Today in updates on the alarmingly casual abdication of presidential duties that is currently in progress, The Washington Post reports that Donald Trump no longer reads the President's Daily Brief he receives each morning, and instead requests an oral rundown on "select intelligence issues." The Post's one-sentence explanation for this, um, unconventional approach is perhaps the single strongest argument yet for the development of a standardized sarcasm font.

Reading the traditionally dense intelligence book is not Trump’s preferred "style of learning," according to a person with knowledge of the situation.

The article goes on to note that intelligence officials, painfully aware of the fact that they are fighting a losing battle against the chuckleheads at Fox & Friends, have taken to adding "maps, charts, pictures and videos" to their analyses in an effort to capture and retain the attention of their audience of one. In other words, a top-secret document that synthesizes some of the most sensitive information in the world is being transformed into a glorified version of USA Today. (The Post also reports that Trump sporadically complains that he perceives those who provide the briefing as "talking down to him," a detail that psychology professors will cite from this day forward when teaching the concept of projection to undergraduates.)

Laughing at anecdotes like these is fun and cathartic, if for no other reason than to help us cope with the fact that a man who appears to be in the midst of a precipitous decline is projected to serve as commander-in-chief for at least the next 1,076 days. But the president's unwillingness and/or inability to learn could pose a real danger in the event that, God forbid, something very bad happens and the task of deciding how to respond at a moment's notice depends on his presumed familiarity with the subject matter. Eventually, a rote insistence on reducing everything to a tighter set of bullet points will render the original material meaningless.

The predominance of the oral briefing also raises the question of who delivers said briefing, and how they choose which stories to highlight in the precariously thin time slot they've been allotted. (The Post describes this person as a "veteran intelligence official," and adds that CIA director Mike Pompeo and Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats, among other unnamed White House officials, also usually attend.) This is not necessarily to impute nefarious motives to any particular individual(s), since, as you can probably deduce, I am not privy to any of these conversations. However, if the people charged with telling the president what he needs to know also understand that he is never going to check their work, it's easy to see how the agenda-setters' personal biases and preferred narratives could, in theory, start to influence the process. Imagine waking up every day and having to make, say, War and Peace into an audiobook that can be, at most, four minutes long.

The meetings were often dominated by whatever topic most interested the president that day. Trump would discuss the news of the day or a tweet he sent about North Korea or the border wall—or anything else on his mind, two people familiar with the briefings said.

...

On such days, there would only be a few minutes left—and the briefers would have barely broached the topics they came to discuss, one senior U.S. official said.

It's comforting to know that the giant spaceship that is the United States of America is being piloted by an elderly man who decided to replace his windshield view of what lies ahead with a giant monitor that displays his tweets.