Donald Trump mocked one of his most important allies for not needlessly staying up until the early hours, according to a report.
A Wall Street Journal feature on House Speaker Mike Johnson detailed how busy the Louisiana Republican is during the day, so much so that he revealed to reporter Olivia Beavers that he had 1,477 unread text messages and 829 unheard voicemails on his phone.
However, no matter how busy he is or what time of night it is, Johnson will always make time to take a call from the 80-year-old president.
Johnson told the Journal that Trump would often call him late into the night, starting the conversation by asking, “‘Mikey, are you sleeping?’”
“No, not really,” Johnson would reply.
“‘Yes, you are, Mike. I can always tell when you’re sleeping,’” Johnson said, imitating Trump’s voice.
“I’m up now. What do you got? What’s going on?” Johnson added that he would respond.
Trump, who has a habit of falling asleep in public, has made staying up all night a worrying feature of his second term in office.
The pattern is clearly evident in Trump’s prolific social media posting. At times, Trump will stay up until 2 or 3 a.m., sharing updates on social media before returning hours later to continue posting.
The Daily Beast previously reported on a concerning trend in how often the president posts on Truth Social between 9 p.m. and 6 a.m., finding that there were only five days in April when the 80-year-old president could have had a full night’s sleep.
The worrying lack of sleep from Trump, who is on course to become the oldest sitting U.S. president of all time, was also detailed in the book Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump by New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan.
The book reveals that Trump often starts his days early by making phone calls, posting on social media, or watching television.
However, there are some mornings when White House aides are unable to reach Trump, which they “soon came to realize meant he had stayed up all night, on the phone or watching television or both, only to finally catch some sleep around four or five in the morning.”
Haberman and Swan noted that while Trump has “never been a big sleeper,” it now appears to staff that he “is sleeping even less, keeping stranger hours than he had in his first term.”
Last month, The New York Times published a report suggesting that the president takes extensive measures to project greater youth and vitality than he actually possesses, including insisting on taking calls and holding meetings late into the night.
One person who visited Trump in the Oval Office noted that the president seemed more tired than usual and told the Times they believed Trump’s late-night Truth Social posting was the reason.
The Daily Beast has contacted the White House for comment.
