It's 2:17 a.m. and Donald Trump Is Studying His Team's Video Replays

What do you do most mornings at 2:17 a.m.?

Safe to say, I am almost always sound asleep in deep darkness and brisk mountain air.

But nights are quite a bit different for the current commander in chief and leader of the free world.

President Donald Trump is known for not wasting many precious hours sleeping; almost the opposite of his predecessor, who spent 40 percent of his term on vacation.

Four to five hours of sleep a night is said to be the norm for the 78-year-old Trump. And his doctor says Trump handles such little sleep quite well.

This is ridiculous.

The non-stop No. 47 president has now been caught doing game-film study in the wee hours of the morning. He was watching reruns of the day's political events on C-SPAN. In the middle of the night. It's true.

The world discovered this by accident.

During last week's Cabinet meeting in the White House, Trump was overheard telling U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer that he had watched his testimony to Congress. And that he had come across it two nights in a row.

Well, actually, two very early mornings in a row.

"You were on every night, at 3 o’clock in the morning!” the president said, sounding impressed.

Following a reader's tip, Playbook author Jack Blanchard did some checking with C-SPAN. And sure enough. The Greer video ran at 2:23 a.m. on Wednesday, April 9, and 2:17 a.m. on Thursday, April 10.

Then, at last week's Republican National Congressional Committee's black-tie banquet, Trump recalled watching House Speaker Mike Johnson on C-SPAN. "I happened to listen to him. He was on C-SPAN 1. That's a big upgrade, right? I was listening as I was putting on the tie."

"As Mike said before - I happened to listen to him. He was on C-SPAN 1. That's a big upgrade, right? I was listening as I was putting on the tie. How does it look? He was on C-SPAN 1."

- Pres. Trump at NRCC dinner - National Building Museum pic.twitter.com/rmVoWiZd8G
— Howard Mortman (@HowardMortman) April 9, 2025

Later during those same dinner remarks, the president said while watching TV late, he had learned of falling gasoline prices "in between my watching my great friends on C-SPAN.”

Watch: Pres. Trump Pops Into the Back of AF1 With Media, Even Making a Joke About His Annual Physical

For a very long time, almost from its beginning 46 years ago last month, I have regarded nonprofit C-SPAN as a national treasure, especially since I am an admitted political junkie. And someone who was often writing for work about events that the network carried without advertising or pontificating.

It's as if the network thinks that, given access to events and facts free of shading, Americans can think for themselves.

Over the years, I remember consuming hours of its coverage of presidential candidates in New Hampshire living rooms and at Iowa picnics, giving me a real sense of their personal skills and interactions at widely separated events I was unable to attend.

And providing a video transcript to check quotes. (I noticed even then that Joe Biden was more interested in telling his stories than listening to those of voters.)

Then, came 1999 and 2000, and, lo and behold, I was working for a presidential campaign, attending such events. I already knew the ropes.

Wednesday night, C-SPAN will even carry live, unfiltered coverage at 8 ET of the debate among candidates who want to be prime minister of Canada while it's still an independent country.

C-SPAN's video archives and transcripts now contain almost 300,000 hours of its event coverage from today, yesterday, last weekend, and all the way back comprehensively to 1987.

The archives are even searchable. Say, for instance, ex-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton wanted to reminisce about her staged exasperations when she was playing defense during Trey Gowdy's House oversight hearings on the Benghazi massacre.

Clinton could relive her sad histrionics about the night of Sept. 11, 2012, when President Barack Obama was AWOL somewhere. His administration had no backup or rescue plan for the county's representatives under attack.

That left Clinton, who had cut embassy security there, to preside alone so ineffectively over the murders of an ambassador and three aides by a roving mob of terrorists in Libya, which had become a lawless state after Obama ordered U.S. forces to help European allies oust Moammar Gaddafi. He was ultimately torn apart by a mob.

That's when Clinton uttered her infamous self-congratulatory quote, "We came. We saw. He died."

Except that was followed by four Americans who came, got caught, and died. A U.S. government review found no one at fault.

Editor's Note: President Trump is leading America into the "Golden Age" as Democrats try desperately to stop it.

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