Donald Trump Is Bored

He gets his war briefings as a two-minute highlight reel, called his own Cabinet meetings boring as hell, and has given close personal attention to exactly one thing in eighteen months.

The war with Iran was in its fourth week when NBC News reported how the president was being kept abreast of it. Each day, military officials assembled a video of the biggest and most successful American strikes of the previous forty-eight hours and played it for him. The montage ran about two minutes, sometimes a little longer if the previous forty-eight hours had been especially cinematic. One official described the daily product as clips of “stuff blowing up.”

Two minutes. “YMCA” runs three minutes and forty-nine seconds, so the commander in chief of the United States armed forces was receiving roughly half as much daily information about an active shooting war as he receives from his own walk-off music, and the walk-off music at least contains a key change.

The obvious objection is that no serious person would call this a briefing, and the obvious answer is that several serious people did. Three current U.S. officials and a former one told NBC they were worried about it, not because the videos were false but because they were true and incomplete, which is the whole architecture of a highlight reel. The White House press secretary said the assertion was absolutely false and came from someone who had not been in the room. She did not say the videos do not exist.

The accommodations go back further than the war. Intelligence officers worked out early in the first term that the president would not read the President’s Daily Brief, so they rebuilt it. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence cut the document down to three roughly one-page articles and a short executive update in February 2017. An internal email that August offered the guidance that a picture is worth a thousand words, repeating the word “visuals” three times in a row, apparently on the theory that the memo itself needed to hold someone’s attention. Mike Pompeo, then running the CIA, told the Washington Post the briefings leaned on maps, charts, videos, and what he called “killer graphics.” Officials eventually landed on the discovery that the president was likelier to keep reading if his own name appeared in the text, so they put his name in as many paragraphs as possible, which is a thing you do for a president or a toddler learning to spell, and one of those two groups can order a strike.

He tweeted one of the satellite photographs, because it was a good picture, thereby disclosing the resolution capability of a classified American reconnaissance asset to everyone including the people it was pointed at. That is the risk profile of the graphics strategy in one image. You cannot hold a man’s interest with a spy satellite photo and then be surprised when he shows it to people.

The second term dispensed with even that. Politico counted twelve daily briefings in four months in the spring of 2025, which works out to roughly one intelligence briefing per ten days, a cadence you would find insufficient in a book club.

Cabinet meetings are where the thing became a matter of public record, because he said it out loud. In an interview with New York magazine published on January 26 of this year, an interview he had agreed to specifically in order to quiet questions about his health, he explained that when he closes his eyes during his own Cabinet meetings it is because they are “boring as hell.” He described the December session, which ran three and a half hours, and noted that he moves his hand so people will know he is listening, and that he cannot wait to get out. Marco Rubio, asked about the same behavior by the same magazine, called the eye-closing a “listening mechanism”, a phrase that should be studied in graduate seminars for the rest of the century, delivered with the specific confidence of a man who has decided that the difference between attention and its absence is a matter of framing.

Three days later he cut the next one to one hour and twenty minutes and told reporters the previous meeting had been on the boring side. The Secretary of Homeland Security was not called on to speak, in the middle of a national story about an immigration agent killing a protester in Minneapolis. That is what shortening the meeting means in practice. Something comes off the agenda, and it is never the praise.

Foreign governments have been designing around this for years, and they have gotten good at it. Before the 2025 G7 in Alberta, Western officials restructured the entire summit for him: no long joint communiqué, just short single-topic statements, and fewer back-to-back group sessions in favor of livelier one-on-ones. CNN reported the organizing principle plainly, which was to keep him from getting bored, because European officials had come to believe boredom was the failure state where things go wrong. Sovereign nations now do agenda design the way a parent does a long car trip. He left a day early anyway, and blamed the Middle East, and told reporters on the plane that he does not believe in telephones because people listen to them. Steve Bannon, who has no reason to be diplomatic and generally isn’t, said the real reason was that he was bored and that the other leaders had nothing to say.

The schedule has always told the same story. When a White House staffer leaked three months of the president’s private calendars to Axios in 2019, the tally came to 297 of 503 scheduled hours logged as unstructured “Executive Time,” a category invented by John Kelly to describe the hours in which the president is in the residence watching television. The schedules listed him in the Oval Office at eight in the morning. Six people with direct knowledge told Axios he was never there at eight in the morning. The document was not a record of his day; it was a courtesy extended to the idea of his day. And a golf tracker built on the public presidential calendar puts him at 129 confirmed rounds across the 580 days of this term, about one day in every four and a half, which is a demanding schedule if golf is your job and a remarkable one if it is not.

So the case looks closed, except that it isn’t, because the man is capable of sustained, granular, obsessive attention. He has simply allocated all of it to a building.

The ballroom. He is personally involved in the East Wing project down to the floor plans and the selection of the marble. In May, CNN reporters standing in the hallway outside the Oval Office overheard him grilling an associate about the latest renderings, insisting portions were missing and demanding clarity about the columns, the number of columns, the columns specifically. That was the same day the United States was trading proposals to end the war with Iran. The war got two minutes of curated explosions. The columns got a follow-up.

The finished structure will run about 89,000 square feet, against 55,000 for the Executive Mansion it is attached to, so the ballroom will be larger than the White House by a comfortable margin, which is either a metaphor or simply a fact that behaves like one. The renderings filed with the Supreme Court this month include a gilded Great Seal set into a pediment and a second gold emblem near the windows. Someone reviewed those renderings closely enough to add gold seals during an emergency application to the Supreme Court of the United States. The application argued the construction was absolutely required for his safety.

The capacity for concentration, then, is intact. It gets spent, reliably and at length and down to the count of the columns, on his own comfort and his own appearance. Nobody has required him to spend it anywhere else in a decade, because the people around him have spent that decade dismantling the requirement. The intelligence community shortened the paper and added the pictures. The Cabinet learned to be brief. The allies rewrote the agenda. The military edited the war down to its best two minutes.

The presidency is, in its actual daily substance, a job made almost entirely of sitting still while people tell you things you did not want to hear. Nearly every part of it that matters is boring, and it is boring precisely where it is most consequential: the modeling, the caveats, the dissent in the footnote, the analyst who thinks the strike numbers are being reported optimistically. When the man at the top cannot be bored through, the apparatus does not force him to sit there. It edits.

And the thing that gets cut first from a highlight reel is the part where it went wrong.