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CIA book 'Getting To Know The President' looks at fraught relations with Trump : NPR
What was Trump like?
Getting to Know the President, Fourth Edition - CIAIt's not exactly classified information — former President Donald Trump and the intelligence community didn't get along. But in an updated book, Getting To Know The President, the story is told from the inside.
The author is a former CIA officer, John Helgerson, who spent 38 years at the agency. The publisher is the CIA's in-house research center. And the book is available for free on the CIA website.
Helgerson gets straight to the point: "For the intelligence community, the Trump transition [from candidate to president] was far and away the most difficult in its historical experience with briefing new presidents."
Helgerson says the only comparable case was President Richard Nixon, who was deeply suspicious of the intelligence agencies and basically ignored them, while Trump regularly fought with them in public and private.
What was Trump like?
Different Presidents have different styles, some preferring oral briefings, some written. Barack Obama liked his briefings in an iPad.James Clapper was the director of national intelligence who was responsible for Trump's briefing as he transitioned from candidate to president in late 2016 and early 2017. He said Trump was prone to "fly off on tangents; there might be eight or nine minutes of real intelligence in an hour's discussion."
Clapper says the intelligence community's traditional way of doing business didn't work well with Trump because he "was 'fact-free' — evidence doesn't cut it with him."
Trump received oral briefings two or three times a week at the beginning of his presidency.
"The single country that occasioned the most discussion with the president during this period was China," Helgerson writes. "North Korea's missile and nuclear programs were priority subjects ... Similarly, coverage continued of developments in Ukraine and Russia; Trump followed both closely."
But in the latter part of his term, Trump's routine called for just two 45-minute briefings a week, Helgerson says.
The author says Trump did not receive intelligence briefings during the final chaotic month of his presidency in late December 2020 through Jan. 20 of this year.
"After the 2020 election, briefings also continued for a period of time. When [CIA briefer Beth] Sanner briefed the president before he went to Mar-a-Lago for the holidays, he commented that he would see her later. The briefings were to resume on 6 January but none were scheduled after the attack on the Capitol," Helgerson writes.