A former aide for President Donald Trump isn’t buying Karoline Leavitt’s claim about his reading habits.
Miles Taylor, a former Homeland Security official who wrote about a “quiet resistance” within the first Trump administration, dunked on the White House press secretary’s eyebrow-raising claim about the 79-year-old president’s news consumption.
Leavitt, 28, heaped praise on Trump during a Turning Point USA event in Washington, D.C., on Thursday night.
“So my advice would be to encourage everyone in this room to try to be the most well-read person in every room that you’re in,” she told students at George Washington University. “That was a piece of advice one of my predecessors, Dana Perino, gave to me before I took this job. She said, ‘You always want to be the most well-read person in the room.’”
“And I try to be every day, but Donald Trump always is,” she continued. “That man does not miss a story. Let me tell you, he’s always reading the papers and watching the TV. He doesn’t miss anything anyone says in the whole world. I don’t know how he does it and consumes it all. And it’s a lot.”
But Taylor, who was chief of staff at the Department of Homeland Security in Trump 1.0, doesn’t quite remember Trump’s reading habits the same way.
“I remember the first piece of advice I got on briefing President Trump in 2017: He doesn’t read,” he wrote in an X post on Friday. “Bring pictures. Only try to impress ONE thing on him. And if there has to be words, single page only.”
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Previous reporting backs Taylor’s remarks. In 2017, sources in the National Security Council told The New York Times that staffers had been instructed to keep papers to a single page and pump it with graphics and maps.
Trump himself has said as much about his own reading habits. The president told Axios in 2017 that he likes his briefings short—ideally, just one page.
“I like bullets or I like as little as possible. I don’t need, you know, 200-page reports on something that can be handled on a page. That I can tell you,” he said.
Taylor isn’t the only official to say that Trump isn’t a big reader.
Rex Tillerson, Trump’s former secretary of state, said in 2018 that he found it “challenging” to transition from his role as ExxonMobil CEO to work for a man “who is pretty undisciplined, doesn’t like to read, doesn’t read briefing reports, doesn’t like to get into the details of a lot of things.”
“When the president would say, ‘Here’s what I want to do and here’s how I want to do it.’ And I’d have to say to him, ‘Well Mr. President, I understand what you want to do, but you can’t do it that way. It violates the law. It violates treaty,’” Tillerson recalled.
“He got really frustrated,” he went on. “I think he grew tired of me being the guy every day that told him you can’t do that and let’s talk about what we can do.”
Gary Cohn, Trump’s former economic adviser, previously described the president as “an idiot surrounded by clowns.”
“Trump won’t read anything—not one-page memos, not the brief policy papers; nothing,” he said in an email published in Fire and Fury, a book by Trump biographer and Inside Trump’s Head podcast co-host Michael Wolff.
