January 23rd, 2026
There’s a pattern emerging in Donald Trump’s second term that should alarm every American who values both presidential competency and historical truth. While the rest of us were sleeping early Friday morning, our 79-year-old president was rage-posting on Truth Social—a platform used by just 3% of Americans—firing off over 70 posts between midnight and 1 a.m. after returning from Davos. When questioned about this erratic behavior and Trump’s slurred speech, House Speaker Mike Johnson offered a defense that should terrify us all: the president “sleeps about three hours a night.”
Let me be clear: this isn’t normal. This isn’t strength. This is a man showing signs of serious instability while wielding the most powerful office on Earth.
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The midnight posting spree wasn’t policy announcements or thoughtful reflections on governance. It was the digital equivalent of a deranged manifesto: attacks on Ilhan Omar, Joe Biden, Gavin Newsom, and Kamala Harris, mixed with promotion of a $40 million documentary about his wife and false claims about “saving TikTok.” He repeated debunked lies about the 2020 election. After a brief pause, he was back at it by 7 a.m.
This is what sleep deprivation does to the human brain. Medical science is unequivocal: chronic sleep loss impairs judgment, increases impulsivity, reduces cognitive function, and can trigger erratic behavior. We’re watching it play out in real-time on social media, and Speaker Johnson is trying to spin it as superhuman stamina.
Think about what Johnson is actually admitting here. The President of the United States, the man responsible for nuclear launch codes, diplomatic negotiations, and life-or-death decisions affecting millions, is operating in a state of chronic cognitive impairment. Any doctor will tell you that consistently sleeping only three hours a night is medically dangerous. It’s linked to increased risk of heart disease, diabetes, depression, and—most relevant here—severely compromised decision-making abilities. This isn’t a badge of honor. It’s a medical emergency playing out in the Oval Office.
But Trump’s erratic behavior isn’t just embarrassing—it’s dangerous. And nowhere is this danger more evident than in his administration’s Orwellian assault on American history itself.
On Thursday, while Trump was frantically scrolling through his phone at 30,000 feet, National Park Service workers in Philadelphia were dismantling a slavery exhibit at Independence National Historical Park. The display, installed in 2010, told the story of nine enslaved African Americans who George Washington brought from Mount Vernon to serve him in Philadelphia between 1790 and 1797.
These weren’t abstract historical figures. They were real people with names, families, and stories: Hercules, the skilled chef who eventually escaped; Oney Judge, who fled to New Hampshire seeking freedom; Christopher Sheels, who was present at Washington’s deathbed. Their exhibit honored their humanity and told the truth about the contradictions at America’s founding—men who spoke eloquently of liberty while denying it to others.
The City of Philadelphia immediately filed a federal lawsuit demanding the exhibit’s restoration. The city’s complaint is damning: the removal happened “without notice” and “without explanation,” presumably under Trump’s Executive Order 14253—cynically titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.”
Read that title again. “Restoring Truth” by removing the truth about slavery. This is textbook Orwellian doublespeak.
Trump’s order claims that acknowledging America’s history of slavery, racism, and oppression amounts to a “corrosive ideology” that casts our founding “in a negative light.” It instructs the Interior Department to purge any content that might “inappropriately disparage Americans past or living (including persons living in colonial times).”
Let’s translate that bureaucratic language: don’t say anything bad about slaveholders, even if it’s true.
This isn’t about historical accuracy—it’s about historical erasure. The American Historical Association got it right when they responded to Trump’s order: “Our goal is neither criticism nor celebration. It is to understand.” But understanding requires acknowledging uncomfortable truths. George Washington did own slaves. Those nine human beings did exist. Their stories deserve to be told.
Philadelphia City Council President Kenyatta Johnson put it perfectly: “History cannot be erased simply because it is uncomfortable.”
But that’s exactly what authoritarians do—they rewrite history to serve their narrative. They can’t tolerate complexity or contradiction. The same founding fathers who created unprecedented democratic institutions also perpetuated horrific human bondage. Both things can be true. Both things must be acknowledged if we’re to understand who we are as a nation.
Meanwhile, in Minnesota, federal immigration agents deployed gas against protesters demonstrating outside a federal building in Minneapolis. The protests erupted after weeks of escalating immigration enforcement, including the fatal shooting of 37-year-old Renee Good and the detention of a 5-year-old boy—whom officials claimed was “abandoned” but school officials say was used as “bait.”
Protesters organized a “Day of Truth and Freedom,” calling for an economic blackout in subfreezing temperatures to demonstrate how vital immigrants are to Minnesota’s economy. Instead of dialogue, they received chemical agents and dispersal orders.
This is Trump’s America: a sleep-deprived president posting conspiracy theories at midnight while his administration erases slavery from national parks and deploys chemical agents against citizens protesting the detention of kindergartners.
The through-line connecting these stories is authoritarianism. Erratic leadership thrives on chaos. Historical revisionism requires control of the narrative. Immigration crackdowns depend on dehumanization. These aren’t isolated incidents—they’re features of a comprehensive assault on truth, memory, and basic human dignity.
When a government removes exhibits about slavery while claiming to restore “truth,” when it detains children and gases protesters, when its leader operates on dangerous levels of sleep deprivation and his allies defend it as strength—we’re not witnessing normal political disagreement. We’re witnessing the deliberate dismantling of democratic norms and historical honesty.
Speaker Johnson can spin Trump’s insomnia as vigor all he wants. The rest of us see a dangerously unstable leader presiding over the systematic dismantling of American values—three hours of sleep at a time.
The question now is whether we’ll remain vigilant enough to resist it—even when those in power are too sleep-deprived to see what they’re destroying.
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