Trump Shares Tom Cotton's Cell Number in Push to Make Daylight Saving Time Permanent

President Donald Trump turned up the heat on a stalled Senate bill Saturday, posting what he said is the personal cellphone number of Sen. Tom Cotton and urging Arkansans to call the senator directly and demand a vote on making daylight saving time permanent. The Sunshine Protection Act cleared the House in July with broad bipartisan support, but it has sat in the Senate ever since, and Trump is making clear he has run out of patience.

"Call Tom on his cellphone," Trump wrote on Truth Social, telling the people of Arkansas to "let him know" the bill "was passed in the House by a Vote of 308 to 117. HAVE THE SENATE VOTE, NOW!" He described Cotton, the state's senior senator, as "a friend of mine" even as he pressed him publicly.

"Almost everybody wants 'The Sunshine Protection Act' to pass, except for Tom Cotton," Trump wrote. "For some reason, Tom is stopping the Bill and, in the Senate, it's very easy to do, it only takes one!"

It is not confirmed that the number Trump shared actually belongs to Cotton. Calls and messages placed to the line did not go through or went unanswered, and Cotton's office has declined repeated requests for comment, pointing reporters to a floor speech he gave opposing the measure.

Trump's Case for Locking the Clocks

Trump has spent months making the end of seasonal time changes a personal priority. He argues that stopping the twice-a-year switch would benefit public health, reduce crime and traffic accidents, and hand Americans more usable daylight in the evening. He has rebranded the effort the "No More Changing of Clocks Act" and repeatedly told supporters that a popular, bipartisan idea is being held hostage in the Senate.

"Nobody wants to spend their precious time running all over the place, turning Clocks back twice a year," the president wrote Saturday, adding that "having sunshine in the afternoon is better than early in the morning!"

He also leaned on a constituency rarely heard from in the debate: golfers. Trump attached a letter from PGA Tour Commissioner Brian Rolapp endorsing the bill and noted that the extra evening light would serve golfers, tennis players, hunters and, "perhaps most importantly, Farmers who want more Daylight to play or work."

The Saturday post follows an appeal the president made a day earlier, when he said the bill was "being held up by Senator Tom Cotton, of Arkansas, for reasons unknown" and called the clock change "ridiculous" and "bad for crime." It also echoes a push in which Trump urged the Senate to pass the Sunshine Protection Act before the clocks fall back on Nov. 1.

Why Cotton Is Holding Out

Cotton, who chairs the Senate Republican Conference, has become the bill's most vocal opponent in the upper chamber. In an October 2025 floor speech, he recalled that Congress tried year-round daylight saving during the energy crisis of the 1970s and abandoned it within a year as complaints piled up.

"Millions of Americans traveled to work and school in darkness," Cotton said then, warning that the policy would "again make winter a dark and dismal time for millions of Americans" and "push winter sunrises to an absurdly late hour, depriving Americans of morning sunshine that's essential for our safety and well-being." In parts of Arkansas, he said, the winter sun would not rise until after 8 a.m.

He is not alone. South Dakota Sen. Mike Rounds has warned that northern communities could see sunrise after 9:30 a.m. in winter. "We'd have kids going to school in the dark until 9 o'clock, 9:30 in the morning," Rounds said. An earlier version of the bill failed to advance out of the Senate Commerce Committee last year, drawing opposition from a mix of Republicans and Democrats.

Sleep-medicine groups have lodged their own objections. The American Academy of Sleep Medicine favors an alternative that would end the clock changes but adopt permanent standard time instead, arguing that year-round daylight saving keeps clocks out of step with human biology and trims morning light that helps regulate sleep.

A Popular Idea Stuck in the Senate

The public appears to be squarely behind the president. A February YouGov survey found 64 percent of Americans want to stop changing their clocks twice a year, with only 16 percent opposed. The House answered that sentiment on July 14, passing the measure 308-117, a rare bipartisan margin in a divided Washington.

The current bill was introduced in the House in January 2025 by Rep. Vern Buchanan, a Florida Republican, with Sen. Rick Scott of Florida leading the Senate companion. The legislation would make daylight saving time the standard across most of the country and end the federal requirement to fall back each autumn.

The idea is far from new. Daylight saving time began in 1918 as a World War I fuel-saving measure, returned as year-round "War Time" during World War II, and was standardized nationally by the Uniform Time Act of 1966. Congress tried permanent daylight saving again in 1974 and reversed it within months amid a dark-morning backlash. The Energy Policy Act of 2007 set the current schedule of springing forward in March and falling back in November. The Senate passed the Sunshine Protection Act unanimously in 2022, only to see it die in the House.

What Happens Next

The Senate is in recess until after the midterm elections, leaving almost no runway for action before clocks fall back on Sunday, Nov. 1. That makes Trump's public pressure campaign the main lever for now, and the president has shown he is willing to use unusual tactics to move a single senator.

He did something similar in 2015, when he read out then-rival Sen. Lindsey Graham's cell number to a South Carolina crowd. Graham, who later became a close ally, joked about needing a new phone, and Trump revisited the moment at Graham's funeral in July, acknowledging that sharing the number was something he "shouldn't have done."

If the Senate follows the House and Trump signs the measure, next month's time change could be the last one Americans ever make. If the chamber stalls again, the switch happens on Nov. 1 as scheduled, and the fight over the nation's clocks rolls into a new Congress, with the president promising to keep the pressure on.