U.S. President Donald Trump gestures, as he heads back to the Oval Office, on the day of the 2026 White House Easter Egg Roll, in Washington, D.C., U.S., April 6, 2026. REUTERS/Nathan Howard
When Americans want to know why things are such a "mess," the former chief of staff at the Department of Homeland Security under President Donald Trump's first administration knows why.
Taylor, who sounded the alarm about Trump in his infamous "anonymous" column in The New York Times, revealed that many of the staff in the White House were desperately trying to keep Trump from his worst impulses. As one Times opinion columnist explained it, "no one is allowed to say 'no' to Trump."
"There was a rule when I was in Trump's first term," Taylor wrote in a social media post. "If a memo had a staple in it, it was too long for him to read. Life-or-death decisions were cut to one page. Or a half-page. Or less. Bold fonts. BIG pictures. When you’re wondering why everything’s a mess, remember that."
Taylor infamously wrote in his first book that there was a one-page rule for Trump making decisions on complicated policy issues like peace in the Middle East or health care policy. During the first term, it was reported that Trump seemed indifferent if he had to read a lot of words.
“I get great intel. I have people brief me on great intel everyday,” Trump reportedly told Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and Ambassador Sergey Kislyak in a 2017 meeting in the Oval Office.
“That’s our task, right? To deliver the material in a way that he can best understand the information we’re trying to communicate,” then-CIA Director Mike Pompeo told the Washington Post.
NBC News reported last year that new director of national intelligence Tulsi Gabbard was struggling to do the same thing: deliver vast amounts of important information using pictures and as few words as possible.
She told the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee, “There was bipartisan consensus that the PDB was in need of serious reform. DNI Gabbard is leading that reform and is ensuring the President receives timely, relevant, objective intelligence reporting.”
White House Spokesman Davis Ingle called reports that information had to be short and feature lots of images “libelous garbage from unnamed sources."
"I remember the first piece of advice I got on briefing President Trump in 2017: He doesn’t read. Bring pictures. Only try to impress ONE thing on him. And if there has to be words, single page only," Taylor said earlier this year when mocking White House staffers claiming the president was "well read."
In one 2024 interview, Taylor recalled that he was forced to take a 50-page memo on the situation in Afghanistan and turn it into a slide show with bullet points.
"I summed up this highly classified memo into Trump's sort of bombastic language because it was the only way he was gonna understand. I mean, I literally said in there, 'You know, if we leave Afghanistan too fast, the terrorists will call us losers. But if we wanna be seen as winners, we need to make sure the Afghan forces have the strength to push back against these criminals.' I mean, it was that dumb and that's how you had to talk to him," Taylor said.
