Flying overseas with President Donald Trump can be challenging—even when you’re his Secretary of State.
Marco Rubio, 54, got candid about what it’s like to travel with his 79-year-old boss in an interview with New York Magazine.
Rubio said he needs shuteye when traveling overseas. After all, he juggles multiple roles for Trump: he is concurrently Secretary of State, acting national security adviser, acting national archivist, and the architect of Venezuela’s transition after the U.S. seized its president, Nicolás Maduro.
But the simple task of dozing off has proven to be difficult on Air Force One, given the president’s notoriety for practically never sleeping.
“There’s an office with two couches, and I usually want to sleep on one of those two couches,” Rubio told the magazine. “But what I do is I cocoon myself in a blanket. I cover my head. I look like a mummy.”
The State Secretary then “mimed pulling a blanket over his body as if he were auditioning for a Snuggie commercial,” according to Washington correspondent Ben Terris.
“I do that because I know that at some point on the flight, he’s going to emerge from the cabin and start prowling the hallways to see who is awake,” Rubio went on. “I want him to think it’s a staffer who fell asleep. I don’t want him to see his Secretary of State sleeping on a couch and think, ‘Oh, this guy is weak.’”
Rubio isn’t the first to reveal the aging president’s concerning lack of rest on overseas trips.
Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard described Trump as “absolutely tireless” in an October interview with Fox News.
“I know somebody made a comment on the plane, you know, [that] he goes on these long trips, these long plane rides, doesn’t sleep, he’s working throughout those flights, hits the ground running and gets directly to business,” she said.
Sources have also said the same to Kaitlan Collins, CNN’s chief White House correspondent.
“I had this source who said you never want to be on Air Force One on a trip,” Collins previously told podcaster Jason Tartick. “He doesn’t sleep on these trips. And like, you’re going to Asia or something, and that’s kind of the only time you’re going to sleep before you go on this trip, but Trump is just always up and talking, and he’ll like have them go and wake staff up if they’re asleep because he wants to talk to them.”
That might help explain why Trump has been seen drifting off to sleep in several public events. Asked about those episodes, however, Rubio merely scoffed.
“It’s a listening mechanism,” he told New York Magazine.
The White House did not immediately return a request for comment on Monday.
