It's time for Bozo to go to bed, and you're paying for it.
President Donald Trump attends a Cabinet meeting at the White House in Washington, DC, December 2, 2025.
(Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
One of Donald Trump's most successful political tactics has been to brand his opponents as too physically weak to handle the presidency. In 2016, Trump immortalized Jeb Bush as “low-energy” (a charge that doomed the Bush campaign) and called Hillary Clinton not “tough” enough (a jibe laden with sexism). In 2019, Trump coined the nickname “Sleepy Joe” for Joe Biden. The insult initially fell on deaf ears among voters who gave Biden a resounding victory over Trump in 2020. stuttering, incoherence this permanently destroyed his chances of re-election in 2024.
Biden's disgraceful decrepitude could not have worked out better for Trump. Not only did this end his re-election bid, but it also made Trump look vibrant and healthy by comparison. But now, a year into his second term, there is no Biden to distract the public from the obvious truth – that Trump is at least as lethargic and lethargic as any of his rivals.
In his speeches and press conferences, Trump is often distracted by chaotic verbal nonsense. But the ramblings at least keep Trump, who has a narcissistic love of the spotlight, on his guard. However, as a series of recent videos have shown, when Trump has to listen to other people talk, his brain tends to go into a default slumber mode.
Even the mainstream media, which had been negligently reluctant to raise questions about Trump's physical and mental well-being, began to take notice. On Friday, Washington Post reported,
President Donald Trump closed his eyes for long periods as Cabinet officials walked the floor Tuesday, giving updates on their work, sometimes appearing to nod.
It was the second time in less than a month that Trump struggled to stay awake while his advisers talked about the administration's initiatives. A Washington Post analysis of multiple video feeds of Tuesday's meeting found that on nine separate occasions Trump's eyes were closed for extended periods of time or he appeared to struggle to keep them open, totaling nearly six minutes. The episode was similar to the Oval Office event on Nov. 6, when the president spent nearly 20 minutes. struggling to keep my eyes open.
Current number
This version of Trump—let's call it Sleepy Donald—is not new. In April 2024, as Trump sat in a Manhattan courtroom facing criminal charges in a gag order, he often found it difficult to remain alert. How New York Times reported“Trump appeared to doze off several times, his mouth hanging open and his head drooping on his chest.”
Trump's growing lethargy has also significantly affected his daily routine. Time documented last month:
Trump's first official event will begin later in the day. In 2017, the first year of his first term, Trump's scheduled events started at 10:31 on average. In contrast, Mr. Trump, during his second term, began scheduled events on an average afternoon at 12:08 p.m. His events end on average around the same time as the first year of his first term, shortly after 5 p.m.
Trump's total number of official appearances fell by 39 percent. In 2017, Mr. Trump held 1,688 official events between Jan. 20 and Nov. 25 of that year. During the same period this year, Mr. Trump appeared at 1,029 official events.
It would be quite alarming if Trump simply needed a lot more sleep. But this is even worse. He sometimes gets up very late at night and posts constantly on social media, but the number decreases throughout the day. This is exactly the kind of sleep pattern you might find in the average teenager or cocaine addict, in other words, not the type of behavior you want to see in a president. Of course, it is alarming that a man who holds in his hands a nuclear arsenal capable of destroying all life on Earth works such long hours.
Of course, when Trump is genuinely involved in an event, he can become animated. Trump seemed uncharacteristically cheerful at a recent meeting with New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani, a political adversary who has nonetheless strangely energized the president. Likewise, Trump found a new spring in his step when he received an apparently fraudulent letter. FIFA World Prizea trinket created by a corrupt football league to satisfy the President's childhood love of shiny trinkets. But these events are the exception; Much of the time, Trump became increasingly clumsy, slow, irritable and sleepy.
Trump and his supporters have responded to inquiries into his health and vigilance with sullen denials and attempts at distraction. Trump returned to the contrast between himself and his rivals. In November Trump said Biden “has broken all records. He sleeps all the time, day, night, on the beach.” Ted Cruz, falling into sycophancy that was ridiculous even for him, came to the president’s defense having said“I don't think [Trump] generally sleeps.” Other allies of the president have also made patently absurd claims about Trump's energy.
Trump is hardly the first president to fight a losing battle to stay awake. His predecessors William Howard Taft (president from 1909 to 1913) and Calvin Coolidge (1923–29) were also prone to fatigue. Ronald Reagan (1981–89) – who would go to the land of dreams during cabinet meetings—also deserves a place on the Mount Rushmore of slumbering presidents. Interestingly, all three, like Trump, were big business conservatives.
How Washington Post marked In 2003, Taft “once fell asleep during a face-to-face conversation with Joseph Cannon, the Speaker of the House of Representatives. He did the same with the wife of the French ambassador. He dozed off while signing papers, attending the opera, and standing at a review of troops. He was the most visibly sleepy person ever to occupy the White House.” Historians speculate that Taft suffered from sleep apnea, a byproduct of his notorious obesity.
We don't have precise measures of presidential sleepiness, but Calvin Coolidge, who stayed in bed nine hours a night and slept at least two hours in the afternoon, was a contender for the title of sleepiest commander in chief. In the obituary of H.L. Mencken, the outstanding journalistic wit of his time, argued that Coolidge “slept more than any other President, whether by day or by night. Nero busied himself while Coolidge only snored.” Mencken suggested that if Coolidge had ruled during the Great Depression, he “would have responded to bad times the same way he responded to good ones, which was to lower the blinds, stretch out his legs on the table, and take a lazy afternoon nap.”
Mencken was an ardent proponent of laissez-faire politics, so for him Coolidge's sleepiness was a virtue. Mencken probably felt the same way about Taft's heavy-lidded presidency.
But Trump refutes the idea that a president who switches off is good for the country. In Trump's case, there is little relief in the fact that he is himself tested and prefers to spend his senile madness on flamboyantly remodeling the White House and accepting gifts that are clearly bribes. That's because while Trump may be inactive, his cronies certainly aren't. He surrounded himself with a team of extremists, notably Stephen Miller, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Pete Hegseth and Marco Rubio. These subordinates were empowered by Trump's lack of interest in government. This allowed them to pursue harsh policies of immigration restriction, deregulation, and militarism. Thanks to his declining intelligence and lack of interest in governing, Trump was able to ignore criticism of these policies. Far from being a harmless personal flaw, Trump's fatigue is a major reason why his second term promises to be an even greater disaster than his first.
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