President Donald Trump has a very strange habit that was revealed in a conversation with a podcaster this week.
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Tom Homan, who is officially Trump’s executive associate director for Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO), spoke with the wife of Trump deputy Stephen Miller for her pro-Trump podcast, answering a rapid-fire round of questions. One answer was bizarre enough to get flagged by the Daily Beast.
According to Homan, Trump is making policy decisions on the phone with half-awake staff at 2 and 4 a.m.
Host Katie Miller asked how many times a week Homan speaks with Trump and how early in the morning he has called.
Homan said he speaks with the president several times a week. He then revealed, “I’ve gotten calls at 2:00 a.m. I’ve got calls at 4:00 a.m.”
Homan tried to explain that sometimes it’s a timezone issue because “he may be on Air Force One flying from the West Coast … but I’ve gotten calls at 4:00 a.m.”
One case Homan highlighted involved Trump calling at 4 a.m. on a Sunday morning.
“First thing he says, what are you doing? I said, ‘It’s four o’clock in the morning, sir. I’m sleeping. It’s Sunday,’” Homan recalled.
In another case, the half-awake Homan was playing the role of the yes-man as Trump asked, “What do you think about ICE in airports?”
“I said, ‘I think it’s a brilliant idea.’ He goes, ‘Good, you’re running it starting tomorrow,'” the top advisor said.
He was referring to the March decision to send ICE to airports while TSA agents were furloughed during a partial government shutdown. ICE officers ended up being photographed and taped wandering around airports and standing around watching TSA do their jobs.
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It ultimately turned into another Trump idea that drew ridicule from late-night comedians, while angering TSA agents, one TIME report said. At the time, CNN host Dana Bash questioned, “With respect, if you’re doing this in 24 hours, how well-thought-out could this be?”
At the time, Homan claimed that ICE agents were there to make arrests, but none of them had any training as TSA agents.
It adds to ongoing discussions about the president’s sleep habits revealed in the book by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, which walks through Trump’s trouble sleeping at night, noting that at times he can’t fall asleep until after 5 a.m. and will sleep until 10 a.m. or later.
“Occasionally, aides couldn’t reach him during the hours between eight and ten, when they soon came to realize [that] 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 said.
On one such morning, staff reported that Trump’s team couldn’t reach him. An aide checked on him, finding he was still asleep. Trump continues to be a “night owl,” the book describes. When the First Lady does sleep at the White House, the two don’t sleep in the same bed.
The book added that while Trump has “never been a big sleeper,” aides now believe he “is sleeping even less, keeping stranger hours than he had in his first term.”
During his first administration, Trump’s doctor, Ronny Jackson, who is now a GOP congressman from Texas, listed sleep aids as among the drugs the president would occasionally use.
The Daily Beast previously analyzed Trump’s schedule to count the number of presidential events that began at 11 a.m. or later.
On the rare occasion that Trump is up before 11 a.m., the Beast analysis found, it is when he goes to play golf.
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