President Trump is battling with White House staff over how much work he actually has to do.
The 79-year-old president, who has repeatedly dozed through public appearances in his second term, has begged White House staff to give him “fewer, more important meetings” during his average workday.
Trump told the Wall Street Journal that he wanted a lighter workload so that he could use his time more “efficiently,” not because of his advanced age. Unfortunately for the president, his staff has not yet pared down his schedule.
Trump’s demand is one of the many internal conflicts revealed in the Journal’s bombshell report about Trump’s health, as White House staff scramble to make America’s oldest-ever president appear fit for the job.
These struggles include the White House’s panic over Trump’s sleepy public appearances.
Trump’s aides have resorted to urging him to keep his eyes open during public events. According to an insider, they’ve had to “counsel” the president not to shut his eyes when he slogs through boring, televised meetings, “fearing the optics of his appearing to fall asleep.”
When Trump learned that the Journal was going to publish a story on his health—a topic the Daily Beast has led the charge in covering while other publications avoided it—he phoned the paper to give a litany of excuses.
On the topic of his repeated dozing, Trump told the Journal that he isn’t actually falling asleep, but that he’ll “just close [his eyes].”
“It’s very relaxing to me,” he said of shutting his eyes. “Sometimes they’ll take a picture of me blinking, blinking, and they’ll catch me with the blink.”
In an effort to keep Trump engaged through boring meetings, White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles has urged Cabinet members to keep their presentations to the president brief—a plea that fell on deaf ears for a December 3 meeting that found Trump struggling to remain awake as Cabinet members sucked up to him for two and a half hours.
Part of the reason Trump may struggle to stay awake during the day is that he reportedly has difficulty sleeping at night. He admitted to the Journal that he’ll stay up until 2 a.m. and text administration figures to criticize their television appearances. On Air Force One, aides have to rotate sleeping shifts through the night to engage Trump, the Journal reports.
The White House chafed at the implication that Trump’s health affects his responsibilities as president.
“President Trump is the hardest-working president the American people have ever had. He is literally always working around the clock, seven days a week, to better our country,” Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told the Daily Beast.
Leavitt has been busted lying about Trump’s health before, and in Thursday’s Journal report, Trump himself blew up her excuse that Trump’s bruised hands come from the president shaking hands all day.
Trump revealed he takes 325 milligrams of aspirin a day for “cardiac prevention,” which is quadruple the 81 milligram dose the Mayo Clinic says is most common for cardiac health.
“They’d rather have me take the smaller one,” Trump said. “I take the larger one, but I’ve done it for years, and what it does do is it causes bruising.”
Trump insisted to the Journal that he had “plenty of energy,” which he credited to his parents.
“Genetics are very important,” he said. “And I have very good genetics.”
Trump’s father, Fred Trump, suffered from Alzheimer’s disease before he died in 1999. The Alzheimer’s Association notes that “those who have a parent or sibling living with Alzheimer’s are more likely to develop the disease than those who do not have a first-degree relative with Alzheimer’s.”
