President Executive Time Proudly Declares He Works Harder Than Abraham Lincoln

From Esquire

Normally, the President of the United States does not feel it necessary to assure everyone he's actually doing the job. But most presidents are not Donald Trump, American president, whose private schedules from the prior three months were leaked last week to reveal 60 percent of his minutes are spent on Executive Time. That's the euphemism for the long "unstructured" periods each day-including 8 to 11 a.m. nearly every morning-in which Trump watches cable news, tweets, and calls old friends outside the White House. And some, I assume, is spent working.

Sunday brought another leak, this time of Trump's schedule from Monday to Thursday of this past week. 50 percent was Executive Time. This was too much for the president to bear.

Again, the fact that the White House's current occupant is the first president in recent memory who feels he must declare he's working is not a glowing advertisement for the idea he's working especially hard, or more than his predecessors. As usual, it smacks of He Doth Protest Too Much.

That's particularly true when his tweet features some of his favorite, oft-repeated lies, like the idea we were on the brink of war with North Korea before he rode into town and saved us. Also, his solution to fix the VA was to hand the agency over to a shadow committee of three Mar-a-Lago members with no background in the military and little background in medicine. His first VA secretary was run out of town amid a travel scandal, his second absolutely loves the Confederacy, and he reportedly wanted to give the job to Fox News host Pete Hegseth, who just yesterday announced on-air that he hasn't washed his hands in 10 years because he doesn't believe in germs. Also, service at VA hospitals is still racked with problems.

Yes, you can safely assume Trump's claim he "probably work[s] more hours than almost any past President"-admittedly a less shamelessly categorical one than you'd expect-is one of the 15 false claims he makes in public every day. Combined with his projection routine on White House tours where he suggests President Obama watched basketball all day, and fairly widespread reports he watches four to eight hours of television a day, and the even more widespread reports about the stunning amount of time he spends playing golf-along with his aides' attempts to cover it up after he relentlessly criticized Obama for far-less-frequent outings-you get a pretty clear picture of what's going on.

Certainly, we know the president is not reading his briefing reports. There's always the possibility that Trump spends some of this Executive Time coordinating with his sons, Tweedledee and Tweedlemoron, on running his business, which he never actually divested from. That has created incredible conflicts of interest which continually raise the question of whether Trump is making decisions in the national interest or to benefit his own private business. The Great American Heist rolls on.

But by this Monday morning, Trump was looking to reinforce his claims about his sterling work ethic. Well, that's after he reinforced the notion he is a completely embarrassing moron with yet another "joke" about how global warming isn't real because it's cold outside. And after quoting Jesse Watters, the Ron Burgundy of White Resentment News, who declared "fact-checkers have become Fake News." Then it was time to put this issue to bed.

That's more like it. No hedging at all. Sure, the president rarely gets to his office before 11 a.m., and some days spends eight hours melting his brain with cable news. But he works harder than Abraham Lincoln! As is so often the case with this guy, it would all be so funny if he were still a reality game show host and not the world's most powerful man. In some ways, our fearless leader seems to sense this:

Just loosen up, man! 😎 Everything's going great!

Never mind that the president laughs at the idea we should combat climate change, an existential threat to human civilization as we know it, and is threatening to declare a national emergency by the end of the week if he does not get funding for the Big, Beautiful Wall-a response to a crisis of illegal immigration happening only in The Presidential Brain. Oh, and right-wing terrorism and hate crimes have exploded in frequency over the last two years. But don't worry folks, he's working hard.

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