Donald Trump has swapped Trump Tower for the White House but his habits of little sleep, prolific tweeting and watching ‘the shows’ remain unchanged
Since moving into the White House on Friday, Trump has posted his first Twitter messages each day at 6.53, 7.35, 6.38, 6.11, 7.10 and 6.04am, reportedly from an unsecured Android phone.
Before his Oval Office meeting with Theresa May, Friday morning began with a tweet – the @Potus account used to quote himself, with an embedded video of himself, while citing his own personal Twitter account. There was also time to record a weekly address and a 25-minute session set aside for the president to participate in his “official portrait sitting”.
While it is unclear what time he goes to bed, old habits die hard: he may be getting by on a sleep schedule that is positively Thatcherite.
“He’s in the no more than four hours a night range,” his biographer Gwenda Blairsaid. “He has made a big deal of saying he never sleeps and people who sleep are lazy.”
Obama would typically rise around 7am, see his daughters off to school and work out in the White House gym for an hour before reaching the Oval Office close to 8.30am. He spent up to an hour reading the national security briefing and four or five newspapers. He did not watch cable news networks because “it feels like WWF wrestling”, he told NBC News in 2009.
Trump, who happens to have a long history with professional wrestling, can’t get enough of “the shows”. He rises before six, the New York Times reported this week, and watches cable TV in the residence and later in a small dining room in the west wing. His favourites appear to be Fox News and MSNBC, in particular Morning Joe with Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, both of whom he speaks to frequently.
The new president also reportedly pores over the New York Times, New York Post and Washington Post before his first meeting at 9am. On Tuesday, for example, Trump opened with a “breakfast and listening session” in the Roosevelt room with leaders of carmakers General Motors, Ford and Fiat Chrysler.
At 10am that day there was a meeting in the Oval Office with his chief of staff, Reince Priebus, who, along with chief strategist Steve Bannon – the Breitbart provocateur – and senior adviser (and Trump son-in-law) Jared Kushner, is thought to spend more time with him in the inner sanctum than anyone else. At 11am, Trump signed an executive order reviving the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines to the deep dismay of Native Americans and climate change activists.
According to the New York Times, the president spent some of Tuesday contemplating artwork from the White House collections, deciding on a portrait of former president Andrew Jackson to hang in the Oval Office. Trump’s aides have compared him to Jackson, a populist outsider, although “Old Hickory” is also remembered for the forced removal of Native Americans, known as the “Trail of Tears”.
At 1pm, there was a phone call with the Indian prime minister, Narendra Modi, followed by afternoon meetings with the CIA director, Mike Pompeo, and Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell. All were in the Oval Office, where Trump likes to work during the day, although it does not offer the luxury of three TVs, once enjoyed by Lyndon Johnson.
But that evening, it appears that Trump was in front of a screen watching Bill O’Reilly’s show on Fox News, which carried an item about soaring crime in Chicago. At 9.25pm, quoting the same statistics used by O’Reilly, the president tweeted: “If Chicago doesn’t fix the horrible ‘carnage’ going on, 228 shootings in 2017 with 42 killings (up 24% from 2016), I will send in the Feds!”
Obama would typically go upstairs to the residence for dinner at 6.30pm with wife Michelle and daughters Malia and Sasha. Then he would remain on the second floor and get back to work for several hours.
A New York Times report last year said: “He works on speeches. He reads the stack of briefing papers delivered at 8pm by the staff secretary. He reads 10 letters from Americans chosen each day by his staff … The president also watches [sports channel] ESPN, reads novels or plays Words With Friends [similar to Scrabble] on his iPad.”
Obama was a self-described “night guy”, the article added, often working until 2am, with his longest nights devoted to writing and rewriting speeches by hand. For his first day as an ex-president, he mused recently, he would not be setting his alarm clock.
Trump’s wife, Melania, returned to New York on Sunday night with their 10-year-old son, Barron, who goes to school there.
But Trump still has a line to the outside world. “These are the most beautiful phones I’ve ever used in my life,” Trump told the New York Times. “The world’s most secure system. The words just explode in the air.”
The reality TV president is also a TV reality president. His gut responses ricochet around the world and have the power to move political mountains. On Thursday, 14 minutes after Fox News talked about whistleblower Chelsea Manning, Trump published a tweet branding her an “ungrateful traitor”. Once, asked whom he turns to for guidance on matters of national security, he replied: “Well, I watch the shows.”
It sounds like the Trump of old. “Not a reader, as we know,” Blair, his biographer, 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.”
Before the advent of Twitter, Blair noted, during his days as a property tycoon in New York, “he was on the phone constantly to reporters. 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.”
The same goes for his nocturnal habits, she said. “He would be up in the middle of the night and be in his limousine. People told me he would check out building sites at 4am, making people think he had eyes in the back of his head.”
George W Bush was known to turn in around 10pm whereas Bill Clinton was a night owl, reading books and papers or talking with staff well into the early hours. Sidney Blumenthal, his former assistant and senior adviser, said: “President Clinton read voluminously. He read long reports, every paper given to him, memos from many people on the staff. He could be up all night, padding around, trying to figure things out.”
Having occupied Trump Tower in New York for years, the current president is accustomed to short commutes with no exposure to sunlight. “It’s a beautiful residence, it’s very elegant,” Trump, who quickly installed gold drapes in the Oval Office, was quoted as saying.
But Blair suspects it will not be enough. “I’m sure he’ll pine for the gilt-cornered furniture and marble and fountains and Louis XIV decor of Trump Tower. It’s not a wild guess that he thought the White House is Plain Jane. It befits the democratically elected president of the United States rather than the titan magnate look of Trump Tower.”