Trump Instructed His Public Presidential Schedule Be Replaced With Summary: ‘Many Calls and Many Meetings’

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Former President Donald Trump only realized a few weeks before leaving office that his schedule as president was made public by the White House communications office, something he had changed.

Judd Deere, a former White House deputy press secretary, revealed the details of Trump discovering his schedule was public during a deposit with the House Jan. 6 committee, a transcript of which was made public on Tuesday.

“Every evening we prepared and released a daily guidance for the following day of the President’s public schedule,” Deere told the committee.

“Beginning sometime around mid to late December, the President discovered that, for the first time, my understanding, that we released a public schedule of his to the public. He wanted to change the way we did that,” Deere added.

“And so what became the new version of the public schedule was basically a couple of sentences about what his day would consist of rather than specific times and titles of events in an outline form,” he added, explaining Trump had told his staff to just write he had “many calls and many meetings” any given day.

Insider’s Brent Griffiths noted the significance of Deere’s testimony. “Deere’s testimony addressed one of the longest-running story lines of the Trump White House: how to account for the president’s schedule.”

Griffiths recalled:

Trump and his allies went on the defensive in 2019 when an aide leaked to Axios nearly every day of the president’s private schedule over a three-month period. The private releases showed that Trump had spent nearly 60% of his time in unstructured “Executive Time” windows.