Homan Says Trump Calls Aides at 2 a.m. to Make Policy

Most bosses text you at 5 p.m. on a Friday and call it an emergency. President Donald Trump, apparently, likes to ring up his top staff at 2 in the morning to hash out actual government policy. That little detail came straight from one of his own guys, and it explains a lot about how the White House runs when the rest of the country is asleep.

Border Czar Tom Homan spilled it on a podcast this week, and once it hit the internet, people could not stop talking about it. Here is what he said, why it matters, and how it lines up with a pile of other reports about the 80-year-old president and his very strange relationship with sleep.

The 2 a.m. Confession That Started It All

Homan was a guest on a podcast hosted by Katie Miller, who is married to White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller. During a rapid-fire round of questions, she asked him a simple one: what is the earliest Trump has ever called in the morning, and the latest at night?

Homan did not dance around it. "I've gotten calls at 2:00 AM. I've got calls at 4:00 AM," he said. He also mentioned that he talks to the president "several times a week," which means these are not one-off wrong numbers. This is a routine. The late-night phone calls are just part of the job if you work near the top of this administration.

To be fair, Homan tried to soften it. He explained that some of those calls happen because Trump is flying back east on Air Force One from the West Coast, where it is still early evening for the boss even though it is the middle of the night everywhere else. "There's times where I'm sleeping and he calls me late at night because he may be on Air Force One flying from the West Coast," he said. Fine. But that only covers travel days, and 2 a.m. calls seem to happen a lot more often than that.

These Aren't Just Chit-Chat Calls

Here is the part that raised eyebrows. According to the reporting, these are not calls where Trump just wants to vent about cable news or ask how the family is doing. He is making policy decisions on the phone with staff who are half-asleep and rubbing their eyes.

Homan's official title is executive associate director for Enforcement and Removal Operations, so when Trump calls him at 2 a.m., they are talking about immigration enforcement and border operations. That is real stuff with real consequences for real people. The idea that big calls get made when one guy is groggy and the other is running on no sleep is exactly what critics jumped on. One CNN host put it bluntly, asking, "With respect, if you're doing this in 24 hours, how well-thought-out could this be?"

That is the whole worry in one sentence. Big decisions deserve clear heads. Anyone who has tried to answer a serious work email at 2 a.m. knows you are not exactly at your sharpest. The half-awake staff on the other end of the line are the ones expected to turn those overnight orders into actual government action.

The Truth Social Posts Tell the Same Story

If you have ever scrolled Truth Social at a weird hour and seen a fresh Trump post, you already had a hint about his schedule. The numbers back it up. On one Thursday earlier this month, the president published 19 posts between midnight and 2:30 a.m. Nineteen. In two and a half hours. That is a man wide awake and typing while most of America is snoring.

It goes deeper than one busy night, too. An analysis of his overnight posting found there were only five days in April when Trump appeared to have had enough time for a full night of sleep. Five days out of the whole month. The rest of the time, his posting patterns suggested he was up late, up early, or both.

There is also a funny wrinkle to the flip side. On the rare mornings Trump is up and moving before 11 a.m., reporters noticed it usually means one thing: he is heading out to play golf. So the early bird version of the president tends to show up for tee times, not staff meetings.

"Mikey, Are You Sleeping?"

Homan is not the only one getting these calls. House Speaker Mike Johnson gets them too, and Trump has a signature way of opening the conversation. According to a Wall Street Journal feature, when Trump calls Johnson late at night, he starts by asking, "Mikey, are you sleeping?"

That is not a question. That is a taunt. Trump seems to treat staying up late like a badge of honor, and he pokes fun at the people who would rather be in bed. For the record, Johnson is a busy man. That same feature revealed he had 1,477 unread text messages and 829 unheard voicemails on his phone. And yet no matter how buried he is or what time it is, Johnson always takes the president's call.

The sleep taunts are part of a bigger pattern. The late-night calls do not stop with immigration officials. Cabinet secretaries, congressional leaders, and senior aides all get them. Multiple officials and reporters have described the same thing. At this point, the phone ringing at an ungodly hour is basically a defining feature of how Trump governs in his second term.

What the Reporters Who Cover Him Say

None of this is brand new information. Trump's night-owl habits got a detailed write-up in the book "Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump," written by New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan. They described a president who has "never been a big sleeper" but who, in his second term, appears to be "sleeping even less, keeping stranger hours than he had in his first term."

The book laid out how staff learned to read the signs. When they could not reach Trump between 8 and 10 in the morning, they figured out what it meant. As the authors put it, those quiet mornings usually 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."

There is even a story about an aide who could not get a response one morning and physically went to check on him, only to find the president still fast asleep. Sometimes he cannot fall asleep until after 5 a.m. and then sleeps until 10 a.m. or later. So the schedule flips: awake and working through the night, then out cold through the morning.

Why the Podcast Format Loosened Everyone Up

Part of why this stuff keeps coming out is the setting. Katie Miller's podcast has turned into a place where Trump officials relax and say things they might not say in a formal press conference. The casual vibe gets them talking. Her show has become a steady source of candid peeks inside the White House, and this episode is a great example.

The episode dropped on a Tuesday night and blew up fast. It is worth remembering how nonchalant Homan was about the whole thing. He was not confessing to a scandal. He was answering a game-show style question, and he casually admitted that the president of the United States routinely calls senior officials at 2 and 4 in the morning to talk active policy. That casual tone is exactly what made it land so hard.

Oh, and the same episode had another moment worth flagging. Homan warned of possible "bloodshed" while talking about enforcement, and Katie Miller pivoted right back to her light "would you rather" questions. The quick subject change was almost as talked-about as the sleep answers themselves.

The Takeaway

Put it all together and you get a clear picture. A president who posts 19 times before 2:30 a.m., who calls his border czar several times a week at all hours, who teases the House Speaker for wanting to sleep, and who staffers know not to bother before 10 a.m. because he was up all night. Homan's little podcast answer was not a leak. It was a confirmation of something reporters and aides have been describing for a while now.

Whether you think a 2 a.m. policy call is dedication or a problem probably depends on how you feel about the guy making the calls. But the schedule itself is not really in question anymore. When the phone rings in the middle of the night in Trump's Washington, the people on the receiving end already know who it is.