Around ages two and three, children naturally are very active and impulsive and have a short attention span. All children occasionally seem overactive or easily distractible—for example, when they’re very tired, excited about doing something ‘special,’ or anxious about being in a strange place or among strangers.
American Academy of Pediatrics, Caring for Your Baby and Young Child
Political leadership cannot be exercised on a whim. Almost by definition, problems that rise to the top of the policy queue are intractable ones. This is particularly true for problems that require congressional buy-in. Even when a President’s party controls both houses of Congress, it is no small thing to get legislation passed. It requires drive, determination, sustained focus, investments of political capital, and the art of persuasion.1 A President needs to be able to signal to other policymakers in the executive and legislative branches which issues are key priorities.
To say that President Trump can be easily distracted would be an understatement. One former high-ranking government official, who met with Trump during the transition period to discuss a possible cabinet position, told me that their hour-long conversation was really a series of 60 one-minute conversations. This was because the President-elect’s attention wandered constantly. Trump would ask a question and then less than a minute later would ask a completely unrelated question: “What do you think about climate change? Is NATO worth it? How big is an aircraft carrier?” This jibes with how others view Trump. One foreign diplomat who met with Trump later told BuzzFeed, “He just bombed us with questions: ‘How many people do you have? What’s your GDP? How much oil does [that country] produce? How many barrels a day? How much of it is yours?’”2 Former George W. Bush economic advisor Lawrence Lindsay told GOP lawmakers that Trump had the long-term decision-making ability of “an empty chair.”3
Trump biographers and collaborators also stress this aspect of his behavior. Wayne Barrett, the author of Trump: The Deals and the Downfall, warned Politico that Trump “doesn’t have the attention span” to handle the day-to-day rigors of the presidency.4 Tim O’Brien told the New York Times, “The reason he gets surprised by these political problems is because he’s not detail-oriented. He has a really short attention span, and he’s profoundly impatient.”5 Tony Schwartz, who wrote Trump’s The Art of The Deal, told the New Yorker that “if he had to be briefed on a crisis in the Situation Room, it’s impossible to imagine him paying attention over a long period of time.”6
Since Trump has been President, officials have also noted this toddler-like trait. Former FBI Director James Comey, in a January 2017 memorandum for the file, characterized a meeting with the President as “chaotic, with topics touched, left, then returned to later, making it very difficult to recount in a linear fashion.” Comey concluded, “It really was a conversation-as-jigsaw-puzzle in a way, with pieces picked up, then discarded, then returned to.”7 Secretary of Defense James Mattis told colleagues that Trump was a good listener—unless you strayed onto one of his third rails, after which he was likely to go off on a tangent that would last a good long while.8 GOP Senator Charles Grassley told reporters, “I’m not sure if you talk to him face to face, he hears everything you say.”9
As Trump has been in office longer, the gripes about his attention span from his own staff have grown louder. In Fear, Bob Woodward recounted Gary Cohn complaining to White House Staff Secretary Rob Porter:
Things are just crazy here. They’re so chaotic. He’s never going to change. It’s pointless to prepare a meaningful, substantive briefing for the president that’s organized, where you have a bunch of slides. Because you know he’s never going to listen. We’re never going to get through it. He’s going to get through the first 10 minutes and then he’s going to want to start talking about some other topic. And so we’re going to be there for an hour, but we’re never going to get through this briefing.10
Trump’s inability to demonstrate sustained focus on any particular set of issues has had a pronounced effect on how he has been staffed. The most obvious effect has been in the way that subordinates have briefed the President on emergent issues. Over the course of his presidency, his staff has continually reduced the amount of briefing materials, reduced the length of briefings, and added as much visual material as possible. To be sure, the concise transmission of information is a good thing regardless of who is the President. As the examples in this chapter demonstrate, however, Trump’s briefings have been far too brief. Even so, there is every indication that the Toddler in Chief does not do his homework and read his briefing books.11 White House officials have acknowledged that Trump does not read even short memos. At one point Trump’s Chief of Staff John Kelly, in response to a reporter’s query about whether the President had read a particular 10-page memo, responded, “He has it. It’s pretty lengthy. We’ll get some people down to brief him on it.”12
To be fair, Presidents have so much on their plate that reading even a 10-page memo comes with opportunity costs. It could be argued that brevity in briefing is not always a bad thing, and it forces staffers to distill their documents into the most vital briefs possible. The flaw in this argument is that Trump’s knowledge deficits compound the problem of his short attention span.13 More than any other President, Trump lacks the basic background information to understand the complexities of, say, health care policy or the history of US interventions in Latin America. Tony Schwartz’s warning proved to be prescient; the 45th President cannot sit through a normal briefing, much less the lengthier-than-average briefings that he actually needs. Most of the time, the Toddler in Chief is operating on very little information, and he lacks the mental capacity to learn what he needs to learn in order to do his job properly.
Because of the Toddler in Chief’s inability to focus, staffers are unclear on which action items the President cares about and which are transient whims. Regardless of who occupies the Oval Office, all White House officials act to protect Presidents from their own worst impulses. A common tactic for staffs of modern Presidents, when their boss issues a dubious order, is to delay action to see if the President was serious or just in a bad mood. If a President truly cares about the subject, they will revisit it with follow-up requests.
Trump’s short attention span, however, means that he is constantly popping off about a kaleidoscope of issues. Without any sustained focus, it is easy for bureaucratic actors to slow-walk or delay implementation of an idea to see if the President’s attention shifts elsewhere. Indeed, Trump’s White House staff has repeatedly used delaying tactics in response to direct orders; as the Washington Post’s Ashley Parker and Greg Jaffe reported in 2017: “In the White House, when advisors hope to prevent Trump from making what they think is an unwise decision, they frequently try to delay his final verdict—hoping he may reconsider after having time to calm down.”14 This delaying tactic makes sense for Trump’s individual whims. Collectively, however, it leads to a dysfunctional administration. A repeated theme of this administration is the President’s desire to do something, followed by staff inaction, followed by a tweet announcing a shift in policy, followed by staff confusion about what to do in response, and then the uncertainty of whether Trump will follow through or not. The result is a series of policy announcements that end with poor follow-through and bad implementation.15
A related problem is the difficulty of briefing the Toddler in Chief on salient issues if he is not interested in them. For example, according to the New York Times, Homeland Security officials were aware of a rising tide of white nationalism but could not brief the President about it: “Officials at the department have felt they could not broach topics like domestic terrorism and white supremacist violence with Mr. Trump because he was not interested in those concerns.”16 When then-DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen sought to regularly brief the President on issues of domestic terrorism, the White House rebuffed her request.
Finally, on the global stage, Trump’s short attention span has been a diplomatic disaster. Part of the President’s job is to attend summits, meet with heads of state, and participate in other ceremonial functions. For Trump, this means having to sit through other leaders giving speeches. Trump’s inability to sit still and focus, however, hurts US standing in two ways. First, Trump’s short attention span means he can miss nuanced shifts in another country’s position on an issue. Second, Trump’s restlessness can often lead to violations of diplomatic protocol, which other foreign leaders view as a sign of disrespect. For example, at the June 2018 NATO Summit, the New York Times reported that “during the middle of a speech by Ms. Merkel, Mr. Trump again broke protocol by getting up and leaving, sending ripples of shock across the room, according to American and European officials who were there.”17 Trump’s awkward first visit with Queen Elizabeth II generated similar reactions. Unfortunately, given the Toddler in Chief’s short attention span, he is unlikely to factor in the perceptions of others when he violates protocol.
The biggest problem with Trump’s short attention span? He will be incapable of paying attention to anyone who tells him that his short attention span is a real problem.