A third of Donald Trump’s social media posts now come in the middle of the night when the soon-to-be 80-year-old president should be sleeping, raising urgent new concerns about his mental health as he navigates war.
Joanna Coles and Daily Beast executive editor Hugh Dougherty break down a shocking investigation that puts Trump’s late-night posting habits on stark display, revealing a disturbing pattern between those baffling posts fired off in the dead of night and the awkward moments in the Oval Office when the president has been caught appearing to doze off.
“It is an extraordinary, extraordinary piece of work. Josh Fiallo, our brilliant reporter, counted up all the times that Donald Trump posted on Truth Social in April and then he looked at when he was posting and he looked between the hours of 9 p.m. and 6 a.m. and we discovered that there were only five days in April when the president did not post on Truth Social between 9 p.m. and 6 a.m.,” Dougherty said on The Daily Beast Podcast.
“Eighty percent of nights when he could be sleeping, he’s posting,” he said.
While Trump’s often bizarre Truth Social posts have in many ways become a hallmark of his time in office, there was something quite different about them in the month of April: They appeared to become more frantic, disjointed, and more incendiary, as Trump’s political troubles multiplied, leading to foul-mouthed tirades and threats of war crimes that shocked even his own MAGA base and prompted some of his own allies to sound the alarm. It was no longer just Democrats questioning his fitness for office, but former advisers and much of the American public.
A Fox News poll conducted April 17-20 found that 55 percent of respondents felt Trump did not have the “mental soundness” to be an effective leader.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment on whether Trump’s April posting spree had sparked any concern among aides.
These health concerns become all the more staggering against the backdrop of his sleep habits, Coles said.
“I mean, the diagram that we have of this, this information about him sleeping is really alarming,” she said, adding that he seems to be “sleep disordered.”
The Daily Beast’s analysis of his social media activity in April “suggests that the longest time he seems to sleep is about three hours. And the frenzied nature of the posting suggests he is having anxiety in the middle of the night,” Coles said.
Sleep deprivation is especially concerning for a president who’s 79, Dougherty noted.
“He is so regularly posting at times like 2:45 a.m.— which I think everybody knows nothing good happens at 2:45 a.m.— 1 a.m., 12:30 a.m. There’s one day in which he posted 18 times between midnight and 2:45, so there’s no way that he’s having any healthy sleep.”
“He himself has said that he thrives on very little sleep,” Dougherty said, but “we all know if you don’t get enough sleep, that’s bad, and usually people catch up at the weekends.”
Trump, however, does not appear to be doing that.
“There was only one weekend day, which was the first Saturday in April, in which Donald Trump did not post fanatically between 9 p.m. and 6 a.m. on a weekend weekend night. When did he catch up on the sleep deprivation? We don’t know, and we all know it’s bad for your brain.”
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