California Governor Gavin Newsom’s troll campaign against President Donald Trump is still going, with the West Coast Democrat now making fun of the commander-in-chief’s struggles to stay awake throughout the day.
On Thursday, Newsom posted an image on X with the title “Presidential Walk of Fatigue.” The image — playing on the Presidential Walk of Fame along the White House’s West Wing — showed three images of Trump allegedly falling asleep on the job while cameras were present to catch him.
Trump reportedly fell asleep during Tuesday’s Cabinet meeting. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, when asked about the president’s slumbering, insisted that he had been “listening attentively and running the entire three-hour marathon Cabinet meeting.”
Newsom has seized on Trump’s newfound penchant for napping, giving him the Trumpian nickname “Dozy Don.”
“Dozy Don is making a lot of appearances recently,” another Newsom post says.
That post included a photo of Trump allegedly asleep at a ceremony noting the addition of his name to the U.S. Institute of Peace earlier this week.
Trump-friendly insiders have spoken before of the 79-year-old president’s sleeping habits.
“And of course if he’s not sleeping, if he’s working, he expects everybody else to be working too,” Vice President JD Vance told Fox News’ Sean Hannity. Vance claimed that Trump sleeps very little on a typical night.
Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard made similar comments, telling Fox News in October that Trump is “absolutely tireless.”
“I know somebody made a comment on the plane, you know, [that] he goes on these long trips, these long plane rides, doesn’t sleep, he’s working throughout those flights, hits the ground running and gets directly to business,” she said.
It’s not just Republicans who’ve heard stories of Trump’s Air Force One restlessness. CNN’s Kaitlan Collins made a similar claim on Jason Tartick’s podcast, saying one of her sources close to the White House said “you never wanna be on Air Force One on a trip.”
“[Trump] doesn’t sleep on these trips,” she said. “And like, you’re going to Asia or something, and that’s kind of the only time you’re going to sleep, before you go on this trip, but Trump is just always up and talking, and he’ll like, have them go and wake staff up if they’re asleep because he wants to talk to them.”
Whether or not Trump is bad at sleeping on planes does not undermine the fact that he has been caught dozing off at times when he would be expected to be awake and alert.
Conservative media personalities are doing their best to spin Trump’s napping as a good thing — or at least something that he does better than his enemies.
Fox News’ senior medical correspondent Dr. Marc Siegel spun Trump’s sleeping by comparing him to inventor Thomas Edison.
“Thomas Edison believed in the 10-minute nap, by the way. We wouldn’t have electricity, right?” Siegel said.
Las Vegas Review-Journal columnist Debra Saunders insisted in an editorial that “no, Donald Trump is not following the snoozy path of Sleepy Joe Biden,” which, if anything, shines a light on the hypocrisy of the president using that nickname for his rival.
