"Incandescently stupid": Former DHS official says he had to "dumb" down classified memos for Trump

https://lemmy.world/post/2223321

"Incandescently stupid": Former DHS official says he had to "dumb" down classified memos for Trump - Lemmy.world

Ok a 50 page memo? That’s pretty friggin long. Depends how many of those you get a day.

But:

I summed up this highly classified memo into Trump’s sort of bombastic language because it was the only way he was gonna understand," Taylor added. “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.”

Great point. It takes a lot of skill to succinctly summarise some dense material for someone who juggles lots of things. Frankly I think we need more of that in the modern world - there is so much information out there! But the killer is that “bombastic language” and false dichotomy. Making things easier to understand - clarity - is important. This good versus evil bullshit is just wrong; unfortunately stuff isn’t that easy.
No. The President of the United States of America needs to br able to internalize and contextualize the details of thr current geopolitical climate over corn flakes. This “only human” bullshit has got to go.
A 50 Page memo is too long. It is relevant for the discussion of the details between the specialised people, so they reach a highly qualified opinion, but the cause and effects of different decision options need to be summarised on a few pages. Of course the president needs to be able to understand what the bullet points entail, but it is literally impossible for a president of a country the size of the US to read up on the details of every decision.
I mean, other Presidents and high level defense officials seem to be handling it just fine. I’d also bet that there are pictures, charts, and supporting information in that 50 pages, and that the actual meat of the document is going to be smaller. I’ve read plenty of 50 page documents like that. It doesn’t take that long.

i’m sure that Trump had things dumbed down for him. But what is the point of giving someone 50 pages to just read a few off? And “taking that long” is relative. For these kind of reports or so at work, reading them properly takes at least 2 hours. So if the president gets 5 if these on his desk he calls it a day and gets back to governing the next day, when he is finished reading?

Crossreading is also terrible, as it easily overlooks maybe critical information. Have someone write a comprehensive summary and give the president time to actually think about which decision is best.

We’re getting off on a little bit of a tangent about proper memo reading but usually the point of supporting information is that you don’t know if the reader is going to need it. You don’t have a full picture of what the president knows already and you have no way of knowing how the president’s thought process is going to go. They might need more information about something that happened or a decision being made to help inform their decisions or they might not, because it’s not really relevant to the direction they want to go. Sure, 50% of it might go unread but you never know what info will fall into that 50%, exclude it and the document is incomplete.

Ultimately, though, the point remains that the memo sizes haven’t really been a problem for others. Typically you don’t make it that high up without being an extremely effective reader. It’s just that this time we wound up with someone unfit and in way over his head.