When President Donald Trump has trouble sleeping, he picks up his smartphone and doom scrolls through social media, posting and reposting things in search of the dopamine hit that comes from seeing a post go viral and whip up millions of his followers on Truth Social.
It’s a pattern that dates back to his earliest days in politics, when he would set the political world alight in 140 (later 280) character bursts on the site formerly known as Twitter.
According to sources who served in both administrations and across his three presidential campaigns, Trump frequently uses his posting sprees as a gambit to force television networks to interrupt their pre-planned coverage to report on whatever utterance emanated from his thumbs on any given day — often marveling at the speed with which his words would move from his phone screen to a cable network chyron at the bottom of his TV screen.
Over the last 10 years — Trump’s entire political career — his posts elicit a predictable outraged reaction from Democrats and left-leaning pundits on the various television networks, and usually polite demurrals from the Republican members of Congress who’ve learned how to deftly blow off reporter questions about whatever outrage-du-jour the president has served up over his mobile phone.
But that pattern appears to be breaking more and more as the second year of Trump’s second term unfolds.
Two months ago, the president’s posting habit got him into serious trouble when a video appeared on his Truth Social account showing Barack and Michelle Obama’s faces superimposed onto apes in a jungle, swaying side to side and smiling as the song “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” played in the background.
The reaction both online and off was swift condemnation and claims of blatant racism — including from several Republican lawmakers — despite early attempts by the White House to dismiss the outrage as liberal overreaction and oversensitivity to what Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt dismissed as “an internet meme video depicting President Trump as the King of the Jungle and Democrats as characters from the Lion King.”
But over the 12 hours between when it was posted and deleted, something happened. Republicans began to speak out.
South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott, a close ally of Trump’s and the only Black member of the upper chamber, wrote that he was “praying it was fake” and called the video “the most racist thing I’ve seen out of this White House.”
Rep. Mike Lawler, a New York Republican whose district voted for former Vice President Kamala Harris in 2024, also slammed the president’s post as “wrong and incredibly offensive — whether intentional or a mistake” and said it “should be deleted immediately with an apology offered.”
It was the rare instance in which Trump had been forced to respond to criticism by retracting something he’d said on social media — even though he later maintained that he hadn’t seen the offending portion of the video.
Between that February day and this past weekend, Trump’s unhinged posting habits would continue without any hint of him feeling chastised by the criticism from his own side.
Amid the ongoing war with Iran he started on Feb. 28, Trump threatened to attack Iranian power plants and water desalination plants — civilian infrastructure protected under international law — on multiple occasions.
A week ago, he appeared to threaten what many experts would consider to meet the definition of genocide when he took to Truth Social to warn that “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again” if the Iranian government did not capitulate to his demand to agree to a ceasefire deal and open the Strait of Hormuz by 8 pm last Tuesday.
That series of posts also triggered widespread outrage and condemnation — including from a Chicago-born Catholic priest named Robert Prevost, who, like Trump, found himself in a new, powerful job last year after winning an election.
Prevost, who is better known nowadays as Pope Leo XIV, is the 267th Bishop of Rome, the head of the Catholic Church, and perhaps the only living American whose fame rivals Trump’s in the current moment.
And because the Pope, as the saying goes, is Catholic, he’s been prone to make statements advocating for peace. He even criticized Trump’s call for Iranian civilization to “die” if Tehran didn’t heed his demands as “truly unacceptable.”
Trump took it personally, it seems, because he lashed out at the pontiff late Sunday in a bizarre Truth Social missive blasting Leo as “WEAK” on crime and “terrible” on foreign policy, posted as part of a late-night spree that also saw him upload an AI-generated image of himself as Jesus.
Some of his Republican allies, such as Vice President JD Vance, appeared to do the usual waffling and explaining away when pressed on Trump’s attack on the Pope, with Vance, the administration's most prominent Catholic, opining on Fox News that “it would be best for the Vatican to stick to matters of morality” and “let the president of the United States stick to dictating American public policy.”
But the Trump-as-Christ meme appeared to be a bridge too far. It depicted the president in a white robe and red sash with a glowing outstretched hand placed on the forehead of a man in a hospital bed. Trump is seen surrounded by patriotic symbols including a waving U.S. flag, the Statue of Liberty and an eagle flying above fireworks and fighter jets.
“I did post it and I thought it was me as a doctor and had to do with Red Cross,” Trump told reporters outside the White House in a hastily arranged press conference on Monday. “It’s supposed to be me as a doctor, making people better. And I do make people better. I make people a lot better.”
He then blamed “fake news” for comparing the image to Jesus and refused to apologize to the pope, who he claimed had “said things that are wrong.”
Yet the president appeared to understand that he’d once again crossed a line after his post was met with a flurry of criticism from right-wing personalities and religious figures.
Isabel Brown, a Catholic podcaster for right-wing outlet The Daily Wire, called the president’s post “disgusting and unacceptable, but also a profound misreading of the American people experiencing a true and beautiful revival of faith in Christ in the midst of our broken culture.”
Michael Knowles, another right-wing Catholic figure at The Daily Wire, said it “behooves the President both spiritually and politically to delete the picture, no matter the intent.”
Within hours, the post was gone from his Truth Social feed.
While he still offered the “doctor” excuse later on, it was yet again a rare instance of deleting a post amid criticism — the exact behavior that he’s resisted for most of his political career.
Twice in two months is not a coincidence. Trump is more and more testing the bounds of decency as his base continues to demand transgressive and outrageous rhetoric. But it’s very possible that Americans — including those who voted for him in 2024 — are growing tired of this game.
And with the 2026 midterms fast approaching, the strategy that served him so well in 2016 and 2024 may have finally run out of juice.
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