After Venezuela, does Trump’s social media use hint at what he’s planning next?

After an admittedly audacious military operation that captured Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro, Donald Trump went online and, in a celebratory spree, posted more than 80 times in the early hours. Sean O’Grady says it speaks volumes about where the sleepless commander-in-chief’s head is at

What are we to make of someone who spends the early hours of the morning on social media?

Not just the kind of obsessive doomscrolling that is both a symptom and a modern cause of insomnia, and hardly uncommon – but actively posting and reposting at an extraordinary rate. Some 80-plus posts in the course of a few hours – let’s say a posting or a share every two or three minutes. All aggressive, full of bile, and almost panicky.

What, in other words, does Donald Trump’s post-invasion online spree tell us about the state of the president’s psyche?

It is frantic, for sure, and apparently unprecedented even by his own prolific standards – 25,000 Tweets, as they then were, during his first presidency, for example. Yet it is part of a pattern of wilder social media activity. Remember the callous assault only last month on the memory of Rob Reiner, the murdered Hollywood director whom Trump mocked as dying of “Trump Derangement Syndrome”?

US president Donald Trump posted over 80 times in the early hours following Nicolas Maduro’s capture (Getty)

And his more recent recirculation of a false and vile claim that former vice-presidential nominee Tim Walz was involved in the assassination of Minnesota Democratic state representative Melissa Hortman last summer? The president has always been petty, vengeful, and vindictive, but is this tendency now becoming pathological?

Trump’s recent tirades are ostensibly focused on his recently ordered attack on Venezuela, and the kidnapping of President Maduro and his wife, but, as so often with Trump, they veered off into all his other pet hates.

Somalis, for example, and Joe Biden, obviously, attracted his ire even when they were mostly asleep and presented no immediate threat to the US – or its president (rather like Maduro in his bedtime “fortress”, as it happens). Trump naturally agreed that “the Fake News just won’t cover the TRUTH!” as the sleepless commander-in-chief put it in characteristic style.

On his ironically named Truth Social channel, he posited that Venezuelans currently residing in the US would soon “self-deport” themselves home – despite the likelihood that his destabilising of the country could tear it apart, and more likely, increase the flow of destitute refugees heading north.

It would be far too facile to suggest that such nocturnal activity is the product of a guilty conscience. Trump’s conscience has long evaded detection, even under the scrutiny of the White House head doctors, who, he claims, say he “aced” his worryingly frequent cognitive capacity tests. To quote Shakespeare: “O sleep, O gentle sleep,/ Nature’s soft nurse, how have I frighted thee, That thou no more wilt weigh mine eyelids down…”

But Trump’s lengthy nighttime tirades do, perhaps, provide some explanation for why he seems to have a tendency to “rest his eyes” during official meetings – at least insofar as can be judged from the televised ones. “Sleepy Joe Biden” isn’t the only chief executive to find himself in need of an impromptu snooze; so does “Dozy Donald”.

Could it be that somewhere, deep in Trump’s complex cerebral cortex, there is a part of his mind that hasn’t been trained to treat fact as fiction, and vice versa?

A tiny inkling that he may have created his own Vietnam – or at least Libya or Iraq – in the form of a disintegrating Venezuela, where large numbers of American troops will have to be deployed just to maintain order and guard the precious oil reserves that Trump so obviously wishes to plunder.

Could it be that his policy – immoral, reckless and illegal as it is, none of which bothers him as such – might fail, leaving him in charge of a gigantic mess he cannot blame anyone else for? That the Venezuelan adventure will cost more money than it yields in oil revenues?

That it will lead to unacceptable American casualties? That his critics – including a growing faction within the Maga movement – will be proved right? That even his collection of cronies might turn on him? Losing control of Congress and the Republican Party? Impeachment? The 25th Amendment invoked because of his mental incapacity? Resignation? Disgrace? Jail?

One day, like Maduro, they might come for Trump in his bedchamber and haul him off too for some rough justice. Such insecurities would be enough to keep anyone up at night.