MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough called out President Donald Trump for attacking his predecessor as lazy, while spending most of his own days in the White House watching TV and chatting with friends.
A White House leak showed the president spent hours each day in unstructured “executive time,” with few public events and occasional, brief meetings with aides and advisers.
“There are seniors playing shuffleboard in Boca retirement communities who work more than the president of the United States right now,” Scarborough said.
MSNBC analyst John Heilemann said it reminded him of his own senior year of college, and he said Trump’s schedule was astonishing.
“There’s never been a president before who had any executive time,” Heilemann said. “It’s not to say presidents don’t occasionally take a break or watch a basketball game on television or play golf. All presidents have taken some time off, you need that for your mental health. But the notion of large chunks of unstructured, unaccountable time in the most important, high pressured job in the entire world is unprecedented and, I think, just frankly unfathomable.”
MSNBC contributor Elise Jordan, a White House and State Department aide during the George W. Bush administration, said the leaked schedule showed how much Trump’s staffers dislike working for him.
“Wow, they really hate their boss,” Jordan said. “I cannot believe this much private information in such great detail was leaked to a press outlet from a staffer who clearly thinks they work for a huge slacker.”
Scarborough pointed out that Trump spent years criticizing former President Barack Obama as lazy.
“The hypocrisy, of course, always extraordinary because Donald Trump always criticized Barack Obama for not working hard enough,” Scarborough said. “He criticized him for golfing too much, he criticized him and always said, if I’m president of the United States, I’m going to be working 24 hours a day, I’m never going to be golfing, I’ll never leave the White House, I’ll be in the Oval Office nonstop.”
“Barack Obama got criticized for not having as long of workdays as, say, Bill Clinton,” he added. “But again, he seems like the marathon man compared again to Donald Trump. This is just absolutely pathetic.”