Aides and staffers are reportedly leaking about Trump out of genuine alarm

Trump blames leaks on &quot;Obama people&quot;

(Image credit: Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

published 8 February 2017

The Trump White House is so leaky that the constant drip of insider information has become a story and matter of speculation in itself. All presidential administrations leak, usually when one aide or staffer wants to harm a rival or expose an unwanted policy, or an administration wants to spread some news or gossip through backchannels. But "Trump's two-week-old administration has a third category: leaks from White House and agency officials alarmed by the president's conduct," report Huffington Post White House reporters Christina Wilkie and S.V. Date.

Both reporters say they have been approached with material from "individuals in executive agencies and in the White House itself" who "spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of losing their jobs." Some of the leaks Wilkie and Date published Tuesday night include a 3 a.m. phone call Trump reportedly made to his national security adviser, Michael Flynn, to ask if a strong or weak dollar is better for the economy. (Flynn "told Trump he didn't know, that it wasn't his area of expertise, that, perhaps, Trump should ask an economist instead," The Huffington Post reports.) Then there are these:

The commander in chief doesn't like to read long [briefing] memos, a White House aide who asked to remain unnamed told The Huffington Post. So preferably they must be no more than a single page. They must have bullet points but not more than nine per page. Small things can provide him great joy or generate intense irritation. Trump told The New York Times that he's fascinated with the phone system inside the White House. At the same time, he's registered a complaint about the hand towels aboard Air Force One, the White House aide said, because they are not soft enough. [The Huffington Post]

"I've been in this town for 26 years; I have never seen anything like this," Eliot Cohen, a senior State Department and National Security Council official in the George W. Bush administration, told The Huffington Post. "I genuinely do not think this is a mentally healthy president." Randy Evans, a Republican National Committee member, predicts the leaks won't last. "If the administration gets serious about leaks, they'll do the blue-dye test and find them," he said, describing a method where you feed discrete stories to different staffers and see which ones show up in print. You can read more at The Huffington Post.

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Peter has worked as a news and culture writer and editor at The Week since the site's launch in 2008. He covers politics, world affairs, religion and cultural currents. His journalism career began as a copy editor at a financial newswire and has included editorial positions at The New York Times Magazine, Facts on File, and Oregon State University.