In an episode of the Ezra Klein Show, two journalists who have spent extensive time profiling members of the Trump administration, sketched out the details of the US President’s daily routine and how it reflects his psyche and the nature of his administration.
“I think his lens is quite transactional. He views it as: Is this something I like, or is this something I don’t like,” said Ashley Parker, a former The Washington Post reporter and three-time Pulitzer winner.
The New York Times podcast also featured Michael Scherer, Parker’s colleague at The Atlantic, who said that in every interaction Donald Trump has “in all the macro ways he lives his life, he’s always trading to get some benefit for himself.”
“The way that manifests in the White House is that it functions more like a royal court would. You have the courtiers who come to the parties and try to please the king in various ways. And the president is constantly asking to be pleased,” he elaborates.
Trump’s routine
Comparing Trump with his Democrat predecessor, Barack Obama, Scherer said: “He wakes up late. Obama would start work very early in the Oval Office…I think on an average day [Trump is] in front of live cameras if he’s at the White House, I don’t know, one to three hours in a day. That’s a lot of time to be just talking on the record to somebody or doing something like that.”
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“I think the rest of the time is much more free-form. I don’t think that drive toward 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,” he added.
“I think it’s the reason he has been so interested in foreign policy. He has an enormous amount of power when it comes to foreign policy.”
After coming back to office last year, the US President slapped reciprocal tariffs on more than 90 countries in an unconventional attempt at shrinking trade deficits by pressuring them to sign trade agreements.
In his most recent bout, Trump has chosen to lock horns with the US Supreme Court after the conservative majority bench struck down the tariffs, which were imposed using a law reserved for national emergencies.
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In its verdict, the top court reminded the separation of powers – between the executive, judiciary and legislature – while restoring Congress’ role in foreign policy-making. Following this, the President announced that he will explore other legal routes to unilaterally impose duties.
Affinity for phone calls
On Trump’s openness to fielding calls from a wide range of people, Scherer said, “He can get on the phone with all kinds of world leaders, and he loves talking to anybody. 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 to settle wars in corners of the world.”
Parker said: “It’s a very good medium for him, frankly. People say he’s incredibly compelling on the phone…It’s much more of a rolling conversation than it is a meaningful policy debate in the traditional sense.”
“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,” she said.
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The host Klein, chimed in with bemusement: “I wonder how he is not more aggressively scheduled,” theorizing that the President may be trusting his administration with matters more than Obama or Joe Biden would.
“I feel like it sometimes leaves me with only a couple of options. Either those things are not coming up to him — so he doesn’t know about as much as Barack Obama or Joe Biden or George W. Bush did — or he’s trusting his people more,” Klein said.
“If something gets bad enough, they bring it to him, but the level at which something gets brought to him is very different,” he added.
Scherer said the President has “his own little superstructure inside the White House of aides who basically just work with him, who just provide him information, who are channeling people to him outside the structure that Susie [Wiles] has created.”
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‘Incredibly in the weeds’
Scherer said: “The amount of time he has spent in this first year on planning events for the “America 250” celebration — a new ballroom, redoing the Kennedy Center, fixing golf courses — you could just go on and on — redoing the Oval Office, putting signs up on the Rose Garden colonnade — he’s spending all this time doing stuff that no president has ever spent time doing, but he loves it, and that’s what he chooses to do.”
“Reasonable people can argue that they would prefer their president to spend that time differently,” Parker said, adding that “Trump can get incredibly in the weeds,” citing as an example his involvement in redesigning the Oval Office with gold inlays.
She hinted that most voters prefer that he take that level of passion and attention to detail to “figuring out what’s going on in Minneapolis,” the city which has been on the edge since the ICE raid.
“He does have that capacity for what he cares about, and what he cares about is often not the policy weeds,” she said.
Klein suggested that Trump 2.0 may be a series of “consequential” projects – ranging from tariffs to CBP enforcement – which are “disruptive and in some cases violent.”
He said the President’s lack of constant engagement with his administration on these issues makes it appear to be a “less structured policy process than we are used to.” Parker agreed.
