Will the real «Sleepy Joe» please stand up?

Trump is becoming the «Sleepy Joe» of his own attacks. For years, he built a central pillar of his political message on the claim that Joe Biden lacked energy, stamina, and alertness — a narrative he reinforced with constant mockery, viral clips, and the now-iconic nickname he repeated at every rally. Now Trump is literally sleeping on the job, caught nodding off for about an hour while his Cabinet praised him on camera, and he can no longer hide it as close-up shots of his drooping eyelids ricochet across every network. What might have passed once as an awkward moment is turning into a pattern, documented by mainstream outlets and fact-checkers, even as some conservative commentators on Fox News scramble to spin his mid-meeting naps as a sign of brilliance or a clever power move. The result is a surreal split-screen: Trump still branding Biden as «Sleepy Joe» in his rhetoric, while the visual evidence increasingly suggests that the president who looks exhausted on camera is Trump himself.

But that storyline is boomeranging back: during another Cabinet meeting filmed on camera, Trump spent more than an hour visibly battling — and often losing — a fight against sleep, his eyes closing for long stretches as his own secretaries showered him with praise. It wasn’t the first such moment, but it’s becoming harder and harder for him to hide, especially when close-up shots capture every slow blink. And despite Trump insisting he’s «sharper than I was 25 years ago,» the footage told a very different story — one of a president now displaying the very signs of fatigue he once weaponized against his rival.

Trump’s greatest hits against Biden’s supposed sleepiness now read like a setup for his own predicament. Back in November 2021, after Biden visibly closed his eyes during the COP26 climate summit in Scotland, Trump blasted out an email to supporters sneering that «Nobody that has true enthusiasm and belief in a subject will ever fall asleep!» He kept leaning on the same theme over the next years, branding Biden «Sleepy Joe» at rallies and, after Biden’s fiery State of the Union in early 2024, complaining that «most of the time, he looks like he’s falling asleep.» In June 2024, he escalated to the blanket claim that «He falls asleep at every single event.» By September 2024, Trump was still drilling the same line on the campaign trail, mocking Biden for supposedly dozing on the beach and asking his crowd, «How do you fall asleep when cameras are raging, right?» He even told podcast host Andrew Schulz: «You’ll never see me sleeping in front of cameras.» Those quotes now collide awkwardly with the images of Trump apparently nodding off for close to an hour in front of his own Cabinet.

As Trump sat at the center of the long Cabinet table, his secretaries took turns delivering glowing monologues about his leadership, his trade policies, his reshaping of federal agencies, and even his supposed global achievements — an orchestrated cascade of praise that often sounded more like a loyalty recital than a policy meeting. Yet while they lauded him with superlatives, Trump appeared to drift in and out of sleep, his eyes closing for long stretches as he nodded slightly in his chair, the contrast between their scripted enthusiasm and his visible fatigue growing more surreal by the minute. By the time Kristi Noem launched into her now-familiar detour «Thank you for no hurricanes this season.» The scene had become almost absurd: a president dozing through his own mythmaking, as his Cabinet embellished accomplishments he wasn’t even awake to hear.

In that earlier Oval Office appearance, the pattern was already on display. Seated at the Resolute Desk for what was supposed to be a tightly choreographed event, Trump spent long stretches with his eyes drooping shut as aides and guests spoke just a few feet away, the pauses in his expression stretching well beyond a normal blink and turning into sequences where he looked completely disconnected from the room. Camera angles from different networks all captured the same thing: a president slipping into brief pockets of unresponsiveness while the microphones were still live. The images rocketed around social media not just because he looked tired, but because they clashed so directly with his own bravado, including his boast to a podcast host that «You’ll never see me sleeping in front of cameras.»