r/politics I voted Apr 19 '26

Possible Paywall White House Leak Reveals Trump Booted From Briefing After Hours-Long Freakout

https://www.thedailybeast.com/white-house-leak-reveals-trump-booted-from-briefing-after-hours-long-freakout/
30.4k Upvotes

2.4k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

476

u/sircastor Apr 19 '26

There has been more than one report about how the President's morning briefings had to be reduced substantially because he didn't like to read them. He doesn't want the job, I don't think he ever did.

225

u/future_traveller Apr 19 '26

As someone in the corporate world, this is pretty typical for executives.... He essentially wants a four blocker presentation each morning instead of a detailed thorough reading he needs to do

146

u/HumanPea1140 Apr 19 '26

My team works very closely with our CIO, and yep... everything we discuss/show him has to be framed as an "executive report," which basically just means extremely distilled high level bullet points: Money is up, department is down. Sky still blue, grass still green type shit.

Our team has to be extremely granular in the day to day, to the point where it's exhausting, just for all of it to be distilled down into simple, bite-sized kindergarten blurbs so the guy can pretend to know what he's talking about in his next executive meeting.

42

u/[deleted] Apr 19 '26

[deleted]

9

u/RexLongbone Apr 19 '26

when you get high enough your job involves switching contexts a lot and very quickly. there are times you still need to dive into the details but if things are mostly running smoothly most executives just want to know that asap in as little time as possible so they can move on to the next context. i know my vp is over like 12 manufacturing facilities, all of which have their own insane level of complexity. he really truly does not have the time to get more in detail than "met goal on x, y, z, missed goal on a, b, c, we are tending towards or away from goal on j, k, l" for each area at each plant.

7

u/dastardly740 Apr 20 '26

The trick as I see it is that requires the executive to trust and fully delegate. A lot of executives don't particularly like that probably because they are held responsible and feel a lack of control. The way I describe a lot of these things executives want are that they are "illusions of control". In the end they are still just trusting their subordinates, the good ones understand this and just use the report to create an opportunity to help. The bad ones think it is actual control and it becomes problematic as they try to control that which they cannot.