By Joe Sommerlad
Copyright independent
California Gov. Gavin Newsom has attacked President Donald Trump as “Dozy Don,” sharing a brief clip of the commander-in-chief appearing to close his eyes during a White House Antifa roundtable on Wednesday.
Newsom has weaponized his official Press Office X account and his own Instagram account in recent months to launch ruthless parodies of Trump’s own eccentric posting style.
His latest effort is an obvious nod to the president’s own cruel broadsides against his predecessor, Joe Biden, whom he regularly referred to as “Sleepy Joe” as part of his argument that the Democrat was too old to serve a second term at 81 years of age.
Now, the oldest occupant of the White House, himself at 79, Trump has an undeniably exhausting schedule. He did appear to perk up when Secretary of State Marco Rubio informed him during the same event that Israel and Hamas were close to agreeing on a peace deal for Gaza. The president subsequently announced this last night, inviting fresh calls for him to receive the Nobel Peace Prize.
MAGA mainstays JD Vance and Kid Rock have previously revealed that Trump is in the habit of calling them at odd hours of the night, and Attorney General Pam Bondi recently reflected on his apparent lack of sleep during a recent appearance on The Katie Miller Podcast.
“None of us can keep up with him; we always joke,” she said. “I don’t know how he does it. I mean, none of us know when he sleeps. He’s working all the time, and it’s just constant for him.
“There aren’t enough hours in the day for any of us,” she added.
The president’s personal physician said during his first term in 2018 that he only sleeps for four to five hours a night, well short of the seven to nine hours recommended for men of his age.
The National Institute on Aging said that “many older people don’t sleep well” and are more likely to take medications affecting their slumber.
A good night’s sleep is essential for humans to function well during the day, the NIA states, and “can help you learn, create new memories, respond quickly, solve problems, pay attention, make decisions, and be creative.”
But Trump has previously dismissed the need for rest, telling his supporters on the campaign trail: “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.”
Newsom, who is nearing the end of his second term and is expected to run for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2028, has emerged as his party’s most potent critic of Trump this year, not least through his online mockery.
Appearing on CBS’s The Late Show with Stephen Colbert last month, the governor unveiled his new range of merchandise spoofing the president and his MAGA movement, which includes a T-shirt showing Rock, Tucker Carlson, and the late Hulk Hogan praying over him in a pose borrowed from Michelangelo and red baseball caps bearing the legend: “Newsom Was Right About Everything!”
Newsom said the thinking behind his “novel” strategy to deploy humor against the administration, breaking with Democratic “stiffness,” was to “put a mirror up to Trump and the absurdity of what’s going on in this country, the absurdity of Donald Trump, the absurdity of these networks [like Fox News] playing into it.”
His most recent satires have included spoofs of Trump’s health concerns, mock adverts for his own line of “Newsom wine,” and ridicule over the president’s “Escalatorgate” disaster at the United Nations.