What Happens in the White House at Midnight

We shouldn’t have to live like this

Trump’s time in office has been dark, and at the White House, the lights aren’t on to elucidate the horror of the president posting videos of death on social media.

Picture the White House a little before midnight on a Tuesday.

The West Wing is dark. The press office is empty. The staff who will spend tomorrow answering for tonight have gone home to their families. Across the White House grounds, Secret Service officers are standing their posts in the cold.

Upstairs, one light is still on.

The most powerful man in the world is alone with his phone. Nobody is reading over his shoulder. Nobody is asking whether this one should wait until morning. There is no one left in the building whose job is to say, “Best not to send that, sir.”

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Now picture the rest of the country a few hours later.

Alarms go off in bedrooms from Maine to Arizona. Before the coffee is made, before anyone checks the weather, millions of people reach for their phones and do something that has sadly become a habit over the last 10 years: they check to see what the President did while they were asleep.

Some of them are bracing for it. Some of them are just tired.

One Night

It started in the evening. The President shared real footage of a young man named William Chapman in his final moments, as he was attacked and killed by a tiger at a wildlife park in England. Trump sent it to his millions of followers with a caption: “Don’t ever mess with nature!”

A little later, he posted a montage of lions attacking people, set to upbeat music.

Then, close to midnight, came a video generated by artificial intelligence. In it, Donald Trump chases a tiger across a lawn, tackles it, and then rolls around playing with it, smiling, while “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” plays in the background. It was, in effect, a parody of a man’s death, with the President cast as the hero.

Just after midnight, he moved on to Greenland. “Massive Oil, Gas, and Mineral Exploration is getting ready to begin in our new and beautiful Greenland!” he wrote.

The Morning After

William Chapman’s family has said he suffered from significant mental illness for years. They were still grieving a young man who had struggled for a long time, and they had to watch his last moments become viral content. I’m not going to describe that footage, and I’d ask you not to go looking for it. He deserved better, and so does his family.

In Greenland, a government official had to go on CNN and correct the President. Greenland banned new oil exploration back in 2021, and the security agreement signed last month didn’t hand over any rights to drill or mine. “We are very far away from ‘massive’ exploration,” Greenland’s deputy mining minister said.

I’ve been thinking a lot about how to describe what it feels like to live through nights like this one.

Citizens of a healthy democracy aren’t supposed to wake up afraid of what their own leader did while they slept. You’re supposed to be able to disagree with your president and still trust that he is mentally and emotionally stable enough to not wake you up with something cruel or unhinged. That basic expectation is gone.

The dread is bad enough. But worse is the numbness that comes after it. Every night like this one pushes the boundaries of what we think of as normal.

What happened on Tuesday night should stop our country cold. Instead, for a lot of people, it was one more strange headline on a Wednesday, scrolled past on the way to something else.

I have a little boy at home. He’s going to grow up with some idea of what a president is supposed to be, the same way I did. I don’t want this to be the picture that shapes his thinking into adulthood. I don’t want any kid to think the most powerful person in the country is supposed to act like this, or that it’s normal for the adults around him to just shrug and move on.

And there’s a deeper loss, too. In our worst moments as a country, the president used to be the person who held us together.

Ronald Reagan speaking to the nation’s schoolchildren the day the Challenger exploded. Barack Obama in a Charleston church, pausing his eulogy to sing “Amazing Grace” until the whole congregation sang with him. Whatever you thought of their politics, they knew that part of the job was carrying the country’s grief.

We’ve gotten so used to living without a president who comforts us that we’ve almost forgotten we ever had one.

Look, every president has bad moments. So does every one of us.

But every airplane I flew in the Air Force had a crew and a checklist, because even the best pilot gets tired, and one person’s worst moment should never be allowed to become everyone’s disaster. And this presidency has nobody there to stop the worst instincts of an increasingly erratic man.

That’s why the dread so many people feel in the morning isn’t hysteria. It’s a reasonable response to an unreasonable situation.

Refuse to Get Used to It

So here’s what I’d ask of you: don’t get used to this.

Don’t let the numbness win. The moment a president posting a stranger’s death at midnight stops bothering you is the moment the people who want this to feel normal have gotten exactly what they wanted. Hold on to the part of you that still flinches. That’s your conscience doing its job.

And remember what normal felt like, so you’ll be able to demand it of the next president.

I know that presidents can be honest without being perfect. They can disagree with you without frightening you. They can comfort a grieving country instead of adding to its pain. We had that, and we can have it again.

There’s a good chance that late tonight, the light will be on upstairs at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. That part, for now, isn’t up to us.

But how we wake up tomorrow, and the kind of country we decide to be in November, still is.

— Adam