transaction. I think it’s the reason he’s been so interested in foreign policy. He has an enormous amount of power when it comes to foreign policy, so he can get on the phone with all kinds of world leaders, and he loves talking to anybody. I mean, he really has no problem taking phone calls from just about anybody, talking to the new mayor of New York in a friendly way, talking to try and settle wars and corners of the world — Like “Don from Queens,” a consummate talk radio caller or host. It’s a very good medium for him, frankly. People say he’s incredibly compelling on the phone. He plays a lot of golf on the weekends. He goes to his private clubs — Mar-a-Lago in the winter, Bedminster sometimes when it’s nicer — where he holds court there. And he loves a lot of inputs. But you’re right, it’s much more of like a rolling conversation than it is a meaningful policy debate in the traditional sense. That’s absolutely true. I am not the president. I do a podcast, I do some columns. I feel like I have trouble fitting phone calls into my day. It’s like I’m not communicative in the way I’d like to be. I hear about this, and I watch some of this, and I wonder how he is not more aggressively scheduled, given all the things that in theory in another White House would ultimately come up to him. I guess the question I am getting at here is this seems like it is a much less structured policy process than we are used to. So is what is suffering in that what the president knows, or is it the president actually doesn’t want to know more than he does? And the way things bubble up to him is more associative and precise than it would have been at another time? I mean, it’s a president who governs and rules on raw, visceral gut instinct. But when you look — and again, I did not cover Barack Obama’s presidency nearly as closely as I’ve covered the Trump one — but my sense was that Obama ran his White House, too, the constitutional law professor that he once was. If he was doing something on trade, he would want to hear all different inputs in a very structured way from economic experts, etc., etc., all the relevant people, synthesize all of that very granular information and make a decision. When you look at Trump’s, some of Trump’s trade things, which sometimes are announced, like much in his administration, in the middle of the night on Truth Social, that may not have been vetted by anyone. It’s just — it’s tariffs against French Champagne because I am angry at Macron. Agree or disagree that that’s a good way to lead a country, you don’t need a rigorous policy process for that, especially if the next day, you’re going to undo all of those tariffs because something else has changed. There is a line in the Obama White House that they would say a lot, that any question that ultimately makes it to the president has no easy answer, that all the easy answers were already made below him. I don’t think there are many questions that make it to Trump that Trump doesn’t think are easy to answer. I don’t think he’s spending a lot of time — to Ashley’s point about gut instinct, I think he gets a presentation, like, “OK, we’re going to do that.” He doesn’t need to read the source material. He doesn’t need to go back through the history of things. Bill Pulte, who runs the Federal Housing Finance organization, I don’t know the proper name for it, will come into the Oval Office with posterboards. I’ve been in the Oval Office in the first term and seen briefing documents for the president about, for Trump about a policy thing that are, basically, 100-word on a page, bullet-point things that are not detailed. It’s like, here’s the five sentences you need to know about this thing before you make a decision. Not here’s the 500 pages you need to know. Like a science project diorama. It’s like, here’s how dinosaurs went extinct. The asteroid, it’s that. I mean, it’s just not the same kind of policy — whereas Obama, if you’re comparing him to him, is really in the weeds of economic theory. And I mean, you did health care reform. I mean, there’s nothing like — Obama understood that bill. I don’t think Trump has the same level of understanding of the Big Beautiful Bill. I mean, he knows there’s no tax on tips, but he doesn’t know exactly what the SALT compromise was. He knows it’s coming out of — Yeah, yeah.
