How many more hours than Donald Trump do you work?

In news that will shock precisely no one, it has been revealed that Donald Trump is not the biggest fan of conventional work.

Back in January, Axios obtained Donald Trump’s schedule, which showed that he was doing less work than in the early days of his tenure at the White House.  Now, nine months on, new documents given to Politico show that he’s managed to whittle it down even further.

It paints a picture of a president whose first meeting of the day is never any earlier than 11:30am and who insists on demanding large blocks of “executive time”: that is, unstructured time when he can do whatever the hell he wants which, we can safely assume, would be watching Fox News, doing a bit of tweeting and ringing up friends to complain about how everyone is mean to him.

According to the documents acquired by Politco, last Tuesday saw Trump have an astonishing 9 hours of ‘executive time’ (one senior Obama aide said that 9 hours would constitute a day off for the former president), while other days had regular blocks lasting up to two hours and 45 minutes. On average, he’d be scheduled to do only around three hours’ work a day.

For the sake of fairness it is worth mentioning that during the week that Politico looked at, several calls to foreign leaders were made ‘off the books’, while, according to White House insiders, ad hoc policy meetings were sometimes called, usually spurred by a thought Trump had had - inevitably sparked by seeing something on TV. Equally however, it’s also worth mentioning that he is the president of the United States of America and the occasional late night phone call kinda comes with the territory, as does impromptu meetings and briefings and we have absolutely zero sympathy here.

All that aside, it’s worth noting that it was also a rare week where he didn’t play golf which, at the time of press, currently stands at 149 days out of 647 days in office - or 1 day out of every 4.3 days. For comparison, his predecessor, often criticised by Trump for being on the course, played every 8.7 days (333 rounds in 2920 days).

Of course, two thoughts occur. Firstly, if you could literally do whatever you liked, you’d probably take it easy as well wouldn’t you? Well, if you had no conscience about doing the best job you could, anyway. And, secondly, the fact that Trump isn’t bothering to do the ‘best’ job he can is really, probably, in everyone’s interests isn’t it?

Don’t worry about it Donald, have that lie-in. Play that extra round of golf. Don’t worry about it, take it easy. You deserve it.

*Quiz results based on Politico’s report and the assumption that Trump therefore works roughly 3-4 hours on average, 7 days per week (7 days because he’s the president and you’d hope he was). We accept that some days may be busier. And some days, where he’s having a ‘Twitter moment’, will be even less.

(Images: Getty)