Trump shares senator's phone number to pressure support for permanent daylight saving

On a Saturday in early October, President Trump took to social media with an unusual request: he wanted Americans to call Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas and tell him to pass a bill making daylight saving time permanent. To make the task easier, Trump included what appeared to be Cotton's personal cellphone number, an Arkansas area code attached to a direct appeal. "For some reason, Tom is stopping the Bill," Trump wrote, framing the legislation as something that would benefit everyone, from professional golfers who'd gain extra time on the greens to ordinary Americans tired of resetting their clocks twice a year. "Call Tom on his cellphone," he instructed. "Tell Tom to, GET IT DONE!"

The Sunshine Protection Act had already cleared the House in July, but it had stalled in the Senate, where Republican opposition—including Cotton's—was proving difficult to overcome. The bill's supporters, including Trump and his administration, argued that keeping daylight saving time year-round would give Americans more daylight during their most active hours, a shift they saw as broadly beneficial. The opposition painted a different picture: permanent daylight saving time would mean darker winter mornings, with children waiting for school buses in near-total darkness and parents commuting to work before sunrise. In some northern states, the sun wouldn't rise until 8:30 in the morning or later.

Cotton, a member of Republican leadership and chair of the Senate intelligence committee, had heard these arguments before and remained unmoved. On Saturday afternoon, he posted his own response, laying out his reasoning with the precision of someone who had studied the issue. Congress had tried permanent daylight saving time before, he noted—in 1974—and repealed it once Americans experienced the reality of absurdly late winter sunrises. He cited his own state's concerns: Arkansans didn't want their children going to school in darkness. "I'll always put Arkansas first," he wrote. In previous Senate floor remarks, Cotton had been more specific about the costs. If daylight saving time became permanent, many Arkansans would see sunrise delayed until 8 or 8:30 in the morning. In Seattle, the sun wouldn't rise until 9 a.m. In Williston, North Dakota, sunrise would come close to 9:45 a.m. He had invoked the 1974 precedent, when children walked to school in pitch black, calling the darkness "especially harmful for schoolchildren and working Americans."

When Trump left the White House later that day for a campaign rally in Ohio, reporters asked him directly why he had posted Cotton's phone number. His answer was personal and practical. He was tired of the twice-yearly clock changes—the confusion, the disruption, the way it made people late for dinner and important meetings. He spoke from experience. Six months earlier, he said, the White House staff had forgotten to change the clocks, and everyone had been thrown off schedule. "It discombobulates everybody," he said. The issue, in his view, was simple enough to warrant direct pressure on a single senator.

This was not Trump's first time releasing a senator's personal contact information. In 2016, while competing for the Republican presidential nomination, he had released Senator Lindsey Graham's cellphone number after Graham criticized him over his comments about Senator John McCain's military service. Graham responded with a viral video in which he dramatically destroyed a series of flip phones. The two men later became close allies, though Graham died in July 2026. McCain had died in 2018.

Public opinion on the daylight saving question was more divided than Trump's confidence suggested. A 2025 poll from the AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research found that if forced to choose, most Americans preferred keeping that extra hour of daylight in the evening. Forty-seven percent opposed the current system of twice-yearly clock changes. Only 12 percent favored it. Forty percent remained neutral. The question itself had a long history in Congress. Daylight saving time had first been adopted as a wartime measure in 1942. The Senate had passed a permanent daylight saving bill in 2022, but it had stalled in the House. Now the roles were reversed: the House had passed it, and the Senate—or at least one influential Republican senator—was holding it up.

When the Associated Press called the number Trump had posted, no one answered. The voicemail box was full. The Guardian's call reached a carrier message: the wireless customer was not available. Whether the number was actually Cotton's personal phone, whether it was still in use, and how many calls it might have received remained unclear. What was clear was that Trump had chosen a direct, public method to pressure a fellow Republican on a legislative matter, and that Cotton had chosen to stand his ground.