The Wall Street Journal’s Jack Dawsey and Alex Ward report that Trump is frustrated and dumbfounded that the wars in Ukraine and Gaza are just a little bit trickier to solve than he had proclaimed during the campaign.
When President Trump spoke to a room of top donors at his Florida club last week, he described ending Russia’s war in Ukraine as a growing frustration that keeps him up at night, people in the room said.
Russian President Vladimir Putin was particularly tough to negotiate with, and wanted “the whole thing,” Trump said, referring to Ukraine, according to an attendee. His comments came in response to a donor’s question about his biggest foreign-policy concerns.
The war in Gaza was also notably challenging, Trump told the crowd. Finding any solution was hard because “they’d been fighting for a thousand years,” he said….
In recent weeks, Trump has privately griped to advisers that Putin doesn’t want to end the war, and that both sides refuse to compromise. Trump has also asked advisers if they believe Putin has changed since Trump’s last time in office, and expressed surprise at some of Putin’s military moves, including bombing areas with children, according to people familiar with the remarks.
Earlier this year, Trump said he believed Kyiv would be harder to convince than Russia unless the deal terms were Ukraine’s terms, resulting in a combative Oval Office encounter with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky live on television.
Dawsey and Ward’s reporting is both amusing and vexing. It is amusing because Trump’s whole “Putin’s changed, man” schtick reveals a president who is completely out of his depth. It is vexing because all Trump has to do was listen to his intelligence officials. Even as he was attempting to negotiate a cease-fire, intelligence finding after intelligence finding revealed that Putin had minimal interest in anything other than the domination of Ukraine. Even the most recent intel suggesting Putin might be interested in a temporary cease-fire also acknowledge that, “clearly hasn’t given up on their maximalist war ends.”
So I suppose it should not be surprising that Politico’s Amy Mackinnon reports that Trump has reduced his intelligence briefings to an absurdly low level.
Since President Donald Trump was sworn into office in January, he has sat for just 12 presentations from intelligence officials of the President’s Daily Brief.
That’s a significant drop compared with Trump’s first term in office, according to a POLITICO analysis of his public schedule.
In much of his first term, Trump met with intel officials twice a week for the briefing, which provides the intelligence community’s summary of the most pressing national security challenges facing the nation.
The low number of briefings this time around is troubling to many in and around the intelligence community, who were already concerned about Trump’s act-first-evaluate-after approach to governing….
The sporadic pace of briefings comes as Trump has been working to broker an end to the wars in Gaza and Ukraine and to jump-start nuclear talks with Iran — all while navigating increasing potential threats from adversaries such as Russia and China.
Each president is different in the manner and pace at which they receive their briefings, and Trump is not entirely out of step with some of his predecessors.
But with Trump, there is added concern as he is known not to read the accompanying briefing document, referred to as “the book,” that is put together by intelligence analysts in a highly labor-intensive process. This document is delivered in hard copy or on a tablet device to the president and his key advisers five days a week.
The briefings from senior intelligence officials are often a chance for the president to hear detailed assessments on global crises and to receive updates on highly classified covert operations overseas — along with blunt facts about the state of the world, regardless of policy implications or the president’s own views….
Senior administration officials said Trump gets the information he needs through frequent communication with his intelligence chiefs.
I suppose it depends on the intelligence chief. The Daily Beast’s Janna Brancolini reports that at least one intelligence head is not really bothering with intel all that much:
FBI Director Kash Patel has alarmed some members of the bureau by taking what they say is an overly casual approach to the role….
For decades, the FBI chief has received an 8:30 a.m. daily “director’s brief” with the most important information gathered from thousands of agents and analysts. Patel reportedly had trouble making the morning briefing, so it was dropped from five days a week to two.
“Even that has been a struggle,” an unnamed official told NBC.
Two current FBI officials said Patel sometimes seems uninterested in the materials, forcing them to try to create briefs that will hold his attention.
Patel also ended a long-standing practice of holding secure weekly video conferences with field office leaders across the country, according to NBC. The meetings were considered a crucial way to share information and priorities across the bureau….
During his first week on the job, Patel told officials from the regional field offices that he didn’t like meetings. Videoconferencing with the field office leadership for the very first time, Patel said he might hold the calls just once a month instead of once a week, The Wall Street Journal reported in February.
Maybe Tulsi Gabbard or John Ratcliffe are more attentive to intelligence than Patel — an admittedly low bar — but by now the point should be clear. Despite mucking about in a variety of hotspots, Donald Trump barely gets unbiased briefings, does not read his briefing book, and it’s far from clear that his political appointees are digesting any better information.
When the Patel story came out, many wags pointed out that this might be a case where laziness is fine. After all, an invested, energetic Patel who consumed very scrap of intel he could consume would make life so much harder for everyone. This is a fair point. When it comes to high-stakes foreign affairs, however, one would think that the United States would be better off if the president and his national security team properly consumed high-quality intelligence. Instead, we get presidential envoys relying on interpreters provided by adversaries.
These fellahs, with their casual approach to their jobs, are going to get us all killed. Trump has limited interest in serving as president, having already derived nearly everything he wanted from the election (his lifetime get out of jail card). $ash, who likes to jet around at taxpayer expense, is a real life Government Gangster. Don't think for a moment that Hegseth is more attentive to intelligence; he's likely spending the time getting coiffed in his new vanity, so that he can do new media interviews. I wonder some days if the Doomsday Clock will hit midnight before the regular clocks chime in 2028.
The question I always ask myself: is there a worse combination in a leader than possessing a room temperature IQ with a steadfast belief one is always right?