Hello. I’m Slate’s news and politics blogger. I am also blessed to be the father of a roly-poly 15-month-old baby who enjoys sharing his frank opinions at all times via methods that include yelling, whining, crying, babbling, and Loud Babbling. Nearly every morning of my life, my beautiful son wakes me up before dawn by shouting repeatedly. At some point thereafter, I check the news on my phone, and I usually find that the president is already complaining on Twitter about something he saw on Fox News. (It happened Friday morning at 6:58.) I began wondering: Who starts whining earlier in the morning, Donald Trump or my actual baby?
So I tracked the two of them for a month, observing the time when they made their first noise from the crib (baby) or on Twitter (president). I also noted the subject of their comments, though admittedly there was some guesswork involved because neither speaks coherent English. Here’s the data:
Illustration by Derreck Johnson. Data by Ben Mathis-Lilley.
Derreck Johnson/Ben Mathis-Lilley
The results: Trump was the earlier bird on only 10 of the 31 days that I tracked. His average first tweet was sent at 7:16 a.m. while my baby woke up (or at least announced that he had woken up) at 6:40 a.m. The most dramatic mano-a-mano battle occurred on Oct. 13, when my beloved child began shouting in the direction of his mother and father at 5:30 a.m., making his presence felt only six minutes before POTUS began shouting in the direction of America via a Twitter message about the Affordable Care Act that involved two basic grammatical mistakes.
On the whole, then, we can conclude that the president is slightly slower to become loud and agitated on the average morning than a baby. Congratulations to the president on his narrow victory over a baby in this contest of behavioral restraint!
