Mr. Trump: Stop tweeting and go back to bed

Press Secretary and Homeland Security Secretary insisted the revised order is 'not a travel ban'

It’s no secret that President Trump prefers tweeting over talking to the public — particularly when nearly everyone else in the country is fast asleep. Monday mornings are bad enough for everyone; pity the administration lawyers and aides who woke up today to find that their boss had undone months of their efforts to get his executive order barring travel to the United States from a number of Muslim-majority countries through the Supreme Court.

Both his press secretary and Homeland Security Secretary have insisted the revised order is “not a travel ban.” Early this morning, the president begged to differ.

He went on to slam the “watered down, politically correct” version of the order that his lawyers are hoping the court will accept, tweeting:

There’s a pattern here. A quick look at Mr. Trump’s Twitter archive shows that some of his angriest and most flamboyant accusations are issued early in the morning. For example, on May 16, he offered a questionable defense against charges that he’d shared with the Russians sensitive information from an ally about the Islamic State, insisting that he had the “absolute right” to do so:

A few days later, he whined about the appointment of Robert Mueller as special counsel for the F.B.I. investigation into ties between members of the Trump team and Russia:

Not that he would listen, but someone on his staff should tell him that the early morning is not his friend.

Like most aspects of human biology, cognitive function has peaks and valleys that follow the day-night cycle. Studies show that alertness, cognitive speed, memory and abstract reasoning are worst around when a person typically wakes up, and best a few hours before he habitually falls asleep.

So for most people, the middle of the night and the very early morning are not great times to make decisions, to say nothing of making policy pronouncements or political commentary. At those times, you are likely to be close to so-called REM or dream sleep, which we all know brings about intense and often distorted emotions and thoughts, often about the events in our everyday lives. These are times for reflection, not for social media.

Not surprisingly, the president makes his sleeping habits, like so much else, a point of pride, bragging about his allegedly Spartan need for slumber. “You know, I’m not a big sleeper, I like three hours, four hours, I toss, I turn, I beep-de-beep, I want to find out what’s going on,” he told the Chicago Tribune.

Whether the president actually gets as little sleep as he claims is open to question. But if true, it certainly isn’t helping with his famously irascible behavior and impulsive decision-making style.

Might we have a sleep-deprived occupant in the White House? Quite possibly — and that’s something that should worry us, because it could contribute to the political chaos that Mr. Trump generates.

Sleep deprivation can impair attention, memory, thinking speed and reasoning. This is something that all physicians know firsthand from their days of residency training, when they spent many sleepless nights on-call.

For example, studies show that medical residents who slept less than five hours a night were much more likely to make medical errors and report serious accidents. They were also more prone to get into arguments with colleagues and to drink alcohol. Indeed, last year researchers estimated that medical errors may cause more than 250,000 deaths a year. Some of these surely originate with sleep-deprived doctors.

This, in large part, is the reason that we strictly limit the number of consecutive hours that trainees can work: to protect both patients and doctors from tragic errors.

The president is under no comparable restriction, but perhaps he should be. After all, the stakes in the White House are considerably higher than in a medical office. One patient death from medical error is bad enough, but imagine the incalculable harm a sleep-deprived, irritable and impulsive president with access to the nuclear codes could wreak.

So I have a bit of unsolicited medical advice for President Trump: For the sake of the nation, stop tweeting and go back to bed.

©2017 The New York Times News Service