President Donald Trump’s personal secretary, Madeleine Westerhout, has launched a blistering attack on the person who leaked the president’s schedules and has leaped to the defense of her boss after they revealed that in the past three months, he spent 60 percent of his time in “Executive Time.”
The term “Executive Time” is used by the president’s executive staff as a term to describe the unstructured time when the president can make phone calls, use Twitter, send emails, and watch the news, according to the Daily Mail .
Responding to the leaked schedule, which first appeared on Axios , Westerhout, who is 28 and also holds the title of Director of Oval Office Operations, took to Twitter to vent her anger.
White House press secretary Sarah Sanders also launched a strong defense of her boss, telling the media that Trump’s executive time usually consisted of “scheduled meetings, events, and calls.”
When pressed, she did, however, admit that “there is time to allow for a more creative environment that has helped make him the most productive President in modern history.”
“President Trump has a different leadership style than his predecessors and the results speak for themselves,” Sanders defiantly said.
Read every page of Trump’s “Executive Time”-filled leaked private schedules obtained by @alexi and @jonathanvswan . https://t.co/mU6oPYWdxv
— Axios (@axios) February 3, 2019
According to the leaked schedules, President Trump rises early each morning, but the first five hours of his schedule are always spent in “Executive Time.” They also showed that the president was never in the Oval Office between the hours of 8 a.m. and 11 a.m., something which a number of different sources confirmed to Axios .
His first meeting will always be at either 11 a.m. or 11:30 a.m. and this will more often than not be either an intelligence briefing or a private session with his chief of staff.
According to Axios’ mathematics, Trump spent 297 hours in “Executive Time” in the three months following the midterms. This compares to 77 hours of scheduled meetings and 51 hours of other private events.
However, Axios did advise that this didn’t necessarily mean that all of this executive time was spent on downtime. Trump’s presidential style is very different to his predecessors and many of these meetings and commitments are undertaken at the spur of the moment. His staff and those around him are always at pains to emphasize his preference from a fluid and creative approach to his work. Whis detractors suggests this is unprofessional, his supporters argue it helps the President to work effectively and clearly develop his policy positions.
As one source explained to Axios , “He’s always calling people, talking to people. He’s always up to something; it’s just not what you would consider typical structure.”