This article is more than 1 year old

This article is more than 1 year old

What does Donald Trump do with his time? The mystery was at least partially solved on Sunday, with an extensive leak of his private schedule.

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According to the website Axios, since 7 November, the day after the midterm elections, the president has spent almost 300 hours in relatively unstructured “executive time” and only 77 hours in scheduled meetings covering policy planning, legislative strategy and video recordings.

According to Axios, the “unusually voluminous leak” from an unnamed White House source gives unprecedented visibility into how Trump spends his days.

The schedules show Trump spends around 60% of each day in “executive time”, a concept introduced by his former chief of staff John Kelly because the president detests being locked into a regular schedule.

In January 2018, a similar leak to the same publication introduced “executive time” to an incredulous world. It said Trump often started his official duties around 11am, and held far fewer meetings than in the early days of his presidency.

Executive time, the publication asserted then, “almost always means TV and Twitter time alone in the residence”.

This time round, a White House staffer said Trump was “always calling people, talking to people. He’s always up to something; it’s just not what you would consider typical structure.”

The latest leak appears to place Trump, an early riser, in executive time for the first five hours of any day, before he gets to the Oval Office.

He reportedly spends his mornings “in the residence, watching TV, reading the papers, and responding to what he sees and reads by phoning aides, members of Congress, friends, administration officials and informal advisers”.

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His first meeting, generally around 11am or 11.30am, is often an intelligence briefing or a 30-minute meeting with the acting chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney.

On Sunday, when the Axios story broke, Trump was finishing up a round of golf with Mulvaney at his golf club in Jupiter, Florida.

The president did not immediately tweet a response, preferring to eulogise his Saturday golf partners, the multiple major winners Jack Nicklaus and Tiger Woods. He told CBS he planned to watch the Super Bowl at his Mar-a-Lago resort.

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The White House press secretary, Sarah Sanders, said in a statement to Axios: “President Trump has a different leadership style than his predecessors and the results speak for themselves.”

Sanders also said that while Trump spends “much of his average day in scheduled meetings, events and calls, there is time to allow for a more creative environment that has helped make him the most productive president in modern history.”

On some days, Axios reported, executive time comfortably exceeds scheduled time. On 18 January, for instance, Trump had one hour of scheduled meetings with Mulvaney and the treasury secretary, Steve Mnuchin, and seven hours of executive time. On 7 November, the day after Democrats regained the House in the midterms, Trump also had just 30 minutes of scheduled meetings.

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“Executive time” does not necessarily preclude meetings, Axios said, since they may be organised on the spur of the moment and include calls with heads of state, political meetings and meetings with counsel in the White House residence.

After the 2018 leak, spokesman Hogan Gidley told reporters that “to describe [Trump’s] work ethic as anything other than yeomanlike is ridiculous, and everyone knows it.”

Historian Evan Thomas told the Guardian then that Richard Nixon, who “couldn’t sleep and was an insomniac”, used to have “staff time” every afternoon, in order to take naps. Dwight Eisenhower built in White House nap time too, Thomas said.

David Karol of the University of Maryland said: “If [Ronald] Reagan was taking a nap or watching an old movie, people didn’t know. His door was closed, he was in the Oval Office, he was in the residence.

“But with Trump because he’s tweeting and his tweets in many cases are clearly inspired by some Fox News segment only 10 minutes ago, it’s pretty obvious what he’s spending his time doing, at least in the early part of the day.”