Is Donald Trump Sleep Deprived? President's Twitter Habits Could Be A Reason

It is common knowledge that President Donald Trump uses Twitter as a weapon that he can wield to virtually snap back at his enemies. But political experts have started blaming the popular social media platform for keeping the president awake at night, leading to serious sleep deprivation.

Washington Post reporter Philip Bump had calculated in February 2017 that Trump spent more time tweeting “real” news to the public than he spent paying attention to intelligence briefings in the first month of his presidency. After being inaugurated to office, the president reportedly dedicated 13 hours to social media and merely six hours to intelligence briefings.

However, more than his frequency of tweeting, it was the schedule of his tweets that shocked many, who started suspecting that Trump might not be catching enough sleep at night. During his initial days at the White House, Trump posted Twitter messages between 3:30 a.m and 5:30 a.m. EDT.

Read: Twitter Reacts To Bill Cosby's Sexual Assault Seminars At Town Halls

“He’s in the no more than four hours a night range,” Trump’s biographer Gwenda Blair said. “He has made a big deal of saying he never sleeps and people who sleep are lazy.”

In this regard, Trump’s perception of sleep has been likened to former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. She too would rarely sleep beyond four hours every day, also forcing her government officials to stay awake past bedtime with her.

"She slept four hours a night on weekdays," says Sir Bernard Ingham, Thatcher’s press secretary, BBC reported. "I wasn't with her at weekends. I guess she got a bit more then."

Read: Twitter Reacts To Bill Cosby's Sexual Assault Seminars At Town Halls

But while Thatcher would often be up at night working on a speech and striving to be the “best-informed person in the room,” Trump is seen striving to discredit the media, portraying him in a negative light by boasting about his achievements. According to the biographer, the president will never be spotted pouring over a book or in deep thought over some intelligence briefing late at night.

“Not a reader, as we know,” Blair said. “Doesn’t spend time on introspection or meeting advisers, much less chewing through briefing books. He’s there in front of a big TV and with an unsecured cellphone, tweeting away.”

Even when Twitter had not come into existence and Trump was not yet voted the most powerful man on Earth, the then business tycoon found other ways of keeping abreast of what the reporters were saying about him.

“…he was on the phone constantly to reporters,” Blair reported. “Now he tweets. Whatever degree of filtering reporters provided at the time, now he’s got a better megaphone with Twitter … Distract, distract, distract. He’s distracting now to keep attention away from the implications of his policies. It’s a hugely ramped-up version of what he did in his whole career.”

One of Trump’s latest tweets sent just after midnight that almost introduced a new, apparently meaningless word to the urban dictionary — “covfefe” — set off a stream of speculations, most of which pointed to the president’s lack of sleep making him mistype on social media.

The White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer tried to cover up the pretty obvious typo by stating to a room full of reporters that Trump’s bizarrely inaccurate tweet was intentional and "a small group of people know exactly what he meant," clearly, nobody bought it.

"Cognitive tasks like spelling are impaired by poor sleep," says neurologist Chris Winter, author of the new book “The Sleep Solution,” citing a probable reason as to why Trump sent out a flawed tweet, USA Today reported. "I would think something’s up, to put it mildly."

This wasn’t the only instance that Trump’s cognitive abilities have been hampered by the lack of sleep. It was revealed that the president diverted from the original plan to refer to the more carefully crafted phrase “radical Islamist extremism” during his speech at Saudi Arabia in May 2017, instead of “Islamic extremism.”

While the speech alterations might easily be attributed to Trump’s love for improvisation, the fact cannot be ruled out that White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus told reporters on Air Force One on the way to Trump’s Middle East tour that the president didn’t get much sleep on the flight.

Huffington Post co-founder, Arianna Huffington told CNBC in January 2017 that Trump would be far more adept in delivering on his campaign promises if someone took away his phone and encouraged him to get a good night’s sleep.

"Donald Trump should be separated from his phone at night, get a full nights sleep and stop tweeting in the middle of the night... he is the poster child of sleep deprivation," Huffington said.

"I promise you if (Trump) got eight hours sleep and did not tweet in the middle of the night, the next four years would be infinitely better for the world... so I highly recommend that his advisers take the phone away" she added.