He had tried to be concise from the get-go, boiling the material down to three pages, but McMaster and his team almost immediately realized the president wasn’t reading any of the briefing books, or even the concise three-page version. Staff secretary Rob Porter would synthesize the memos in a one-page cover letter, written in prose the president might find easier to digest. As one of Trump’s confidants said, “I call the president the two-minute man.