Sarah Sanders defends Trump: He reads ‘more than anybody I know’

Former White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders defended President Trump after an anonymous author who served in his administration claimed in a new book that officials had to slim down their briefing materials to a single key point in order to make the information easier for the president to understand.

In excerpts of “A Warning” that were published by Business Insider, the author wrote that some officials in the Trump administration were instructed to reduce briefing materials in presentations because Trump “couldn’t digest too many slides.”

Sanders said during an appearance on a Fox News panel on Sunday that she thinks the book’s author, who served as a senior official in the Trump administration, is a “total coward” and added that she found the book to be “despicable.”

She went on to say that the book reads as being from somebody who is not close to Trump, agreeing with points made by fellow former press secretary Sean Spicer, who had also joined Sanders on the panel.

“It doesn’t read to me like somebody that’s spent real time with the president. You can’t spend the kind of time with him and have that takeaway,” Sanders said.

When pressed by Fox News’s Steve Hilton about how she would describe Trump and his leadership style, Sanders said “he’s very decisive” and added that’s one of the perceptions she doesn’t believe readers will get from the book. 

“I think it’s the opposite of how they lay it out. He takes information from a number of people, very quickly processes it, makes a decision and moves forward,” she said. “I mean, I’ve watched this process play out so many times, sat in hundreds of meetings with the president, and the idea that he can only take in one or two bullets is absurd.”

Hilton then goes on to bring up claims that the president “doesn’t read briefings,” to which Sanders exclaims: “He reads more than anybody I know.”   

“Every single foreign trip we actually would laugh about the fact he has boxes upon boxes, file boxes where he reads for hours,” she said. “The rest of us want to take a break, we want to sleep, the president works the entire time.” 

The author behind the new book, which was published earlier this month, is the same anonymous official who wrote an op-ed last year in The New York Times. It has not been confirmed whether the person still works in the administration.