White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt made wild claims about one of President Donald Trump’s most notorious deficiencies as commander in chief.
“A piece of advice one of my predecessors, Dana Perino, gave to me before I took this job: She said, ‘You always want to be the most well-read person in the room,’” Leavitt said during a Turning Point USA event with Erika Kirk at George Washington University on Thursday. “And I try to be every day, but Donald Trump always is. That man does not miss a story.”
Reports about Trump’s lack of desire to read have been widespread for years. During his first term, he reportedly did not read daily intelligence briefings, instead relying heavily on oral briefings, according to The Washington Post.
“After several months, Trump made clear he was not interested in reviewing a personal copy of the written intelligence report known as the PDB,” the Post reported in 2018.
A separate article from the Post in 2016, before Trump became president, detailed how he rarely read before he got into politics, and that was unlikely to change when he became president.
Trump told the Post at the time that he doesn’t have time to read, saying: “I never have. I’m always busy doing a lot. Now I’m more busy, I guess, than ever before.”
He also told Axios prior to his first inauguration: “I like bullets or I like as little as possible. I don’t need, you know, 200-page reports on something that can be handled on a page. That I can tell you.”
Critics on social media were quick to pan Leavitt’s claims of Trump being “well-read” as nonsense:
