TRUMP GARBLE HAS SLEEP EXPERTS ATWITTER

Tweet may show he’s not getting enough rest, neurologists say

The tweet came, as they often do, when many on the East Coast were sleeping.

When President Trump complained to the twitterverse about all the “negative press covfefe,” just after midnight Wednesday, sleep experts saw it as more than just a laughable lapse.

“Cognitive tasks like spelling are impaired by poor sleep,” says neurologist Chris Winter, author of the new book The Sleep

Solution. “I would think something’s up, to put it mildly.”

Trump has claimed he likes to get three to four hours of sleep a night. He shows “many classic signs of sleep deprivation,” including bad decision making, inability to focus, irritability and impulsiveness, says Winter, who

“Cognitive tasks like spelling are impaired by poor sleep. I would think something’s up, to put it mildly.” Neurologist Chris Winter

describes himself as “a fairly conservative guy.”

White House spokesman Sean Spicer suggested the typo was intentional, saying, “A small group of people know exactly what he meant.” A new study in the Journal of

Neuroscience suggests that chronic sleep deprivation in mice causes microglia — brain cells that get rid of toxins and clear debris — to eat small pieces of the synapses, the connections that allow neurons to communicate with each other. The study did not mention Trump.

If this activation is prolonged, it could “trigger a chain of events” that leads to cellular degeneration, which is related to cognitive impairment, says neuroscientist Chiara Cirelli, who led the research.

Sleep is “very, very impor-

tant” to normalize the functions of the brain’s synapses, she says.

“I don’t think we know of any cognition function that isn’t affected by sleep deprivation,” says Cirelli, a physician who directs the Wisconsin Center for Sleep and Consciousness and is a professor of psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s medical school.

She cites effects on working memory, the “capacity to integrate a lot of information and even appreciation of humor.”

When seeing and reading about Trump, Cirelli notes, “I cannot not think about this.”

Aetna CEO Mark Bertolini takes sleep so seriously the company pays employees up to $300 a year if they regularly sleep at least seven hours a night as shown on their tracking devices.

Trump’s latest questionable tweet, about three days after he returned from a nine-day, overseas trip, was a sign he could be suffering from jet lag or may have even nodded off at the keyboard, Winter says.

White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus said the president didn’t get much sleep on Air Force One on the way to Saudi Arabia. In his speech in Riyadh, Trump departed from his prepared remarks, saying “Islamic extremism” instead of the more carefully crafted phrase “radical Islamist extremism.”

Early Wednesday, Twitter night owls wondered what explained the lack of a follow-up tweet until six hours later, when the typo-tweet was deleted and replaced by one making light of his misspelling.

Some of Trump’s most memorable tweets have been even later at night — or earlier in the morning, depending on one’s schedule.

At 2:30 a.m. Sept. 30 when he tweeted about a former Miss Universe contestant he knew who started campaigning for his opponent in the presidential election, former secretary of State Hillary Clinton. He suggested his tens of millions of Twitter followers should “check out sex tape and past” and asked rhetorically whether Clinton had helped her to become a citizen.

At 3:40 a.m. Aug. 7, Trump wrote that then-Fox News host Megyn Kelly “really bombed tonight.”

At 6:40 a.m. Feb. 15, the media were “going crazy with their conspiracy theories and blind hatred,” Trump tweeted. Last week, the Chicago Tribune wrote of Trump: “He stifles yawns. His eyes narrow. And ultimately, when he garbles part of his speech, an aide explains that President Donald Trump is ‘just an exhausted guy.’ ”

“Sleep evangelist” Arianna Huffington has used Trump as her highest-profile argument for a good night’s sleep since her Colby College commencement speech last May.

Huffington is liberal in her politics, but she is an equal-opportunity sleep critic. She compared Trump’s erratic and occasionally questionable behavior to that of former president Bill Clinton, who also boasted about how little sleep he got when he was president.

“Mood swings, fogged memories, incomprehension of a comprehensible problem and the occasional re-tweeting of Mussolini,” Huffington told Colby graduates, according to an article on CentralMaine.com. “These are all symptoms of chronic sleep deprivation, according to the American Academy of Sleep, except the retweeting Mussolini part — that’s just pure Donald Trump.” Huffington, author of The Sleep

Revolution, compares sleep deprivation to being drunk.

“I’ve never smoked a cigarette in my life,” Trump told Rolling

Stone in 2011. “I’ve never had a drink, never had a joint, never had any drugs, never even had a cup of coffee.”

He did confess to liking a “little caffeine,” noting that “Coke or Pepsi boosts you up a little.” The habit continues. In April, the Associated Press reported Trump pushed a red button that presidents have long used, and a White House butler brought Trump a Coke.

Winter says he slept three to four hours a night during his medical residency and that took a toll on his health as he was eating poorly and not exercising, which he says could also describe Trump. “You don’t want to be in that situation if you’re taking a spleen out — or the leader of the free world,” Winter says.

“I don’t think we know of any cognition function that isn’t affected by sleep deprivation.” Neuroscientist Chiara Cirelli