Donald Trump often sits up a good part of the night and wigs out. His aides had long breathed a sigh of relief that these reality breaks were only evident on Truth Social—a social media platform of one. Nobody was paying attention except the most devout Trumpers. But now that’s changed. “He’s a crazy man. He falls apart at night. Probably, in part, because he can’t be alone. But, still, it’s extreme,” one aide said. Extreme behavior, repeated over and over again in a political context, must be a tactic, right? But this is then also seen as simply who he is. Crazy is truth; crazy is authentic. Trump is crazy, but crazy is Trump. And yet, they know if they sat up all night and hate-posted, they’d lose their jobs. So they live in a world of denial. (Indeed, they all wake up in the mornings filled with trepidation and resignation.) Is there a way to look at this rationally, in which the world comes to recognize Trump’s derangement as it slowly came to understand Joe Biden’s decline? The evidence is in his posts.
Click through to Michael Wolff’s HOWL to read more on the president’s late-night meltdowns—and what they mean for us all.
