Donald Trump Does Not Sleep?

A Precise and Documented Inventory of the Nocturnal Posting Habits, Daytime Unconsciousness, and Publicly Celebrated Insomnia of the 47th President of the United States

Let us begin with the four hours and forty-eight minutes.

That is the length of the gap, on one night in April of this year, between the President of the United States finishing a stream of posts at 2:45 in the morning and resuming at 7:33. We know this with precision, to the minute, not because anyone in the White House disclosed it but because the man broadcasts a timestamped public record of every moment he is conscious, and the only way to determine when the leader of the free world is asleep is to observe the intervals during which he is not typing.

This is a genuinely novel development in the history of the office. There is no equivalent record for any previous president. We do not know what hours Eisenhower kept. We know, to the minute, when this one stopped.

The arithmetic is where it becomes a subject rather than an anecdote. The Daily Beast went through a full month of it and found that in the whole of April there were five days on which he could possibly have had a full night’s sleep. Five. Out of thirty. He posted 565 times that month, which is roughly eighteen times a day, against 250 in the equivalent month of his first term, meaning the output has more than doubled while the man has aged eight years, which is not the direction these things normally run. A third of the total came during the night. At one point he strung together thirteen consecutive nights of it, which is not a habit so much as a tour.

On April 18 he posted six separate times, overnight, about the 2020 election, which he continues to believe was stolen from him and which concluded five and a half years ago. Somewhere around three in the morning, in the residence of the White House, a seventy-nine-year-old man was awake and alone and litigating a grievance from the first Obama-era iPhone against nobody, on a platform he owns, to an audience that was asleep.

The staff regard this as a selling point. This is the part I find hardest to get past.

Howard Lutnick, the Commerce Secretary, volunteered on television that the president sleeps four hours a night, that he calls him late at night wanting to talk about the day, that he is on it all the time, and that it is the most impressive thing you have ever seen. Nobody asked. He offered it, unprompted, in the register of a man describing a colleague’s marathon time, apparently having never once run the sentence backward to hear what it sounds like: my boss is awake at two in the morning and he telephones me.

Mike Johnson, the Speaker of the House, did him one better. Asked to account for the president slurring his words and appearing to confuse Greenland with Iceland at Davos, Johnson replied that the president sleeps about three hours a night, that he outwears everybody in the building by a factor of two or three, and, with real indignation, whether this was a serious question.

Read the exchange again and appreciate the structure of it. A journalist asks why the president appears cognitively impaired. The Speaker’s defense is that he does not sleep. This is offered as exculpatory. It is the argument of a man who has been handed a bucket and asked why the boat is full of water and has replied that there is a hole in it, sir, a very large hole, the largest hole anybody has ever seen.

JD Vance supplied the mechanism by which the condition spreads. He told Sean Hannity that his colleagues envy him because they fly separately, and that on a twenty-hour trip the president does not sleep the entire time, and then added the operative clause: if he is not sleeping, if he is working, he expects everybody else to be working too.

So the sleeplessness is not merely a personal eccentricity. It is a workplace policy, enforced downward, by a man who cannot rest and has therefore concluded that rest is a form of disloyalty.

The nodding off is the other half of the ledger, and the two halves do not reconcile because they were never meant to.

He has been photographed asleep, or something adjacent to asleep, in a Cabinet meeting, in a separate meeting in the Oval Office, at a Memorial Day event, at an NBA finals game, and during televised press conferences in both the morning and the afternoon. The eyes close for several seconds at a stretch. On April 23, having just completed his thirteen-night run, he appeared to doze at the Resolute Desk while surrounded by pharmaceutical executives and members of his own cabinet, including Dr. Oz, a man whose entire public career was built on telling Americans how to live longer and who was in that room watching it happen.

The catalog is now long enough to have produced a secondary phenomenon, which is the most instructive item in this entire file.

In July an image went around showing him asleep in his suite at the World Cup final. It got hundreds of thousands of views within hours, on multiple platforms, in several languages. One caption read that it was only a matter of time.

It was fake. Generated by a machine, based on a genuine New York Post photograph of Infantino presenting him the trophy. Fact-checkers had to sit through the entire livestream of the final to establish that the President of the United States remained conscious for the duration of a football match.

He was awake. He was awake, and nobody believed it, and the reason nobody believed it is that he has spent four years assembling a body of authentic evidence so extensive that a fabrication of it was indistinguishable from the record. A man can only be framed for something he is famous for doing. The forgery was persuasive because the original exists in quantity.

Trump’s explanation is that he was not sleeping and had merely closed his eyes, out of boredom.

I want to give that defense its due, because he has chosen it deliberately over the available alternative. He could have said he was tired. Everyone is tired. Tiredness is the most universally forgiven condition in human experience and would have cost him nothing. Instead he has elected to tell the country that during a formal Oval Office event on pharmaceutical policy, in front of his own cabinet, he was fully conscious and simply so unengaged by the proceedings that he shut his eyes to get through them. He would rather be understood as contemptuous than as sleepy, and he made that trade on purpose, in public, and nobody has asked him to explain it since.

That evening, at 6:23, he posted, in its entirety: I LOVE TRUTH SOCIAL!

And then, for the first time in nearly two weeks, he took the night off.

The cover story deserves its own paragraph because it is worse than the thing it was meant to cover. A White House official, asked to account for the three a.m. posts, told The Independent that they are made either by the president himself, because he sleeps so little, or by staff catching up on the articles and posts he had read the day prior.

Consider both branches of that sentence. Either the President of the United States is personally awake at three in the morning posting about a five-year-old election, or there is a person on the federal payroll whose job is to be awake at three in the morning posting as him about a five-year-old election, having first read everything he read that day. The official offered these as alternatives, in a tone suggesting that one of them was reassuring.

The medicine is the least funny part and it can be stated in one sentence. The research on this is not ambiguous and has not been for decades: repeatedly sleeping four to six hours a night produces progressive cognitive decline comparable to total sleep deprivation, and the subjects reliably report feeling fine.

That last clause is the one that matters. The impairment does not announce itself. It arrives as certainty. A person running on four hours does not experience himself as diminished, he experiences himself as sharp, and he will tell you so, at length, and he will be irritated that you asked.

Which he was. When the New York Times raised questions about his health, he called the paper seditious and perhaps even treasonous, and posted that there has never been a President who has worked as hard as him. His spokesman described him as the sharpest, most accessible, and energetic president in American history. His former Attorney General said that nobody can keep up with him because he sleeps so little.

They are all describing the same symptom and filing it as a virtue, and they are doing it in press releases, and every one of them has seen the photographs from the Resolute Desk.

There is a version of a man who does not sleep because he is building something. Edison is the model everyone reaches for. He worked the nights because the nights were where the work was, and the record of what he did with them is a filament and a phonograph and thirteen hundred patents.

We have the complete record of what this one does with his nights and it is not a filament. It is eighteen posts a day, a third of them after midnight, consisting of grievances, screenshots, reposted compliments, video clips generated by machines, and the same election, over and over, five and a half years after it ended.

He is not up late working. He is up late because he cannot be alone in a dark room with his own mind and no audience, and the thing he has built to solve that problem is a website he bought so that nobody could ever throw him off it.

And in the morning, at 7:33, on four hours and forty-eight minutes, with the whole apparatus of the executive branch waiting, he goes to work.