It has been calculated that Donald Trump spent 18 hours tweeting and only 6 hours in intelligence briefings during his first month as president.
Philip Bump of The Washington Post broke down how Trump spent his first month in office:
https://t.co/H5C7wWnlSe pic.twitter.com/K19YoGNCH5
— Philip Bump (@pbump) February 21, 2017
To get more stories like this, subscribe to our newsletter The Daily.
Bump calculated that Trump spent 18 hours tweeting during his first month in office, “Trump spent an estimated 13 hours on tweets in D.C. and another five hours while in Florida. In total, Trump sent 128 tweets from an Android device, of 199 total since he was inaugurated.”
The least qualified and most poorly informed president in at least a century has spent three times more time on Twitter than he has getting intelligence briefings and learning what he needs to know to lead the country. This fact may go a long way towards explaining what the Trump administration has hit the ground stumbling instead of running. President Trump is more interested in his Twitter account than he is in knowing what a president needs to know to lead the most powerful nation on Earth.
Trump has vastly overestimated the power of his Twitter account to dictate media coverage, which is why he held the press conference and campaign rally last week. Trump realizes that the tweets aren’t working, but you know what would help his job approval ratings more than tweets, press conferences, and rallies?
Learning something about policy and governing.
As long as Donald Trump invests more time on Twitter than he does on intelligence briefings, he will continue to be a failed president.
A president can’t govern by tweet alone. At some point, the president is expected to actually do something, or else voters will toss him out of office.
Jason is the managing editor. He is also a White House Press Pool and a Congressional correspondent for PoliticusUSA. Jason has a Bachelor’s Degree in Political Science. His graduate work focused on public policy, with a specialization in social reform movements.
Awards and Professional Memberships
Member of the Society of Professional Journalists and The American Political Science Association
