Science of Us writer Drake Baer lays out the argument that Donald Trump’s, umm, distinctive personality characteristics can be blamed on (or are exacerbated by) sleep deprivation:

Earlier on in the race, Trump trumpeted his sleeping style. “I have a great temperament for success,” he said at an event in Illinois last November. “You know, I’m not a big sleeper, I like three hours, four hours, I toss, I turn, I beep-de-beep, I want to find out what’s going on.”

But this doesn’t mean that he only needs a couple hours of sleep; rather, Trump “shows all the scary symptoms of sleep deprivation:”

You can see it in his impulsiveness, whether it’s retweeting bogus crime statistics and anti-Semitic images or taking the bait from Hillary in roaring about Alicia Machado. Experimental laboratory research finds that when randomly assigned people are sleep-deprived for just one night, they’re worse at recognizing whether faces look happy or sad, which speaks to a blunting of empathy, a quality that Trump is astoundingly short on. Similarly, one night’s sleep deprivation increased psychosis-like symptoms in healthy adults.

In fact, as Baer notes, in Scientific American Mind Daniel Barron, a Yale University resident physician and neuroscientist (now THERE’S a combination that guarantees a good night’s sleep) reports that he and his colleagues

often joke about whether patients of a particular temperament are suffering from what we called “Trump Syndrome”– a ravenous late-night craving for stimulation that results in a sometimes sporadic, often slender sleep schedule.

Even if you assume that just about everything Trump does reflects, in his view, that he’s successful the way other people are tall or smart, it’s notable that Trump describes sleeping little as part of “a great temperament for success.”

This is notable because it’s an attitude that lots of people share; and while there are a tiny number of people who can function on very little sleep (just as there small numbers of people who can eat anything and not gain weight, or can sleep absolutely anywhere), that’s a genetic endowment that doesn’t seem to be correlated with Success. (It’s also notable that Trump tries to feminize the need for rest, and make it a sign of weakness.)

But as I explain in REST, many leaders recognized the importance of rest, and felt they made better decisions when they were well-rested. Winston Churchill took long naps every afternoon during World War I (when he ran the Admiralty) and World War II (when he ran Great Britain). When he planning the Allied invasion of North Africa in 1942, Dwight Eisenhower rented a small cottage outside London, where he and his aide would escape for a day. American presidents are criticized for being slackers whenever they step out of the Oval Office, but downtime is essential for them to recharge and be able to focus during real emergencies.

In contrast, sleep deprivation plays a well-known role in bad decision-making. And that’s not just in laboratory studies, or studies of pilot error or accidents. The Greek-Eurozone negotiations went badly, according to some insiders, because everyone was sleep-deprived. And Baer notes that Bill Clinton has said that “most of the mistakes that he made in his long political career came because he was ‘too tired,’ and he told Jon Stewart that ‘sleep deprivation has a lot to do with some of the edginess of Washington today’.”

As usual, history provides a perfect object lesson in the value of sleep and costs of sleep deprivation. The Nazis were big believers in the use of drugs like meth to deliver superhuman, Aryan-ideal levels of performance among soldiers and pilots, and Hitler was an avid consumer of all kinds of performance-enhancing drugs. Churchill, in contrast, took two-hour naps after lunch, and even during the Blitz, when it was too dangerous to leave the War Rooms and return to Number 10 Downing Street, he would sleep. Which approach won World War II?