In a White House run by President Trump, short attention spans are just part of the daily routine.
Aides and lawmakers left to clean up the ashes of Trump’s impulsive policy announcements bank on the President forgetting his latest Twitter directive before they actually have to do the work to implement it, according to new reporting in the Atlantic.
For example, at the end of March, the president announced he would be cutting off aide to Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador as a means of deterring migrants from entering the United States illegally. The State Department had to scramble to make an announcement that aligned with Trump’s impulsive policy decision and it vowed to work with Congress to cut off the funding, an order Trump can’t make completely on his own, according to the Atlantic.
A month and a half later, lawmakers tell the Atlantic that the administration has essentially abandoned the effort.
“We have heard nothing so far,” a senior Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Committee told the Atlantic. “What money are we talking about? For what purposes? What’s the timeline for this? It’s been weeks now, and we’ve asked multiple times, and we know nothing.”
Some agencies have even opted to just ignore Trump’s tweets instead of scrambling to account for them. When Trump tweeted demanding investigations into House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-CA) ties to Russians or Jussie Smollett’s alleged attack in Chicago, the Justice Department and the FBI reportedly did not acknowledge the requests.
Read the full report in the Atlantic here.
