“Critics” of President Donald Trump are deeply worried that he is spending nearly 60 percent of his work days in so-called “executive time”—AKA watching cable news and tweeting—as a recently leaked White House schedule revealed. Fox News doesn’t see what all the fuss is about.
On Monday evening, Fox’s media analyst Howard Kurtz told host Martha MacCallum that this “heat-seeking missile of a leak” is “solely designed to embarrass Donald Trump,” not allowing for the possibility that whoever made the schedule public may have genuine concerns about the way the president is spending his time.
“To me and to the average American, I think, basically who cares how he runs his schedule as long as he gets things done,” Kurtz added. How can Trump be “not doing much of anything” and simultaneously “wreaking havoc on America with his terrible agenda and threatening world civilization,” he asked. “You can’t have it both ways.”
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“What kind of struck me when I read it,” MacCallum said, “is that it sounds a lot like work. I mean, he’s reading the papers. He does watch a lot of television, he admits that. He watches tons of news, he watches probably every cable news channel during the day, and you can make what you want of that.”
“But speaking to members of Congress, reacting to policy, calling people, to me it sounds like he’s sitting in the residence doing similar work to what he might be doing in the Oval Office,” she continued. “I think a lot of Americans sort of understand that the lifestyle has kind of changed in the world in terms of where people do their work.”
Of course, it’s not so much where Trump is “working” as what he’s doing that has caused alarm.
But if Trump needs “time to think,” then Kurtz said he should have it.
And though MacCallum said the president “admits” to watching a lot of cable news, he seems to do so either reluctantly or inadvertently. Speaking to The New York Times last week, Trump explained, “I get up early in the morning and I turn on television. And I do. But I don’t turn it on very much because I really read the papers much more than I watch the television, O.K.?”
