Trump gets briefing visuals, unable to retain top secret intelligence

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According to a report by the Washington Post, President Donald Trump “ravenously and impatiently” takes in the intelligence that is presented to him during briefings in the White House, but he has a hard time retaining the details and the nuances of the information he is given.

CIA Director Mike Pompeo explained that the nearly daily intelligence briefings often come with “killer graphics” and visual representations, playing to Trump’s past in development, when blueprints and other visual information was his forte.

“That’s our task, right? To deliver the material in a way that he can best understand the information we’re trying to communicate,” Pompeo said.

The briefings reportedly run for 30 to 45 minutes and are often over-time, often with Reince Priebus poking his head into the office to let the president know that he needs to wrap things up, as people are waiting.

“He always asks hard questions, which I think is the sign of a good intelligence consumer. He’ll challenge analytic lines that we’ll present, which is again completely appropriate. . . . It is frequently the case that we’ll find that we need to go back and do more work to develop something, to round something out.”

“A president who I think came into the office thinking he would focus on domestic issues — ‘make America great again’ — has learned that you inherit the world and its problems when you’re president of the United States,” said Daniel Coats, director of national intelligence and a frequent participant in Trump’s briefings.

“One time he came in and said, ‘All right, what’s the bad news this morning?’ ” Coats added. “You can see the weight of the burden on the shoulders of the president.”

However, there is strain between the intelligence community at large and the president, especially given recent events in which he reportedly disclosed highly classified information to Russian officials during their visit to the White House, not to mention his speech at the CIA headquarters in which he praised himself and his election victory shortly after taking office, all while standing in front of a wall with the names of the fallen.

“Pompeo and Coats are doing their best to give him the most accurate daily briefing, but my sense is in the rank-and-file, they are very worried about how do you deal with him and about sharing with him sensitive material,” said Mark Lowenthal, a former assistant director of the CIA and the president of the Intelligence and Security Academy. “This is the result of his behavior, both during the campaign and that visit to the CIA, which was a disaster, and now the whole Russia briefing.”