Donald Trump Reportedly Requests Pictures And 'Killer Graphics' For Intel Briefings

Since before he entered office, it was established that President Donald Trump prefers visuals and bullet points over lengthy, written intel briefings. In February it was reported that President Trump preferred the briefings to be, well, brief — no more than a page in length and accompanied by maps. However, a new report finds that President Trump requested “killer graphics” be included as well.

According to a Monday report from the Washington Post, “Trump likes to pore over visuals — maps, charts, pictures and videos, as well as ‘killer graphics,’ as CIA Director Mike Pompeo phrased it.” Pompeo told the Post that he also prefers brevity and prefers to “get to the core of the issue quickly.”

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According to Pompeo, President Trump also prefers conversational briefings rather than simply listening to intelligence officials deliver confidential information. Pompeo, speaking highly of the president’s reception of such briefings, called them “very oral, interactive” discussions.

“He always asks hard questions, which I think is the sign of a good intelligence consumer,” Pompeo added. “He’ll challenge analytic lines that we’ll present, which is again completely appropriate. . . . It is frequently the case that we’ll find that we need to go back and do more work to develop something, to round something out.”

The report also noted President Trump seemingly failed to understand the scope of his role in dealing with international affairs before entering office. Director of national intelligence Daniel Coats told the Post, “A president who I think came into the office thinking he would focus on domestic issues — ‘make America great again’ — has learned that you inherit the world and its problems when you’re president of the United States.”

He said President Trump once entered a briefing and asked what “bad news” the morning had brought with it. Coats added, “You can see the weight of the burden on the shoulders of the president.”

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Aides to the president point to his career as a real estate mogul who looked to blueprints and renderings to visualize future properties as an explanation for his requests. However, it seems unlikely that matters of top secret intelligence would be adequately explained on a one-sheet.

“I like bullets or I like as little as possible,” Trump told Axios in January before his inauguration. “I don’t need, you know, 200-page reports on something that can be handled on a page. That I can tell you.”

“Pompeo and Coats are doing their best to give him the most accurate daily briefing, but my sense is in the rank-and-file, they are very worried about how do you deal with him and about sharing with him sensitive material,” Mark Lowenthal, a former assistant director of the CIA and the president of the Intelligence and Security Academy, told the Post. “This is the result of his behavior, both during the campaign and that visit to the CIA, which was a disaster, and now the whole Russia briefing.”

Of Trump’s preferred method of taking in sensitive information, Pompeo said, “That’s our task, right? To deliver the material in a way that he can best understand the information we’re trying to communicate.”