The White House made the combative move of exclusively granting The New York Post a trove of internal Oval Office schedules Monday in a strategic rebuttal of last week’s New York Times report claiming that President Donald Trump is slowing down.
After the Times published a piece citing “signs of fatigue” in Trump’s public agenda, aides turned over ten days of private logs covering mid-November – days that, by their telling, show a president clocking up to 12 hours and roughly 50-hour working weeks. It is a rare release of what officials describe as “private narrative” documents.
The leaked logs, published Tuesday, span the exact window before and during publication of the Times report, which charted a shift towards later starts and shorter advertised days compared with 2017. The new White House counter-narrative reads like a curated diary: dozens of calls and meetings crammed into days bookended by late dinners, foreign policy briefings and media interviews.
Missing, aides note, are the after-hours phone calls and Truth Social activity.
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt even issued The Post accompanying comment to go with the logs, which the newspaper said was delivered hours after Monday’s White House presser.
“The New York Times cobbled together half-baked data to push a narrative that President Trump, who is clearly sharp as a tack, is somehow unfit to be president, after they covered for Joe Biden’s clear cognitive decline,” Leavitt said, adding: “The truth is President Trump never stops working, and his private schedule, Truth Social posts, and around-the-clock engagement on every issue proves just that.”
The Post’s exclusive comes after Trump initially attacked the Times investigation – slamming its author as “ugly.” The newspaper, however, released a statement saying that it stood by its reporting.
