Page 13 - John Walcott News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

>> makes a lot of sense. chris whipple, in your study of presidencies, have you ever seen schedules like what was leaked about president trump's schedule now? and i'm not counting fdr when he was dying. i'm not counting woodrow wilson when he was physically incapacitated. i'm talking about physically capable presidents who spent as much lecture time as donald trump. >> no, nothing like it. even ronald reagan, who was famously detached as president, would show up at 9:00 sharp in the oval office every day, and he would hilt his marks. as long as he had a good director like jim baker around. so ...

What with calls ignorance when presented withal knees generated by america's $81 million a year. they describe futile attempts to keep his attention by using visual aids, confining some briefing points to two or three sentences and repeating his name and title as frequently as possible. and leading off our discussion now are john walcott, who broke that story for "time" magazine about what senior intelligence fficials call trump's willful ignorance that cannot be overcome by senior intelligence analysts. john whipple literally wrote the book called "the gatekeepers: how the chiefs of staff def...

White house chiefs. because you think about it, these guys are the last line of defense. they are the thin line between the president and his own delusions and really his own fantasyland. this is a president for whom discipline and process are anathema, and in a crisis that relays disaster. >> president obama, for example, served on the senate armed services committee. donald trump, there is no evidence that he's ever even read an article about any of the subjects that presidents have to deal with on a daily basis. there was certainly no evidence that he had read any "new york times" article o...

Disagreed with or taken a different stance on, you're in danger of losing your access to him. he doesn't want to hear from you anymore. so the tough decision that all these people face and that the chiefs of the intelligence services faced when they testified last week on the hill, is do i tell it straight or do i try to maintain my access to this guy? jim mattis at defense had that problem, john kelly and h.r. mcmaster had that problem, and where are they now? >> but, john, on the intelligence briefers, would they just be replaced? if an intelligence briefer tells president trump something he...

Intelligence briefings in case one of them wins so they understand what's going on in the world. what you see in trump is he's not been interested in understanding the way the world works. he does not ask follow-up questions about the consequences of the course of action he's going to take, and so you see the world not reacting in the way that he wants to this world that he is trying to invent. >> and john walcott, you have briefers telling you that they have been warned, as you report. they've been warned against giving the president intelligence assessments that contradict stances he has tak...