President Donald Trump has a habit of calling top aides to make policy decisions at all hours of the night—including as late as 2 a.m. and as early as 4 a.m.—according to White House Border Czar Tom Homan.
Appearing on Katie Miller’s podcast, Homan said he speaks with Trump “several times a week.” Miller, the wife of White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, asked him: “What’s the earliest he’s called you in the morning and the latest he’s called you at night?”
“I’ve gotten calls at 2:00 AM. I’ve got calls at 4:00 AM,” Homan said.
He explained that the late-night calls often come while Trump, 80, is traveling aboard Air Force One.
“There’s times where I’m sleeping and he calls me late at night because he may be on Air Force One flying from the West Coast... but I’ve gotten calls at 4:00 AM,” Homan said.
One early-morning conversation caught him completely off guard.
“First thing he says, what are you doing? I said, ‘It’s four o’clock in the morning, sir. I’m sleeping. It’s Sunday,’” Homan recalled.
Trump then got straight to business.
“One of the phone calls was, ‘Hey, what do you think about ICE in airports?’ I said, ‘I think it’s a brilliant idea.’ He goes, ‘Good, you’re running it starting tomorrow.’”
Homan was referring to the March deployment of ICE agents to airports during a partial government shutdown, when unpaid TSA officers were calling out in record numbers and security lines stretched for hours.
Although the move was billed as a way to ease travel delays, Homan acknowledged at the time that ICE agents were also there to make arrests despite having no airport screening training.
The revelation adds to a growing picture of Trump’s unusual sleep schedule.
The president is known for posting on Truth Social deep into the night. On one Thursday earlier this month alone, he published 19 posts between midnight and 2:30 a.m.
A previous analysis by The Daily Beast found there were only five days in April when the 80-year-old president appeared to have had enough time for a full night’s sleep based on his overnight posting activity.
Trump’s nocturnal routine was also detailed in Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump by New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan.
The authors wrote that White House aides eventually realized that mornings when they couldn’t reach Trump usually 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 added that while Trump has “never been a big sleeper,” aides now believe he “is sleeping even less, keeping stranger hours than he had in his first term.”
