The "too stupid to brief" President

If you can get to it, have a read of this WAPO piece:  Donald Trump, the unbriefable President.

Some parts:

But Trump does not read the PDB. Or much of anything else, a former senior White House official told me. As his presidency began, it was an open question: Would Trump even bother to sit for CIA briefings? He didn’t, at first, and did so only after Mike Pompeo, then his CIA director, agreed to be there. Trump’s distrust of the intelligence services was stoked by their conclusion that Russia had intervened in the election on his behalf. Given his hostility toward the intelligence community, and his Twitter-sized attention span, Trump would be a challenge for any briefer.

Trump’s first briefer was Ted Gistaro, a widely respected career CIA officer on loan to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI), where he oversaw the PDB. Gistaro, who has a calm demeanor and a healthy sense of humor, got almost nowhere — so the briefing team devised a show and tell. Pictures of New York City landmarks, agency briefers thought, might help Trump grasp threats. In an effort to explain the scale of North Korea’s nuclear program, the CIA built a model of the Hermit Kingdom’s underground weapons facility and put a miniature Statue of Liberty inside it.

But Trump preferred his own sources. In July 2017, he batted away the CIA’s conclusion that the North Koreans had developed an intercontinental missile that might soon be capable of reaching U.S. soil. How could the president be certain the agency was wrong? Because, he said, Vladimir Putin told him so.

And this:

Trump’s current briefer, Beth Sanner, a highly regarded, 30-year CIA veteran, has endured a bumpier ride than Gistaro. When news broke that the alleged Russian bounties were included in the PDB, the Trump administration issued its usual denials and obfuscations. First, the president claimed the so-called reports were fake news. Then, he told Fox News that the intelligence was not credible enough to be in the PDB. Then the story changed again: If the intelligence was in the PDB, the White House said, his briefer didn’t bring it to Trump’s attention. 

It wasn’t the first time the White House had thrown Sanner under the bus. (In an early May tweet, Trump blamed his briefer for not sounding alarmed when she first spoke to him about the novel coronavirus in January.) But if Sanner had been routinely derelict in her duties, why hadn’t Haspel removed or replaced her? And why hadn’t national security adviser Robert O’Brien — who, along with other top aides, receives the PDB daily and presumably reads it — gone into the Oval Office, shut the door and briefed the president himself?

The answer is simple. The president is unbriefable. He will not listen to anything he does not want to hear.