While campaigning for office, President Donald Trump repeatedly claimed Hillary Clinton didn’t have the stamina to be president, but according to a new report, Trump’s work day is as leisurely as can be to accommodate him.
According to new media site Axios, Trump officially starts his day at 11am ET and typically ends it around 6pm, which is a seven-hour workday. We should all be so lucky.
During the day, as well as before and after, Trump’s schedule is filled with “Executive time,” which, according to Axios, is code for watching TV.
The schedule says Trump has “Executive Time” in the Oval Office every day from 8am to 11am, but the reality is he spends that time in his residence, watching TV, making phone calls and tweeting.
Trump comes down for his first meeting of the day, which is often an intelligence briefing, at 11am.
An example of a recent day of the president sounds pretty relaxed:
On Tuesday, Trump has his first meeting of the day with Chief of Staff John Kelly at 11am. He then has “Executive Time” for an hour followed by an hour lunch in the private dining room. Then it’s another 1 hour 15 minutes of “Executive Time” followed by a 45 minute meeting with National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster. Then another 15 minutes of “Executive Time” before Trump takes his last meeting of the day — a 3:45pm meeting with the head of Presidential Personnel Johnny DeStefano — before ending his official day at 4:15pm.
That’s three-and-a-half hours of me time in one work day. It’s also a pivot from earlier in his presidency, where Trump worked longer hours. When asked about his shrinking schedule, White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said that Trump was “one of the hardest workers [she’d] ever seen and puts in long hours and long days nearly every day of the week all year long.”
That said, at nine this morning, the president was tweeting about something he saw on Fox & Friends.
The issue of Trump’s personal TV consumption has come up before. In their year-end review, the New York Times White House team noted that the president spent upwards of four hours a day watching television, a claim the president directly rebuked.
Earlier in his presidency, Trump said he had no time for television while in the midst of retweeting several Fox & Friends segments.