Trump signing his latest order: ‘A lot of words. I won’t bother reading everything’
In a stunning admission on Tuesday afternoon, President Donald Trump admitted he doesn’t necessarily read every executive order he signs.
During a press conference for the signing of the executive order promoting agriculture and rural prosperity, President Trump began reading the order, before quickly putting it down and saying he didn’t want to read too many words.
“So this is promoting agriculture and rural prosperity in America. And now, there’s a lot of words, I won’t bother reading everything,” Trump said. “But, agriculture and rural prosperity in America. That’s what we want.”
While the moment was just a quick aside before Trump went into a speech praising farmers and promising to enact policy that helps them, it’s important to note that Trump has never been much of a fan of reading. In an interview with Axios just prior to his inauguration, then-President-elect Trump told Politico veterans Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei that he preferred to get as few words as possible in his intelligence briefings.
“I like bullets or I like as little as possible,” Trump told Allen and VandeHei. “I don’t need, you know, 200-page reports on something that can be handled on a page. That I can tell you.”
Trump’s candid remarks about not reading lots of words hearkens back to a New York Times piece from February that shed light on how chief White House strategist Steve Bannon and policy advisor Stephen Miller are in charge of writing the executive orders themselves, while Trump just signs them. After a federal judge struck down the first of two unsuccessful Muslim bans, Trump demanded he actually be included in the process of drafting executive orders:
By then, the president, for whom chains of command and policy minutiae rarely meant much, was demanding that Mr. Priebus begin to put in effect a much more conventional White House protocol that had been taken for granted in previous administrations: From now on, Mr. Trump would be looped in on the drafting of executive orders much earlier in the process.
Another change will be a new set of checks on the previously unfettered power enjoyed by Mr. Bannon and the White House policy director, Stephen Miller, who oversees the implementation of the orders and who received the brunt of the internal and public criticism for the rollout of the travel ban.
The Trump List 