President Trump is in a race against time. There are 28 days until the midterms. There are 837 days left in his presidency. There are actuary tables noting the challenges of battling Father Time for 80-year-old men. But, at the moment, he is focused on one particular slice of time: daylight savings.
It has become the latest obsession for a man known for not letting go of his compulsions. He has tilted against windmills, told the government to stop procuring paper straws, and spent significant mental and rhetorical energy openly discussing which is worse: electrocution in a sinking electric boat or being devoured by a shark.
His attention has been pulled to daylight savings by pending legislation that would end the requirement to change clocks twice a year to match the seasons, moving an hour back in the fall and then jumping forward in the spring. Instead, he wants to keep the clock where it is after springing forward—ensuring more sunlight in the evening—and not falling back, which would allow for more light in the mornings during winter months. “LOCK THE CLOCK!” the president wrote on social media over the weekend.
Trump has offered a number of anecdotal arguments to support his view. During an interview with the conservative commentator Wayne Allyn Root in August, he claimed that he was once an hour late for an important meeting—“a big person from a big country”—because he had forgotten to reset his clock. He then claimed that stopping the time change would deter crime, “because criminals sleep late, you know; they do their crime in the evening.” He has suggested that it’s unsafe and costly for workers to have to reset clocks on church steeples or government buildings twice a year. He has also said that getting rid of daylight savings would lower people’s risk for cardiac issues and stroke, limit seasonal depression, and boost tourism.
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But perhaps Trump’s most fundamental motivation became evident late last month: A president who likes to golf would like more sunlight to do so. During the final day of the Presidents Cup, held at a Chicago-area country club on September 27, Trump met with the PGA Tour Chief Executive Brian Rolapp and discussed daylight savings. A few days later, Rolapp sent Trump a letter urging him to ensure that there is more sunlight in the evenings. Too many golfers are busy with their lives and struggling to get in enough time on the course, he argued—a problem made even worse when the clocks fall back. “An extra hour of evening light sounds simple, but for everyday Americans, it can be the difference between getting on the course and not,” Rolapp wrote. The change, he said, would generate 23 million additional rounds of golf each year and pump $1 billion into the golf industry. All of this seemed to register with Trump, who operates multiple golf clubs, and who made the letter public two days later. In a midterm election in which many voters are angry about prices at the pump or in the grocery-store aisles, a closing message from the president is to stand up for the rights of golfers to get an extra hour on the green.
This particular president has known few constraints during his return to the White House. Without congressional approval, he has gone to war with Iran, torn down the East Wing, renamed large bodies of water, and shuttered the Kennedy Center.
But Trump has not attempted to halt the changing of the clocks himself, instead conceding that he needs Congress to pass the Sunshine Protection Act. The House has passed the bill, but Trump has met resistance in the Republican-controlled Senate. “It’s dead as disco,” Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana, a Republican, told Reuters last week. Trump has fixated on one particular Republican holdout: Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas. Last weekend, the president took the unusual step of posting what he claimed was the Republican’s cell-phone number and urging Americans, particularly those in Arkansas, to call Cotton and demand that he vote for the bill.
Cotton’s office did not respond to my requests for comment, but he has said on social media that although “no one likes changing the clock,” not doing so would mean “absurdly late sunrises” during winter months. In Fayetteville, Arkansas, the sun would rise close to 8:30 a.m. “Arkansans don’t want their kids going to school in the pitch dark,” he wrote. When I tried the number that Trump posted, I was greeted by a cheery automated message: “Sorry, the mailbox is full, and there is not enough space to leave a message. Goodbye!”
Historians have traced the idea behind daylight savings back to Benjamin Franklin. In 1784, he wrote a satirical letter to the editor arguing that the government should make sure that sleep patterns coincide with the sun as a way to save money on candles. It would take more than a century for the idea to become reality: Congress enacted daylight saving time in 1918 to help conserve energy during World War I. Although Woodrow Wilson tried to keep the change permanent, Congress overrode his vetoes, and the experiment with shifting the clocks ended.
But at the urging of President Franklin Roosevelt, it was reinstated in 1942 during World War II, with a new slogan: “War Time.” When the war ended, Congress again dropped the practice. In the decades afterward, some states adopted different standards, creating a confusing patchwork of time zones. William Markowitz, a time scientist at the United States Naval Observatory, at one point concluded that “the United States is the worst timekeeper in the world.” Iowa alone had 23 methods for starting and ending daylight saving time. For a brief period in Minnesota, St. Paul moved clocks forward for daylight savings while neighboring Minneapolis did not. Police officers in St. Paul wore two watches.
Congress stepped in to create a national standard with the Uniform Time Act in 1966. Clocks would spring forward in April and fall back in October. In 1973, Congress ended the practice once again after President Richard Nixon called for the change in an address to the nation. But public support crumbled during the winter months because kids were going to school in the dark. The New York Times called it the “Second Dark Age,” and the experiment ended after less than a year. Since then, there has been some tinkering—shifting what month the clock changes, for example—but not wholesale changes.
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Trump’s own stance has evolved. In March 2019, he posted on Twitter in support of making daylight savings permanent. Five years later, he reversed himself: “Daylight Saving Time is inconvenient, and very costly to our Nation.” Last March, three days before clocks were scheduled to spring forward, Trump was again indecisive. Americans seemed evenly divided on the issue, he told reporters in the Oval Office, making it “hard to get excited about it.” He said he could see the argument from both sides. Some people want more light later in the day, he said, whereas others like having the light early in the morning. But a few weeks later, perhaps tired after losing that hour, he was clear that he wanted daylight at the end of the day. “Very popular and, most importantly, no more changing of the clocks.”
In May, as the legislation marched toward House approval, Trump was again animated, and said the country had to end “this ridiculous, twice yearly production.” He added: “It will also be a very nice WIN for the Republican Party. Take it!”
It doesn’t appear that the Republican Party is going to follow his advice.