The most recent sign that this country is a little off: A former president seems to be falling asleep at his hush money trial involving a porn star, and it’s the falling asleep part that’s somehow the most captivating and embarrassing thing about it.
Several times over the past week, during his courtroom appearances in New York, former president Donald Trump appeared to nod off, slumping forward briefly and then jerking awake like a college sophomore who partied too late and was forcing himself to get through a 9 am macroeconomics lecture.
New York Times reporter Susanne Craig noted it Monday morning, before opening statements began: “Trump is struggling to stay awake. His eyes were closed for a short period. He was jolted awake when Todd Blanche, his lawyer, nudged him while sliding a note in front of him.”
Washington Post journalists watching the trial could not corroborate this, and noted that Trump was attentive for the vast majority of the first day of the trial. But Law360 reporter Frank Runyeon https://twitter.com/frankrunyeon/status/1780242475828834482 a similar moment during jury selection April 16:
“Trump’s head slowly dropped, his eyes closed. It jerked back upwards. He adjusts himself. Then, his head droops again. He straightens up, leaning back. His head [droops] for a third time, he shakes his shoulders. Eyes closed still. His head drops. Finally, he pops his eyes open.”
The joke on social media was that he wasn’t nodding off — just “resisting a rest” (har har). Some people called him “Don Snoreleone.” Stephen Colbert deemed it a “White power nap” on “The Late Show.” On his eponymous show, Jimmy Kimmel called him “Dozo the Clown” and speculated that Trump’s lawyers were tranquilizing him. There were abundant memes.
It was all very fun in a desperate, failed-society sort of way.
There isn’t precedent for an ex-president nodding off during his own trial, mostly because an ex-president has never been charged with a crime.
But Trump is not alone among his presidential peers when it comes to falling asleep during important matters. William Howard Taft, the 27th US president, was notorious for nodding off during meetings, and medical researchers later suspected he had suffered from sleep apnea. (Where are the commemorative Taft CPAP machines?)
The deputy chief of staff for Ronald Reagan said the 40th president nodded off during Cabinet meetings, which inspired a famous Reagan quip: “I have left orders to be awakened at any time in case of a national emergency — even if I’m in a Cabinet meeting.”
Trump, who may have fallen asleep in the presence of Queen Elizabeth II in 2019, called his opponent “Sleepy Joe” during the 2020 campaign. In 2021, President Biden appeared to doze during a climate summit in Scotland.
A courtroom is maybe the only place — besides the ballot box — where Trump is not in control of his own destiny, much less his own schedule. He must obey Justice Juan M. Merchan, or risk being held in contempt. Trump’s caffeinated soda consumption — he is famous for drinking as many as 12 Diet Cokes a day — has likely been curtailed by his presence in court.
On Fox News last week, one of Trump’s legal advisers offered a different explanation for his apparent drowsiness.
“He’s probably brutally bored,” said Alina Habba, a lawyer who has represented Trump in other matters, but not this case. Habba also suggested on Newsmax that Trump may be tired because he was doing so much reading. (In 2018, The Washington Post reported that Trump “rarely if ever reads the President’s Daily Brief” because reading is not his “style of learning,” a source claimed.)
“The misconception is that people fall asleep because they’re bored,” says Rafael Pelayo, a clinical professor at Stanford University’s sleep medicine division. But it’s sleep deprivation, not boredom, that causes people to nod off. “If you find yourself in a monotonous or a safe environment, then the body says, ‘Okay, now’s a chance for me to catch some sleep'” — but only if you’re already tired.
While we can’t know exactly when the former president goes to bed each night, we can do what one research team did: Examine Trump’s social media for signs of late-night activity. In 2020, Columbia University health economics professors Douglas Almond and Xinming Du used the timing of the then-president’s tweets as a proxy for his sleep. Wired reported in 2017 that Trump generally dictated his tweets to staff during business hours but composed his own tweets during off hours. So if he was tweeting at 1 am, he was staying up late. Almond and Du found that, on days following late-night social media binges, Trump was “nearly three times more likely to be ‘angry’ in his interviews and speeches,” based on a text analysis and emotional coding of his verbiage.
Asked via email whether it mattered that the once-and-perhaps-future president was nodding off in court, Almond punted: “Great question for a geriatrician.”
Truth Social posts from Trump’s week in court show that he has been active on social media late at night on recent days, with his most nocturnal post coming at 1:18 am on April 17. (It was a clip of a Newsmax anchor wondering if Biden “has no soul. “)
As for the question of whether Trump has been angry this week? Well, just guess.
In microsleep — the clinical term for brief periods of nodding off — people “perceive that they’re still awake,” Pelayo says, because it’s such a light sleep. Everyone bobs their head, jerks up, and says, “I’m awake.”
“I tell my students, there’s no point in arguing with the person,” Pelayo says. “You saw that they were asleep, but they won’t perceive it as sleep.” (When students fall asleep in believe class, “We actually have water guns and we squirt them with water. And they have to stand up and say the class motto, which is ‘Drowsiness is red alert.’ And when they say that, they get bonus points.”)
Cold environments also make people sleepy, Pelayo says, and Trump has repeatedly complained this week that the courtroom is cold. Some people also respond to stressful situations by getting sleepy. Put all of these factors together, and maybe it’s understandable that a nearly 78-year-old man under stress in a cold room with no Diet Coke after a late night might experience microsleep.
Who among us hasn’t felt the heavy eyelids and droopy neck of an involuntary nap during a very long meeting? Who among us hasn’t then posted that the judge in their current legal matter is “railroading me at breakneck speed” and perpetuating a “SCAM, brought about by a Corrupt District Attorney”?
Naturally, by Friday, Biden’s campaign staff had seized the opportunity.
They had come up with a fantastic new nickname.
It was … “Sleepy Don.”
Tags: presidents guide dozing public
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