While President Donald Trump absconds from Washington for his 17-day vacation, the wheels of the news media circus following his every move keep turning. Newsweek lambasted the “Lazy Boy” president with its latest cover, while the fallout from his most recent comments regarding Mexico and the proposed border wall continue to grow. That Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced a new series of leaks investigations by the Justice Department proved most prescient, however, as a new Washington Post report regarding Trump’s increasing frustrations with National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster was soaking wet.
Unfortunately for them, as previous reports have indicated, the Donald is unable to keep himself engaged for the time necessary to understand fully what McMaster is telling him. “I call the president the two-minute man,” said one official identified as a “confidant” of Trump. “The president has patience for a half-page.” Others claim “[e]ven a single page of bullet points on the country seemed to tax the president’s attention span on the subject” of “Afghanistan’s history, its complicated politics, or its seemingly endless civil war.”
The president reportedly isn’t happy about the situation in Afghanistan, where American troops have been on the ground for 16 years, and he keeps asking McMaster the same two questions: “Why the U.S. military wasn’t winning in Afghanistan” and why our military is “still stuck there.” Considering Defense Secretary James Mattis’ recent admission that “we’re not winning” there, and a recent report about Russia’s allegedly arming Taliban rebels in the country, Trump’s irritation is understandable. Hence why, as the Post‘s sources contend, McMaster and other staffers have struggled to present viable answers.
https://twitter.com/Frank_Konkel/status/893584241115762689
(Via Washington Post)