A late-night comedian has a theory about why the president keeps showing up to meetings with his eyes closed.
Seth Meyers devoted a segment of Late Night to the now-viral footage of President Donald Trump apparently dozing off during a Cabinet meeting, an awkward reality that landed Secretary of State Marco Rubio in a very uncomfortable spot on Capitol Hill this week.
Democratic congressman Ted Lieu confronted Rubio during testimony with a simple question: Had he been at “more than one meeting where President Trump has fallen asleep?” He then showed the video to the room to make his point.
“That’s false. That’s false. I’ve never seen him fall asleep,” Rubio told the committee. “On the contrary, the guy doesn’t sleep, which is a big problem because he calls me at 2 in the morning, he calls me at 5 in the morning.”
Meyers was ready for that one. “Yeah, we believe you,” he said. “That’s why he’s asleep during the day! It’s the same reason the raccoons are asleep whenever you go on a field trip to the Bronx Zoo. They’re up all night looking for a garbage can to knock over—which is also what Trump is probably doing.”
As for what exactly Trump is doing at those late-night hours, Meyers had a theory. “Don’t bull us that he’s working in the middle of the night. We know what he’s doing. He’s posting AI slop of himself as Jesus or on Mount Rushmore riding on horseback with George Washington next to a NASCAR race while his space shuttle flies overhead.”
Trump, who turns 80 on June 14, is the oldest president ever inaugurated, and questions about his health have been mounting — from bruises on his hands to swollen ankles to whether he is, in fact, catching up on sleep during official functions. He spent years hammering his predecessor, Joe Biden, over mental and physical fitness. Now he’s fielding the same questions himself.
Trump has offered his own explanations. Asked in January why his eyes were closed during a meeting, he said, “Sometimes they’ll take a picture of me blinking… They’ll catch me with the blink.” That same month, he attributed closed eyes in a Cabinet meeting not to fatigue but to boredom.
Meyers, for his part, landed on a different diagnosis entirely. “He’s thinking so hard with his brain,” the host said, “it’s draining energy from his eyelids.”
