On Sunday, in a long, rambling Truth Social post, President Donald Trump revealed the real reason he’s been pushing for permanent Daylight Saving Time. Unsurprisingly, it’s for the benefit of golf. What’s more, in the same post, he doxxed a Republican senator by revealing his personal cell phone number.
“Everybody in Arkansas, [Senator] Tom Cotton (R-AK), a friend of mine, is holding up a very important Bill,” posted the president. “It’s called, ‘The Sunshine Protection Act’ or, ‘We Don’t Want to Change Our Clocks Twice a Year Act.’ For some reason, Tom is stopping the Bill and, in the Senate, it’s very easy to do, it only takes one! It should pass overwhelmingly, in a Bipartisan fashion. So, everyone in Arkansas, a State I love, and won 3 times, the last by by 34 points, tell Tom to, GET IT DONE! It will be appreciated by all. Nobody wants to spend their precious time running all over the place, turning Clocks back twice a year and, having sunshine in the afternoon is better than early in the morning!”
Here Trump tipped his hand, revealing his actual justification for the bill: “The PGA TOUR, as an example, needs more Daylight in the afternoon in order to finish their Tournaments. Likewise, regular Golfers, Tennis Players, Hunters and, perhaps most importantly, Farmers who want more Daylight to play or work. See letter from Brian Rolapp, CEO of the PGA TOUR below. 65 percent PLUS want more sun in the afternoon, Daylight Saving Time (The way it is now!), but 100 percent don’t want to change their Clocks twice a year. They want to, as they say, ‘LOCK THE CLOCK!’ Who doesn’t? It’s very expensive for our Nation where you have high and dangerous steeples to reach, like on churches and municipal buildings. Almost everybody wants ‘The Sunshine Protection Act’ to pass, except for Tom Cotton. To the Great People of Arkansas, please let your Senator know it would be a GREAT Bipartisan WIN for the United States Senate, and for America, itself. Call Tom on his cellphone…” The president went on to reveal what he asserts is Cotton’s actual phone number.
Honestly we should just move to a timezoneless universal time. Places in one part of the world could open at 8:00 and close at 18:00 and somewhere on the other side of the world would open from 20:00 to 6:00. No zone change in travel or scheduling meetings would simplify communications and logistics, and you can also ditch this asinine “saving” concept as you’ll have decoupled when the sun rises from an arbitrary number.
One big problem with that is changing days in the middle of the day…
You have a global day and you have local euphemisms. “Evening” just becomes “the dark after lunch” instead of “the dark after noon.” That’s a trivial linguistic adjustment to make to ensure that the thing we actually care about syncing up for convenience is synched up for convenience.
Edit: we already have such euphemisms and ambiguities in English:
For better or worse, the vast majority of people think in terms of local communities, not a global one, so this is still a massive ask. UTC already exists for the industries that need it (and people chronically online enough to have more global than local social connections).
Words have meaning because many people want to use them. I very much doubt people would adopt something like this within the same country much less worldwide. You could be right and that people might actually change but for something so drastic (and cultural even), I’m willing to bet few would bother.
This is how they’ve been doing it in China for awhile now, and it seems… fine
China’s using CST/UTC+8 and while there are variations from the west to the east for the time of day, that’s only a variation of 5 hours in the worst case. I’m flubbing the stats here a little but essentially your average is going to be within 2 hours of daylight differences which is your variance across seasons anyways.
What was being proposed was something throughout the world where someone’s morning could be another’s night. That’s a huge difference and not at all comparable.
It’d probably be like the attempt by the French Revolutionaries to adopt metric time, nobody would listen and somebody will get shit over it. At best you may be able to get say the federal government to adopt and push it but the end result of that would probably be that one road in Arizona with roadsigns in meters and not miles, but otherwise ignored by the states and non federal individuals and entities.
Why is that a problem? That seems like something the night shift figured out ages ago.