Most people who get a phone call at 2 a.m. assume someone died. Tom Homan, President Trump’s border czar, has learned it usually just means the boss is awake and wants to talk. In a new podcast interview, Homan casually admitted that Trump rings him at all hours of the night, including 2 a.m. and 4 a.m., and that these are not emergency calls. They are working calls. Policy calls. The kind of conversation most bosses save for a Tuesday afternoon.
The detail slipped out during what was supposed to be a light, friendly chat. Instead it opened a window into how the White House actually runs after midnight, and a lot of people did not love what they saw through it.
Where the 2 a.m. Confession Came From
The setting was the Katie Miller Podcast, which dropped a new episode on Tuesday, July 22, 2026. Katie Miller is the wife of Stephen Miller, Trump’s top policy adviser, and she used to be a White House press secretary herself. So this was not a hostile interview. This was as friendly a room as Homan was ever going to sit in.
The episode started serious, with Homan talking about immigration enforcement. Then Miller flipped the tone and started a rapid-fire game of “Would You Rather.” Somewhere in that back-and-forth, she asked him a simple question: what is the earliest Trump has ever called him in the morning, and the latest at night? Homan did not hesitate. According to his own words, the answer was blunt: “I’ve gotten calls at 2:00 AM. I’ve got calls at 4:00 AM.”
He also said he talks to the president several times a week. So this is not a one-time thing that happened during some crisis. This is the rhythm.
Homan’s Explanation: Blame the Time Zones
Homan tried to make it sound normal, and to be fair, part of his explanation makes sense. He said a lot of these calls come while Trump is on Air Force One. “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,” Homan said.
If Trump is flying back from California, 11 p.m. on the West Coast is 2 a.m. on the East Coast, where Homan lives. So some of this is just geography. Trump is not necessarily pulling all-nighters every single time the phone rings. Sometimes he is just three time zones behind.
But the time zone excuse only stretches so far. It does not explain the 4 a.m. calls, and it does not explain the rest of what we know about how the 80-year-old president spends his nights.
The Truth Social Timestamps Tell Their Own Story
Here is where the phone calls stop being an isolated quirk and start looking like a pattern. Trump posts on Truth Social constantly, and those posts come with timestamps. Those timestamps do not lie.
On one Thursday earlier this month, Trump fired off 19 posts between midnight and 2:30 a.m. Nineteen. In two and a half hours. That is not someone who woke up to use the bathroom and checked his phone. That is someone wide awake and typing at full speed while most of the country is dead asleep.
And it is not a one-off. A review of his overnight posting found that in the entire month of April, there were only five days where Trump appeared to get a full night of sleep based on when he stopped and started posting. Five days out of thirty. Do the math and that means most nights, the president was up doing something other than sleeping.
Aides Figured Out a Code for the Missing Mornings
This is not new territory for the people around Trump. In the book Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump, New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan wrote that White House staff developed a kind of unspoken code about the president’s sleep.
If they could not reach him between 8 and 10 in the morning, they learned what it meant. As the book puts it, 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.” One morning, staff could not get him at all, and an aide went to check on him. They found him still asleep in the White House residence.
The reporters added that Trump has “never been a big sleeper,” but that aides now think he is sleeping even less than before, keeping stranger hours than he did during his first term. So the 2 a.m. call to Homan is not a fluke. It fits a schedule that people who work near him have been quietly tracking for years.
Why the Timing Actually Matters
Plenty of people work odd hours. Truckers, nurses, bakers, night-shift cops. Being a night owl is not a crime, and it is not automatically a problem. If Trump wants to watch TV until 4 a.m., that is his business.
The part that raised eyebrows is what happens on those calls. This is not the president watching cable and unwinding. According to one report, these late-night and early-morning phone calls are when actual policy decisions get made. Homan holds a serious job. His official title is executive associate director for Enforcement and Removal Operations, and he runs immigration enforcement for the whole country. When Trump calls him at 2 a.m., they are not trading recipes.
That means major decisions can get set in motion while at least one person on the line, probably both, is running on no sleep. Anyone who has ever tried to make a big choice at 2 a.m. knows how that tends to go. Nothing feels quite as smart in the morning.
The ICE-at-Airports Decision
There is a real-world example that critics keep pointing to. Recently, ICE agents were deployed to airports, a move that got put together fast and drew a wave of criticism. During an interview, CNN’s Dana Bash pressed Homan directly on how the plan came together so quickly.
“With respect, if you’re doing this in 24 hours, how well-thought-out could this be?” Bash asked him. Homan did not have a smooth answer. He acknowledged that none of the ICE agents sent to the airports had any training as TSA agents. So the people put in place at security checkpoints had not been trained for the environment they were dropped into. That is the kind of rough edge that shows up when big things get decided in a hurry, and it is exactly why the 2 a.m. detail landed so hard.
The Awkward Pivot That Almost Buried the Story
What makes this whole thing stranger is how it came out. The 2 a.m. confession was not dragged out of Homan by a tough reporter. It came during a fun little game segment on a friendly podcast, sandwiched between softball questions.
Earlier in the same episode, Homan had made a comment about “bloodshed,” and Katie Miller quickly changed gears, telling him “we’re going to play a game” and launching into “Would You Rather.” That sudden switch is what set up the sleep question in the first place. Homan was caught off guard by the tone change and paused before answering.
The episode covered other odd ground too. At one point Homan was asked whether ICE might get renamed to NICE. He also argued that an award he once received from former President Barack Obama for record deportations proves today’s Democrats are hypocrites on the border. “I really think it has to do with our president and the hatred for this president,” Homan said. But of everything in that episode, the throwaway line about 2 a.m. phone calls is the one that traveled.
The Bigger Picture
Put the pieces together and you get a fairly consistent portrait. A president who does not sleep much, who posts 19 times between midnight and 2:30 a.m., who cannot always be reached before 10 in the morning, and who calls the man running immigration enforcement in the middle of the night to talk shop.
None of this is a secret anymore. Homan said it out loud, on a recorded podcast, while trying to make Trump sound like a tireless leader who never stops working. Depending on how you feel about Trump, that is either exactly what you want in a president or exactly what worries you. Either way, the phone is apparently ringing at 2 a.m., and Homan is picking it up.
