The White House has lashed out at a CNN anchor who claimed President Donald Trump’s nocturnal habit of being a serial social media poster was something to be “concerned” about.
Erin Burnett discussed Trump’s increasingly erratic flood of Truth Social posts on Wednesday night’s OutFront.
Trump, who turns 80 next month, has made at least 8,800 posts on Truth Social since the start of his second term, according to a new Wall Street Journal analysis.
The publication found in that window of time, there have been 44 nights where Trump has made at least 12 posts, Burnett cited. His record so far is 160 posts in under four hours on December 1, a statistic which Burnett called “actually terrifying.”
Those numbers come after analysis by the Daily Beast earlier this month that Trump posted on social media 250 times in April 2018 during his first term. This April, he made 565 posts on Truth Social—an average of about 18 a day.
The CNN host on Wednesday said if it were someone other than the U.S. president making this high volume of posts instead of sleeping, “You should say, ‘That’s not OK. That’s something to be concerned about.’”
Burnett then riled up MAGA by claiming that Trump’s relentless barrage of posts, which this week have included copious AI slop, including Former Presidents Joe Biden and Barack Obama swimming in sewage, as well as wild conspiracy theories about the 2020 election, actually waters down their impact.
Recalling working on CNN documentaries during Trump’s first administration, Burnett said they struggled to get them aired because tweets the president had made were treated as breaking news by the network. He has since left X for Truth Social.
“Every time Trump tweeted, people talked about it,” Burnett said.
“Now he posts pictures of people swimming in sewage and himself on $100 bills. And nobody even notices,” she said. “That’s another weird thing about this, nobody’s even watching all this.”
The White House’s Rapid Response 47 X account shared a clip of Burnett’s segment on the president’s posts, calling her a “total moron.”
The post said Burnett “does an entire segment about President Trump’s Truth Social posts... but insists `nobody even notices’ them.”
They signed off by saying Trump was the “MOST TRANSPARENT PRESIDENT IN HISTORY!”
The Daily Beast has contacted the White House and CNN for comment.
The criticism of Burnett comes after the 49-year-old host criticized Trump’s endless posts on her CNN show on Tuesday night. Burnett suggested Trump calling a female reporter “a dumb person” may have been a result of his lack of sleep.
“His behavior today came after he spent much of the night seemingly awake,” Burnett said on Tuesday. “Maybe that‘s why he‘s so testy, posting and reposting on social media.”
After pointing out his 75 posts on Monday night, Burnett asked viewers, “Do you know anybody who does that?” The timing of Trump’s posts indicates he slept no more than 5-1/2 hours on Monday, before heading to China.
Former Democrat Rep. Max Rose told Burnett he believed Trump’s after-dark posting “must be exhausting,” and may impact his day job.
“Hundreds of posts all throughout the night, and it‘s impossible not to connect that to the absolute inattention that he paid, laziness, towards the run-up to the war in Iran,” he said.
Rose claimed Trump ignored factors, including the affordability crisis in the U.S. and the fact that a war in the Middle East would likely affect gas prices before going ahead with his attack on Iran.
“Could it be that he is spending all night tweeting and he‘s just too exhausted during the day to even do the bare minimum for his job?” Rose said. “That I think, is a rightful conclusion.”
Burnett added, “It is actually really important to know, I’d like to know how much the president, within a general range, is sleeping and that he‘s getting his rest, you know, he’s not AI.”
The Journal also claimed that Trump’s executive assistant Natalie Harp, who is in her mid-30s, takes the president printed-out drafts of social media posts, many sourced from other accounts, which he then approves.
That included some of his most controversial posts, including a racist video that depicted Barack and Michelle Obama as apes, and an AI-generated image of Trump as Jesus Christ, both of which Trump later took down. Trump claimed he was meant to be a doctor, not a deity in the fake picture.
The report said Trump posts some Truth Social messages himself, and Harp posts things he has approved on his behalf, however he personally ticks off everything posted on his account, according to the Journal.
The publication also said that process has frustrated some White House officials due to the fact Harp does not share her proposed posts with the chief of staff’s office, communications aides, or national-security officials.
