Trump reportedly got bored during one of his first classified briefings on Afghanistan and ordered milkshakes in the middle of it
President Donald Trump interrupted a classified intelligence briefing on Afghanistan in the early months of his presidency to order milkshakes, per Politico.
Trump has garnered a reputation as a president who routinely ignores intelligence briefings, and reportedly prefers visuals over written briefings.
This same disinterest is viewed as a major contributor to Trump's haphazard response to the coronavirus pandemic.
President Donald Trump interrupted one of the earliest classified briefings of his presidency to ask top intelligence officials if they would like a milkshake, according to a new report from Politico.
"Does anyone want a malt?" Trump reportedly said during the briefing, calling a waiter into the room. "We have the best malts, you have to try them."
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The highly classified briefing, which focused on Afghanistan, took place at Trump's New Jersey golf club several months into his presidency, according to Politico.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.
Trump has garnered a reputation as a president who has no patience for intelligence briefings. The president reportedly doesn't read the written intelligence reports he's given on a daily basis, and prefers to look at visuals.
The president faced criticism over the summer after The New York Times reported that US intelligence officials concluded Russia was paying bounties to Taliban-linked Afghan militants to kill US troops, and the Trump administration hadn't taken any known actions in response. The White House initially said Trump was never briefed on the intelligence, though multiple reports suggested otherwise.
In a July interview with Axios, Trump said he had not confronted Russian President Vladimir Putin over the intelligence assessment in a number of phone conversations.
The president's apparent disinterest in intelligence has also been pointed to as a major factor in his disastrous response to the coronavirus pandemic. Intelligence officials repeatedly warned Trump of the threat of COVID-19 in the early months of 2020, but he ignored them and downplayed the virus to the US public.
"The president didn't want to hear it," Trump's former national security adviser John Bolton told Insider political correspondent Sonam Sheth in August. "He didn't want to hear bad news about his friend Xi Jinping -- he didn't want to hear about the Chinese cover-up about what was actually happening with the virus in China."
Bolton said that Trump "didn't want to hear that this disease could be so threatening that it could impair the US economy significantly and therefore his ticket to reelection."
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