In March, Reuters reported that briefers had strategically placed the president’s name in as many paragraphs of briefing documents as possible so as to attract his fickle attention. In September, the Associated Press reported that top aides had decided the president needed a crash course on America’s role in the world and arranged a 90-minute, map-and-chart heavy lecture at the Pentagon. And amid the hype over Wolff’s book, MSNBC host Joe Scarborough wrote a column Friday saying that in September 2015, he confronted Trump over poor debate performances, saying, “Can you read?” Met with silence, Scarborough pressed again: “I’m serious, Donald. Do you read? If someone wrote you a one-page paper on a policy, could you read it?” Trump replied by brandishing a Bible from his mother and saying he read it all the time—probably a self-aware joke, given Trump’s proud impiety and displayed ignorance of the Bible.

The Scarborough anecdote is the strangest of these. This is not only because Scarborough held on to the story for nearly a year and a half, and continued to hype Trump’s candidacy on air and advise him privately. (As James Fallows notes, the real scandal of the Wolff book is that so many people have such grave misgivings about Trump but have kept their heads down.) It is also unfortunate because Trump is clearly, in strictly literal terms, literate. He displays his basic grasp of the language—if in sloppy, often typo-ridden ways—on Twitter on a roughly daily basis. Such stories, by dint of their hyperbole, offer a bit of a distraction from how serious the problem is.

Meanwhile, Trump’s defenders could fall back on semi-plausible excuses, such as arguing that his information consumption was typical of the business world from which he had come. The AP reported that Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Secretary of Defense James Mattis used charts and maps in the briefing on America’s role because that was “a way the businessman-turned-politician would appreciate.”

There was some precedent for this. Bill Clinton famously loved long briefings, to the point that aides became frustrated with his tendency to focus too much attention on minutiae and lose the big picture. But although Barack Obama also liked briefings on the longer side—three-to-six page policy papers, and lengthy president’s daily brief—he asked aides to present memos demanding a decision to him with his options distilled in checkboxes at the end.

George W. Bush, who came from a business background—he attended Harvard Business School, and would eventually borrow biz-school jargon for the title of his memoir Decision Points—was closer still to Trump’s approach. Bush wanted an oral briefing to accompany the written PDB, and his PDB was slimmed down to no more than 10 pages, according to Philip Shenon. In another augur of Trump, Ron Suskind reported that aides observed that whatever was in the final verbal briefing Bush received usually became his view.