Maybe because this in the article:
“PDBs are presented to presidents and their closest aides by representatives of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), though material in them is prepared by the CIA, the National Security Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency and other parts of the U.S. intelligence community, the officials said.”
indicates that “briefings” are in-person meetings.
“Presidents-elect have in the past generally welcomed the opportunity to receive the President’s Daily Brief (PDB), the most highly classified and closely held document in the government.”
We’re splitting hairs because whether he gets them or not, we both know Trump isn’t reading these - he bragged that he doesn’t need them. But do you really think there’d be this kerfuffle if this came down to a difference between an in-person briefing and a paper document?
I think there would be. Anything and everything he does right now is criticized. Why not this?
I think what happened was that he listened to two briefings, saw that the second one was basically a repeat of the first one, and decided he’s going to let one of his advisers screen them and tell him what changed. Which is basically what Reagan did. As the articles cited in this thread keep saying, each President “structures” the PDBs his own way.
You seem to think a lot of things. Doesn’t make any of them true.
This is like saying you only need to read the newspaper once per week on Sundays because nothing of importance happens in the interim.
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The Presidential Daily Brief exists for three reasons:
[ol]
[li]To provide the President with daily updates on the status of events, both domestic and foreign, which may have a signifcant impact on the national security posture and his or her options to address security issues[/li][li]Ensure that the intelligence apparatus is regularly summarizing information for executive review, and[/li][li]Provide the President for a forum for immediate feedback in the form of further questions or requests.[/li][/ol]
The President may chose to do what they want with the briefing, of course; he or she is the chief executive and can decide what priority they wish to place on various aspects of leading the nation. However, a intelligent person would recognize that while they may be well informed about world events in general they will not be informed about intelligence or special activity operations which are classified and would seek the opportunity to become better informed, both by receiving intelligence briefings and asking pointed questions that invite more sharing of information so as to make informed decisions, and to continue doing so until he is sufficiently informed to make credible decisions about the level of detail and frequency of briefings he needs. And it is not sufficient to be informed of the development and background of an issue while a crisis is ongoing; in order to make informed, intelligent decisions, you need to have a basis of knowledge in the issue at hand.
Donald Trump is not a intelligent person. Despite his protestations that he is “like, a smart person,” (something I have almost never heard an actually intelligent person say), his decisions seem to be remarkably ill-informed, such as his decision in 2006 to start a mortgage services company in 2006, or his 1984 purchase of the New Jersey Generals, a United States Football League team that was disbanded when the entire USFL franchise collapsed in 1985. And these are not cherry-picked selections of an otherwise massively successful business portfolio; Trump fails and fails and fails, from an airline to a line of steaks sold through “The Sharper Image” stores (which no longer even have a physical presence for you to waste time in their stores between flights of the cancelled Trump Airlines), and of course Trump University. Donald Trump went broke running a casino, a business which is structured by its very nature to statistically take in more revenue than it pays out in winnings!
Donald Trump is smart in the same way that reflux of bile is refreshing, and curiously enough, the latter usually follows exposure to the former. He can chose to ignore intelligence briefings, the concerns of his State Department experts on international relations, or indeed, the massive perception and integrity problems he is creating by appointing advisors and agency heads from industry or think tanks who have blatant conflicts of interest. This is not normal, ethical, or good for the security and well-being of the nation.
Ronald Reagan–the president who either wasn’t aware, or lied about complicity in an illegal intelligence and international arms dealing operation that was overseen by members at the highest level of his administration–is not the high bar to be set here in terms of the degree of frequency or informedness that a chief executive needs to have.
Stranger
The people who prepare and present the PDB are his intelligence advisors. If he doesn’t like what he is getting, he should tell them how to fix it. That’s what each President does.
But you can’t have it both ways: Trump says he doesn’t want the PDB every day, but you’re claiming he gets it every day. A PDB is the most highly classified document in the United States. It isn’t simply left on the President’s desk, and maybe he picks it up and leafs through it between meetings. His briefing team would deliver it to him (however he wants it) and then remove it when they leave. If you notice, Trump keeps a lot of shit on his desk at Trump Towers. Look at any picture. The idea of the PDB just being placed on his desk among the magazines with his picture on them, random empty boxes, half-eaten taco salads, and whatever else, is just not plausible in the slightest.
I can’t prove he doesn’t receive them. But being as he’s currently having his competence questioned over his decision to not get daily briefings in person, if he was getting those daily briefings in writing you’d expect him to say so. It would pretty much close down the issue.
Instead he defended his decision by saying he would get briefings if something new came up and saying that Pence gets daily briefings. Neither of those statements would be relevant if Trump was getting written daily briefings.
I’m wondering if anyone has explained to him what a nuclear triad is. He’s going to be in charge of one in five weeks.
It’s a three-legged thing you put a nuclear on, right?
Jesus Christ, don’t say things like that without a proceeding warning. I almost dropped my whiskey.
Hopefully he’ll just lose the nuclear launch approval codes in one of his curiously voluminous and apparently off-the-rack suits. Or maybe he’ll lose it in a game of Omaha Hi-Low with Vladimir Putin, Angela Merkel, and Theresa May. I’m rooting for Merkel to play the wheel and take both the high and the low.
It is a frightening prospect when the leader of a G8 nation you would trust most is from Germany.
Stranger
No, a frightening prospect is when you’re more worried about the President of the United States getting access to nuclear weapons than you are the President of Iran.
Not worried about nukes. He needs someone to confirm a launch order. OTH he has soon to e unfettered access to the most thorough snooping apparatus in history under his control.
The time to worry about government officials seeing your dick pics was fifteen years ago when Congress authorized the most sweeping domestic surveillance programs ever enacted in law under the most flimsy of pretenses. That ship has sailed like the mighty unsinkable HMS Titanic with our liberties and Constitutional protections aboard.
The “someone to confirm a launch order” would be any of the Cabinet secretaries or government agency leaders confirmed by the Senate. This is generally assumed to be the Secretary of Defense–Trump’s selection for which is nicknamed ‘Mad Dog’, and yet, is still one of the most rational choices made in stocking his advisory cabinet–but in his or her absence could be any other Congressionally vetted Cabinet secretary or government official, who, it should be noted, are not approving the order but simply confirming that the order does in fact come from the President of the United States who is making the order of free will and in sound mind and body. The President could, in theory, wake up one morning and give the order to launch a nuclear attack on, say, the Republic of Mauritius, and there is actually no person with the legal authority to belay or hold the order once it has been confirmed.
Stranger
You are making it sound like he could (to paraphrase Jordan Klepper) nuke a city in Oregon cause someone disliked a FB comment he made?
Except for the fact that it would be essentially impossible to launch an ICBM based in the Continental United States to hit a site in Oregon, that is basically true. One would hope that all of his advisors and agency heads would view such an order as intrinsically demonstrating a lack of legal competence to issue a valid launch order, but then the fundamental lack of integrity or good sense didn’t prevent slightly less than half the voters from selecting him and largely continuing to back his decisions despite how they’ve already effected economic conditions and foreign relations before he has even been inaugurated. So, I’m not betting on any of the norms of presidential behavior or typical safeguards to stop Trump from rampaging like a tiny-fisted Orange Hulk with a Twitter feed and deeply impotent inner ego to compensate for.
Stranger
Look at the bright side. He has already asked just how the hell has the F35 become so expensive, a question neither of the previous two Prez’s dared ask.
Maybe not reading his security briefs has an advantage. 
Well, he is right and quite obviously so. He is sufficiently like a smart person for millions of people to mistake him for one.
Especially since the US is selling a large number of these exceptionally expensive items to allies. Who may now have questions about the final bill, since the US president has told them that they are vastly overpaying for the ones they have on order.
I am told Richard Nixon did not take his briefings and would in fact return the written ones unopened. Despite his well-known faults, Nixon is normally considered to have been on top of foreign policy. I would assume he had his own sources that he trusted more.
Let’s not allow ignorance of the program to allow such statements to go unchallenged. Foreign participants paid a fixed amount for R&D, and are buying F-35s at fixed prices that are in the neighborhood of $95 million a copy. (Other, 4th generation aircraft cost in the general range of $80 million a copy.) The procurement prices are going down, not up. Your assertion that allies “have questions about the final bill” implies that their costs are going up, to which there is no evidence that it is. Again, just because Trump is totally ignorant of facts should not be justification for people to fan the ignorance he spouts into manufactured crises like you are proposing. Because, aside from Canada, and maybe you want to count the UK changing the mix of their orders, nobody is pulling out of the F-35 program, and several countries are buying in. For example, South Korea, Israel, and Japan.
I believe at certain points, his main foreign policy adviser was Mr. Daniels. First name, Jack.
I believe I must ask you to point out where I have asserted that allies have already issued questions about the final bill? Or implied that costs are going up? Or that buyers would already have had time to push bills about changing their orders through their respective parliaments?
English is not your native language, I am guessing? I remember how hard it was to learn.