Donald Trump’s staff were again left scrambling in Washington on Wednesday after the 80-year-old president fired off a bizarre 2:38 a.m. social media post railing against communism and left-wing Democrats, the latest sign of what aides privately describe as Donald Trump’s increasingly erratic sleep and work habits in his second term.
For context, Trump has long bragged that he barely needs sleep, but the pattern has hardened into something more troubling since he returned to the White House. His nocturnal activity on Truth Social, combined with frequent episodes where he appears to nod off in public, is now detailed in a new book by New York Timesreporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump, which says the president’s strange hours are worrying staff inside the West Wing.
Donald Trump’s 2:38 a.m. Truth Social Blast
The latest flare-up came in the early hours of Wednesday on Truth Social, the platform Trump has made his de facto press office. At exactly 2:38 a.m. Eastern Time, he posted: ‘America the Beautiful will NEVER be a Communist Country!!! President DJT.’
The post landed less than three hours after his previous late-night message and appeared to be Trump’s response to Tuesday’s primary results. In New York, several Democratic socialist and progressive candidates endorsed by New York City Assembly Member Zohran Mamdani had clinched victories, developments that Trump folded into his now familiar storyline about the dangers of the left.
Shortly before midnight, he had already primed his followers with another broadside. ‘Many Communists running in badly failing Blue States. The votes seem to have them doing quite well against each other,’ he wrote. ‘The bad news is that history has conclusively shown that the downtrodden States that they will soon be running will ONLY GET WORSE. MAGA!’
The wording is vintage Trump, but the timing is what jarred his team. According to Haberman and Swan’s reporting, such posts often appear after the president has spent the night toggling between television, phone calls and social media, only finally crashing in the small hours.
A screengrab of the 2:38 a.m. post circulated quickly among reporters and critics on Wednesday morning, not because the sentiment was new, but because it fit into an emerging portrait of a president who is both perpetually online and visibly exhausted.
White House Spins ‘Unmatched Energy’ As Staff Worry
Publicly, the White House insists there is nothing to see. In a statement responding to questions about Trump’s sleep patterns, spokesman Davis Ingle praised what he called the president’s ‘unmatched energy’, arguing that it stands ‘in stark contrast to what we saw during the last administration, when Democrats and the legacy media intentionally covered up Joe Biden’s serious mental and physical decline from the American people.’
It is a combative line that leans on an old Trump trope. All through Biden’s tenure, Trump derided his predecessor as ‘Sleepy Joe’, accusing him of lacking stamina and mental sharpness. Now, however, it is Trump, at 80, who holds the record as the oldest man ever inaugurated as US president, and Trump who is being photographed with his eyes shut during official business.
One Getty Images photograph from November 2025, taken in the Oval Office, shows the president slumped with his eyes closed during a briefing. At the time, White House officials insisted he was simply ‘resting his eyes’. The explanation has since become a running gag in Washington, but in the West Wing, aides are not laughing.
Haberman and Swan write that Trump’s sleeping patterns have grown more erratic during his second term and that staff have had to adjust their working lives around his unpredictable hours. ‘Some mornings Trump would be up early making phone calls and posting on social media while watching TV,’ they report. ‘But occasionally, aides couldn’t reach him during the hours between eight and ten, which they soon came to realize 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.’
The book concludes that although Trump has ‘never been a big sleeper’, his team now believes he ‘is sleeping even less, keeping stranger hours than he had in his first term.’
Night Posts, Daytime Nods, And A President Who Won’t Log Off
The concern is not theoretical. A previous analysis of Trump’s Truth Social habits, reported earlier this year, tracked how frequently he posts between 9 p.m. and 6 a.m. The pattern was stark: in April, there were only five nights where the data suggested he might have got anything close to a full night’s sleep. Most other nights showed activity spread across the small hours, with long strings of posts, re-shares and replies.
This is not simply a quirky work pattern. Senior staff, according to Haberman and Swan, have had to juggle briefing times, travel schedules and even major policy roll-outs around an 80-year-old leader who may, on any given morning, only have slept for two or three fragmented hours.
On camera, the effect is visible. Trump has been photographed seemingly dozing at ceremonies, leaning heavily to one side during Oval Office briefings and closing his eyes at public events. The White House explanation is always the same, that he is concentrating, or that the camera has caught an unfortunate split-second. It may be true in some cases. Nonetheless, the images land, they circulate, and to voters who remember the ‘Sleepy Joe’ slur, there is an obvious irony that no amount of spin quite erases.
Experts in sleep medicine would no doubt have a field day with this stuff, but the political question is simpler. An American president has unique powers and responsibilities, from nuclear launch authority to crisis management. Voters do not expect perfection, yet they do expect their leader to be alert at key moments and grounded in something other than a scrolling feed at three in the morning.
Inside the White House, officials cling to the idea that Trump’s frenetic online presence reflects energy, not decline. Outside, the 2:38 a.m. post will be read very differently, as one more data point in a story that is starting to write itself, whether his team likes it or not.
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