Here's what it's like to work for Trump, according to 2 former campaign staffers
- Corey Lewandowski, Trump's former campaign manager, and Jason Miller, who worked as a senior communications advisor on the campaign, spoke at an event in London on Thursday.
- The pair talked about what it was like to work with the President.
- Trump is hard working, expects a lot from those around him, makes decisions on the fly, and challenges conventional thinking, they said.
LONDON - What's it really like to work for President Donald Trump?
From the outside, it can seem like a thankless task that will end in being fired sooner or later. But the President is actually a hard worker who challenges those around him to re-think status quo ideas, according to Corey Lewandowski, Trump's former campaign manager, and Jason Miller, who worked as a senior communications advisor on the campaign.
"He's the single hardest working individual I've ever met," Lewandowski told the Wall Street Journal's CEO Council event in London on Thursday.
"Donald Trump wakes up at 4.30 a.m., 5 a.m. every day and he finishes at 11 p.m. And he repeats that cycle every single day."
As a result, Lewandowski said, the President expects a lot from his staff.
"What he expects, demands, and deserves is perfection because that's what he does every single day. I can tell you this because I spent almost two years every day with him, thousands of hours."
In December, the New York Times reported that Trump spends between four and eight hours a day watching television news.
'Decisions were made wherever he is'
While Trump may have high expectations, he is not entirely results-driven, according to Miller.
"As demanding and a perfectionist as he is, you don't have to be right 100% of the time with him," Miller said. "You need to be kind of close to 100%... but as long as the effort is there, as long as there's attention to detail, as long as it's clear you have his best interests at heart, you don't have to be perfect all the time."
"The reason I flew around with him all the time on what we called Trump Force One - the 757 - which is not the traditional model of a campaign manager, was because decisions were being made in real time and it wasn't, 'lets wait till we land the plane and call Corey in 30 minutes.'"
"The decisions were made wherever he is. You have to be there when he's making decisions if you want your input to be known."
The rate of decision making is also high when you're around Trump. Lewandowski said: "We would go from having a problem on the campaign trail, and there were many, solving that with the Twitter account, to creating a new problem with the Twitter account in 15 minutes. That was the cycle."
Miller, who appeared alongside Lewandowski at the event, said Trump also challenges the thinking of people around him "in a way that no other political leader I've ever worked with has."
"When you're helping President Trump with a decision you need to always be thinking through the lens of: is this the traditional way of doing this? Is this what got us to the current mess? Is the smarter strategy to do something completely counter-intuitive to take things in a different direction?" Miller said. "Working with President Trump makes you think."