President Donald Trump evoked a speedy Disney character during a wild early-morning posting spree.
The president, 80, often posts a flurry of “Truths” on his Truth Social account at odd hours. Thursday was no different. From around midnight to 2.30 a.m. Trump posted 19 times, covering topics from the defense budget, international relations, the Freedom 250 Grand Prix, and his Trump Accounts for children.
He also shared a slew of glossy videos that painted him as a hero. The strangest of these was one that featured a speech from an animated car, over images of the president going about his duties.
“Okay, here we go. Focus. Speed. I am speed. One winner, forty-two losers,” the viewer hears. The voice is that of actor Owen Wilson, who plays Lightning McQueen in Cars.
“I eat losers for breakfast. Breakfast? Maybe I should have had breakfast? Brekkie could be good for me. No, no, no, focus. Speed. Faster than fast, quicker than quick. I am Lightning,” the monologue from the 2006 children’s movie continues.
It is unclear whether Trump enjoys modern Disney movies. He has historically been a vocal critic of the studio, publicly condemning the company as a “woke and disgusting shadow of its former self” over its insistence on diverse casting in modern films.
However, he does appear to enjoy the speech from Cars, even if a man of Trump’s age should perhaps be enjoying it at a more sociable hour.
Much of his social media strategy is thought to be devised by his closest aides, including his dutiful “human printer,” Natalie Harp. The 34-year-old, who has been bolted to the president’s hip of late, reportedly prints out reams of praise, AI slop, and word salad and presents it to the president. It later becomes the basis of his late-night and early-morning tirades, which are sometimes physically posted by Harp and others.
The blonde former host at the far-right One America News Network, who has a “very unhealthy” relationship with Trump, according to her estranged brother, is constantly searching for Truth Social fodder, journalist and author Michael Wolff told the Daily Beast’s Inside Trump’s Head podcast last month.
“The stuff that she prints out is this laudatory stuff. Anything laudatory, she’s searching for at all times and then giving to the president,” Wolff said. “Other things that will cause him ire—actually, that would be her agenda. So things that cause her ire—that will also cause the president ire—that goes to him.”
His latest posting frenzy came after the president appeared to struggle to keep his eyes open as he was lavished with praise by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth during a summit at the U.S. Army War College in Pennsylvania on Wednesday.
Hegseth, 46, began showering his boss with compliments, saying, “Because of President Trump’s leadership, we have an entirely different department.” But Trump struggled to keep his eyes open as Hegseth spoke.
The Daily Beast previously reported on a concerning trend in how often the president posts on Truth Social between 9 p.m. and 6 a.m., finding that there were only five days in April when the 80-year-old president could have had a full night’s sleep.
The worrying lack of sleep was also detailed in the book Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump by New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan.
The book reveals that Trump often starts his days early by making phone calls, posting on social media, or watching television. However, there are some mornings when White House aides are unable to reach Trump, which they “soon came to realize meant he had stayed up all night, on the phone or watching television or both, only to finally catch some sleep around four or five in the morning.”
Haberman and Swan noted that while Trump has “never been a big sleeper,” it now appears to staff that he “is sleeping even less, keeping stranger hours than he had in his first term.”
