White House Aides Are Claiming Trump ‘Doesn’t Get’ Time Zones
Anyone who’s travelled a lot knows the trouble with time zones. You might want to call your friends at home, and then you realize it’s 3 a.m. where they live and they probably wouldn’t be happy to hear from you at that precise moment. Time zones can be admittedly tricky, but most people quickly figure out how they work. But most people are not Donald Trump, who, according to Politico, has to be repeatedly reminded that they exist.
In the Politico piece, an unnamed former Trump National Security Council official said, “[Trump] wasn’t great with recognizing that the leader of a country might be 80 or 85 years old and isn’t going to be awake or in the right place at 10:30 or 11 p.m. their time.”
A diplomatic source also said that Trump’s aides had to explain time zones to the President on “a constant basis.”
According to Sarah Huckabee Sanders, “Foreign leaders appreciate that the President is willing to take their calls day and night.” Though that’s well and good, she doesn’t address Trump attempting to call foreign leaders in the middle of their night.
A White House official said that Trump’s background as an international businessman means he does indeed know how time zones work, but he just doesn’t care.
“He’s the president of the United States. He’s not stopping to add up [time differences]. I don’t think anybody would expect him or Obama or Bush or Clinton or anybody to do that. That’s the whole reason you have a staff to say, ‘Yes, we’ll set it up,’ and then they find a time that makes most sense.”
Time zones are a natural outgrowth of “solar time,” based on the sun’s position in the sky. Though a world-wide standard of time zones was proposed back in the 1800s, the last country to adopt the standard was Nepal in 1986. There are six time zones in the United States, while Russia has the most contiguous time zones with 11.
Now you probably know more about time zones than our president.
