U.S. President Donald Trump signs documents as he issues executive orders and pardons for January 6 defendants in the Oval Office at the White House on Inauguration Day in Washington, U.S., January 20, 2025.
Security expert Miles Taylor, who served in the Department of Homeland Security from 2017-2019, has revealed the first piece of advice he was given about briefing President Donald Trump: less words, more pictures.
“He doesn’t read. Bring pictures. Only try to impress ONE thing on him,” Taylor tweeted Friday morning. “And if there has to be words, single page only.”
Taylor’s revelation came as a response to a video that’s been going around of White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt in which she asserted, “You always want to be the most well-read person in the room, and I try to be every day. But Donald Trump always is."
Leavitt’s claim drew widespread guffaws, as the president’s aversion to the written word is well known. During Trump’s first administration, for example, it was reported that his aides frequently had to “trick” him into reading briefing documents by packing them with photos and lots of references to his own name. Then last month, it was revealed that rather than receiving standard briefing documents on the war in Iran, Trump’s staff provides him with a 2-minute “montage” of video clips exclusively highlighting American strikes and successes rather than an in-depth brief on the full situation.
As former-Trump economic advisor Gary Cohn once explained, “It’s worse than you can imagine… Trump won’t read anything — not one-page memos, not the brief policy papers, nothing. He gets up halfway through meetings with world leaders because he is bored.” This quote appeared in a book on Trump by journalist Michael Wolff, who went on to write that the president “didn’t read. He didn’t really even skim. Some believed that for all practical purposes he was no more than semi-literate.”
According to New York Times journalist Jamelle Bouie, these “truncated briefings” ignore vital information and context, and essentially mean that “Trump is flying blind.”
Leavitt’s assertion has reignited discussions about Trump’s illiteracy that come in the wake of his national address on Wednesday, in which he claimed that the Hormuz Strait — which has been closed for weeks due to the war, plunging the global energy market into chaos — will “open up naturally” once the U.S. leaves. His assertion, according to most experts, is “bonkers.”
