President Donald Trump was supposed to be having his big victory lap. Instead, much of the internet was watching his eyelids.
As cameras rolled in the White House’s Roosevelt Room for what his administration billed as “the single largest deregulatory action in U.S. history,” Donald Trump stood beside Environmental Protection Agency chief Lee Zeldin while the EPA effectively tore up the scientific and legal foundation for federal climate regulation. It was meant to be a show of force.
What many people saw, or thought they saw, was a president looking drowsy, glassy‑eyed, and at times on the verge of nodding off.
Into that visual walked an unlikely narrator: California Governor Gavin Newsom.
On X, from his official press office account, Newsom’s team dropped a line that read like straight MAGA fanfic: “President Trump remains the MOST ACCESSIBLE, energetic President in history. 🔥”
President Trump remains the MOST ACCESSIBLE, energetic President in history. 🔥 pic.twitter.com/RhjEl5qM87
— Governor Newsom Press Office (@GovPressOffice) February 12, 2026
Coming from one of Donald Trump’s most persistent Democratic antagonists, it landed with obvious sarcasm. The juxtaposition was the point—“energetic” prose over footage of a president whose face, critics said, told a different story.
The post lit up in minutes, and so did the comment sections.
Gavin Newsom’s jab hit on the very day Zeldin, standing just a few inches from Donald Trump, announced that the administration was scrapping the 2009 Greenhouse Gas Endangerment Finding and every federal greenhouse gas standard tied to it for vehicles from model years 2012 to 2027 and beyond.
For climate policy, this was a tectonic moment. The Endangerment Finding has, for 16 years, been the formal scientific judgment that greenhouse gases endanger human health and welfare—essentially the legal trigger that allowed the federal government to regulate them under the Clean Air Act. Without it, the architecture of U.S. climate action looks more like a house with its foundation ripped out.
Yet instead of looking fired up as his EPA demolished that foundation, President Donald Trump appeared lethargic through long stretches of the event. Clips showed him blinking slowly, staring down, shifting in his chair as Zeldin mocked “climate change religion” and hailed an estimated $1.3 trillion in projected “savings” from shedding rules that require carmakers to measure and limit greenhouse gas emissions.
X user Republicans against Trump gave voice to what many people thought they were seeing. “Sleepy Don struggles to keep his eyes open,” the account posted, pairing the caption with footage of Donald Trump looking, quite literally, tired.
Sleepy Don struggles to keep his eyes open
pic.twitter.com/FVbsnUcnyp
— Republicans against Trump (@RpsAgainstTrump) February 12, 2026
Others piled on. One user wrote, “This is the guy tearing up climate rules for the next generation and he can’t stay awake for the announcement?” Another commented, “He looks more sedated than ‘energetic.’ If this is the most energetic President in history, we’re in trouble.”
In other words, Gavin Newsom served the setup, and the internet supplied the receipts.
Of course, Donald Trump’s defenders saw something else entirely. Pro‑Trump accounts accused Newsom of “deepfaking the narrative,” insisting the former president was simply “bored by bureaucratic details” or “resting his eyes” while the EPA chief handled the technocratic part. A few tried to boomerang the health question back at Democrats, invoking lingering questions about Joe Biden’s stamina.
But the visual stuck—and it landed at a moment when the underlying policy couldn’t be more consequential.
What made the “Sleepy Don” narrative so potent wasn’t just partisan snark. It was the disconnect between the scale of the announcement and the effect of the man presiding over it.
Zeldin’s rule doesn’t just tweak fuel‑efficiency targets. It declares that the EPA no longer has legal authority, under Section 202(a) of the Clean Air Act, to regulate vehicle greenhouse gas emissions the way previous administrations did. It rejects the finding that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases from vehicles endanger public health and welfare. It wipes away the future of federal tailpipe climate standards and the complex compliance-credit system underpinning them.
In practical terms, it means the United States is retreating from using its primary environmental law to address climate change through vehicle regulations. The EPA even argues in its own analysis that eliminating all greenhouse gas emissions from U.S. vehicles would have “no material impact” on global climate indicators through 2100—a framing that climate scientists will, at minimum, call dangerously myopic.
So when people watched Donald Trump blinking through that announcement, the symbolism was hard to miss: a visibly tired president overseeing the rollback of climate science as a guiding principle for federal action.
Netizens leaned into that symbolism. “He looks like he’s literally sleeping on the climate crisis,” one commenter wrote under Newsom’s post. Another summed it up more bluntly: “He’s wide awake when it’s time to drill or deregulate, but ask him to listen to science, and he’s out.”
The sundowning starts earlier every day pic.twitter.com/90daeOJzKZ
— Governor Newsom Press Office (@GovPressOffice) February 11, 2026
Not everyone bought the premise; some users accused Gavin Newsom of cheap theatrics and mocked him for earlier hyping Donald Trump’s “energy” to needle Joe Biden. But even those critics were forced to reckon with the optics: if this is Trump’s signature climate reversal—one his allies call “historic”—it landed with a strangely sedated star.
The White House, for its part, has leaned on process arguments, not visuals. Officials tout a 52‑day comment period, four days of virtual hearings, more than 600 speakers, and roughly 572,000 public comments. They insist this is about “restoring the American Dream,” opening up cheaper car options, and killing off widely disliked features like start‑stop systems that shut engines off at red lights.
Some drivers, it’s true, cheered that last piece. “If he kills start‑stop, let the man nap,” one X user joked, straddling the line between mockery and begrudging appreciation.
But there is a deeper discomfort in the way this rolled out: a tired‑seeming president, a grinning EPA chief, and a rule that tells the country, in effect, that climate science no longer commands federal action in the way it once did.
Newsom’s “MOST ACCESSIBLE, energetic President in history” line was meant as a taunt. What made it sting is how many people, staring at the same footage, saw the opposite—a leader looking half‑asleep as his government walked away from the scientific basis for confronting a heating planet.
Whether that’s irony or simply the new normal depends on how seriously you think Washington should take the next 70 years of climate reality.
