Dozy Don
When President Donald Trump appeared to be dozing off during a cabinet meeting last week, it naturally raised the issue of whether the 79-year-old grandfather still has the basic physical ability to handle the rigors of the presidency. Even the New York Times noticed, and not just in the opinion pages. Trump’s eyes were closed for a cumulative six minutes over the course of the meeting—often as his cabinet members showered him with praise.
Old people are prone to napping. That’s fairly uncontroversial. But after former President Joe Biden’s waning stamina became such a frequent Republican talking point (and as a result, a defining feature of the national narrative about him) questions about whether Trump can endure the daily demands of the office seem beyond just fair. They seem appropriate.
Biden made the issue unavoidable by giving the worst performance in the history of American presidential debates, compelling Democrats to push him to withdraw from the race to make way for Vice President Kamala Harris. Trump hasn’t had a public embarrassment at that level. But since he is showing many of the same struggle-with-sleep characteristics, I felt it would be worthwhile to ask some of our elected officials if they were concerned.
Quite a few Republicans I spoke to declined to comment on Trump’s midday slump. Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) said he hadn’t heard of it at all and declined to watch a video that I had at the ready of Trump snoozing. This was expected. Republicans tend to refuse to comment on things they don’t want to admit they’ve seen, and when the thing in question is being put right under their nose, they sometimes simply run away.
But as her GOP colleagues fled around her, Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska)—who does sometimes criticize the president—did offer some insight. She chalked up his drowsiness to “long meetings” and perhaps too much time online—the president posted on Truth Social 158 times between 8 p.m. and midnight the night before his soporific cabinet session.
“He doesn’t keep very good bedtime manners, does he?” Murkowski said.
“I don’t know that dozing off or closing your eyes means an indicator of anything. I’m not worried about it,” she added. “If anything, he seems to have more energy than the Energizer Bunny on any given day. He kinda wears everybody else out. Maybe if you start seeing this as a pattern, I’d wanna pay attention.”
A pattern may actually be emerging already: December 2 was hardly the first time reporters had witnessed Trump’s droopy-eyed mugging while the president was on the clock. During a November Oval Office event, Trump closed his eyes for a prolonged period and rubbed them like the drowsiest member of Snow White’s seven dwarves.1 And while in court last year, Trump nodded off with a slackened jaw, bobbing his head sluggishly, according to reporters in the camera-free room.
Following last week’s cabinet performance, Fox News’s medical analyst Dr. Marc Siegel compared Trump to legendary inventor Thomas Edison, citing the need for a quick nap on the fly.
“What President Trump does on a daily basis, if you sleep three hours or four hours a night, you’re probably going to close your eyes, whether you are 79 or 49,” he said. “I don’t think that matters.”
“Thomas Edison believed in the ten-minute nap, by the way,” Siegel added. “What would they say? We wouldn’t have electricity, right?” (As the Independent drily pointed out, “Edison actually invented the incandescent lightbulb, not electricity.”)
Perhaps Trump’s sleepiness is the result of long nights spent in the sickly blue light of his phone screen. Perhaps he needs a good power nap. Who among us? Then again, if this were Biden, the comparisons on Fox News would be to the Crypt-Keeper, not Edison.
But good luck asking if something more is going on. The president gets irate when asked repeated questions about his health or stamina.
Pre-check yourself before you wreck yourself
When Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) became the subject of an unflattering police report detailing a kerfuffle with airport security employees in October, she quickly turned the episode into messaging material for her gubernatorial campaign. “Airport staff for MACE,” read a photoshopped picture of her in a baggage-claim area, alongside a caption declaring herself the undisputed champion of Charleston International Airport. It ended, as her social posts often seem to do, with the dramatic tag, “HOLD THE LINE.”
Like many things with Mace, it appears to be a bit of an exaggeration. According to an investigation by the airport police, Mace turned a “minor miscommunication” into a full-blown incident. The Washington Post reports:
Rep. Nancy Mace (R-South Carolina) berated airport police and Transportation Security Administration officers with profanity and demeaning insults during a chaotic airport encounter in October, leaving airport employees “visibly upset,” according to an internal investigation by the Charleston Airport Police Department.
The Nov. 12 investigation report, transcripts of interviews with officers and officials, and video related to their encounters were obtained by The Washington Post on Monday through a public records request. They offer more details from the Oct. 30 confrontation, which was initially disclosed in a police incident report. . . .
The airport holds “a certain level of responsibility” for a “minor miscommunication” about the color of the vehicle that Mace would arrive in, airport police chief James A. Woods wrote in the new report. But Mace’s “continued failure to follow established procedures at the checkpoint” escalated the situation into “a spectacle” and negatively affected airport staff, the report concluded.
Mace’s run for governor has been somewhat fraught. And another report detailing the ways in which she loses her cool probably won’t pacify voters who might be worried about her temperament for the job.
Come with me if you want to live
If you feel like artificial intelligence is being pushed on you from every possible direction, you’re not going crazy. Type an email now, and you get a prompt to write “smarter” or “faster” with AI. Use Google to search for something, and the top results are AI summaries rather than actual links. Social media applications seem bent on integrating AI into every search, post, or scroll. If you don’t want any of this, it can all feel quite exhausting.
News companies have also attempted to integrate AI into workflows, and some products reporters use have incorporated AI features as well. Whether and how to use AI is a dilemma for anyone in a field, and I wanted to share my own experience with it so you as readers can understand how this dilemma could potentially change the way you receive information.
But first, I want to share with you the moment that sparked the idea of sharing this with our Bulwark readers. Pope Leo XIV has taken a critical stand on AI, and in a speech on Friday, he articulated his qualms with it in greater detail:
Human beings are called to be co-workers in the work of creation, not merely passive consumers of content generated by artificial technology. Our dignity lies in our ability to reflect, choose freely, love unconditionally and enter into authentic relationships with others. Artificial intelligence has certainly opened up new horizons for creativity, but it also raises serious concerns about its possible repercussions on humanity’s openness to truth and beauty, and capacity for wonder and contemplation. Recognizing and safeguarding what characterizes the human person and guarantees his or her balanced growth is essential for establishing an adequate framework for managing the consequences of artificial intelligence.
Leo’s comments put good, clear words to my own way of thinking about AI as it relates to reporting from the Capitol. I don’t have a practical use for (or even a real curiosity about) AI outside of the professional space. But there is one area where virtually every journalist uses it.
A lot of Capitol Hill reporters use Otter, an AI-powered transcription service, to quickly get recorded quotes and interviews into text. When I first started reporting more than a decade ago, Otter wasn’t an option. You had to type your recordings out yourself. I’ll admit that in recent years, I’ve occasionally used Otter. But I don’t any more.
Sure, transcribing recorded interviews the old-fashioned way is onerous and slow going, but doing so allows me to relisten to not just what lawmakers said but how they said it. There is value in paying close attention to their emotions—their nervousness or confidence, for instance, in what they’re choosing to reveal on the fly during a short hallway interview or in an off-the-cuff remark before jumping into an elevator. And if you listen to the timing of their pauses, you can sometimes discern if something is preventing them from saying something more.
Of course, it’s possible to relisten to parts of the interview while using Otter. If a lawmaker’s twang or drawl is too thick for the application to interpret effectively, you can relisten to the original audio while simultaneously reading the quote that the software chunders out to verify the person’s wording. But that’s primarily a spot-checking process, not a thorough analysis of the way they’ve spoken.
A lot of time, AI is either hilariously incompetent or doesn’t work as intended. But even when it does what you want, it limits your ability to fully understand and critically reflect on a task. It makes some things move faster, sure. But even in journalism, faster isn’t always better. And in the worst cases, the use of certain AI tools on the reporting and writing side could prevent you, the reader, from receiving a complete and honest understanding of what I’m encountering in the Capitol. That’s why I don’t have any use for it.
I’d be interested in your experience with AI as it relates to your job or daily life. Is it helpful or a hindrance? Let me know in the comments.
“Trump hasn’t had a public embarrassment at that level.” To that, I say, HELL yes he has. I would vociferously dispute your assertion. Trump IS a public embarrassment on every level every day. Just like every other media member in America for ten years, you let him play by different rules. He says and does things EVERY day for ten years, any one of which would still sink ANY other politician EVER. Just in the last two weeks he has made insane, misogynistic, cruel and dishonest comments about SEVEN female reporters that should have in a decent and sane
world caused his resignation. I am serious. I am sick of the media, and frankly most everyone else in this country. Thanks for the reminder that Trump has broken our “regular order” as JVL says, and the quote above from you proves it. Shame on you, and frankly all of us.
Does the Cabinet not know they are being photographed praising this sleepy 🥱 PRESIDENT WHILE THEY ARE FALLING ALL OVER HIM. You are all humiliating yourself and letting the world witness!?