This Might Go a Long Way to Explaining Trump

Donald Trump behaves just like a person in the throes of severe sleep deprivation.

No, this isn't just casting bones and reading entrails. During the nomination and election campaigns Trump repeatedly alluded to how he gets by with just a few hours of sleep every night.

The good news is that this is a well researched problem. Doctors know how it impacts the afflicted. The bad news is that the medical community know how it impacts the afflicted and what that might mean for a president of the United States.

President-elect Donald J. Trump regularly boasts he’s the biggest winner, makes the biggest deals, and appoints the best people, and recently he claimed he’ll be the biggest job creator god ever created. He also brags that he does all these amazing things on next to no sleep. This 70-year-old pre-adolescent made numerous boasts on the campaign trail last year about his sleeping habits, saying he sometimes gets as little as an hour’s sleep a night. Most nights, Trump says he gets by on just three or four hours of sleep, which is half of the amount sleep experts recommend. “I have a great temperament for success,” he told the Chicago Tribune at an event in Illinois last November. “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.” 

Some evidence of the rare truth of this particular brag is evident in the tweets he churns out, many with time signatures in the wee hours. In one case, after a GOP election debate moderated by Megyn Kelly, he tweeted out 30 messages between 2:30 and 4:30am, according to the Washington Post. Daniel Barron, a Yale University neurologist, even gives Trump’s nocturnal habit a name: Trump syndrome. The symptoms are, “a ravenous late-night craving for stimulation that results in a sometimes sporadic, often slender sleep schedule.”

How does this sort of sleep deprivation manifest in others?

Sleep-deprived individuals, according to the American Academy of Sleep Medicine, are impulsive, have difficulty adapting to new situations, are snappish, exhibit poor judgment, have trouble listening to and processing information, experience a lack of concentration and focus, are prone to imagining things, and get distracted easily. The sleep-deprived’s ability to learn new information can drop by up to 40 percent. Moreover, the lack of sufficient REM sleep can lead to the inability to recognize happiness or sadness in others—in other words, a lack of empathy. Sound familiar? 

The article goes on to list six major disasters where lack of sleep played a significant role: the Exxon Valdez grounding; Three Mile Island nuclear accident; Chernobyl; the Challenger disaster; Air France 447; and Britain's Great Heck rail crash.