Trump Posts What Appears to Be Senator Cotton’s Number in Daylight Time Push

President Trump stepped up his campaign to end the twice-yearly clock change on Saturday, singling out Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas for blocking legislation to make daylight saving time permanent and posting what appeared to be the senator’s cellphone number so constituents could call him.

In a post on his social media platform, Trump said Cotton was stopping the bill and noted that in the Senate it only takes one senator to do so, according to NBC News and Al Jazeera. He urged Arkansans to contact Cotton and, in a later post, said Cotton would give the state an extra hour of daylight if he were putting Arkansas first. Al Jazeera said a call to the number reached a full voicemail box. A day earlier, Trump had urged Senate Republicans to pass what he called the No More Changing of Clocks Act, saying the switch costs the country a fortune.

The bill’s formal name is the Sunshine Protection Act. The House passed it in July with bipartisan support, by a vote of 308 to 117, but the Senate has not taken it up. The Senate approved an earlier version in 2022 with co-sponsors from both parties. Senators left Washington this week with no plans to return until after the November 3 midterm elections, and Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana, a Republican, told Reuters the bill was dead as disco and that he did not expect Majority Leader John Thune to bring it to the floor, Al Jazeera reported.

Cotton has been clear about his reasons. In a post on X on Saturday, he said Arkansans do not want their children going to school in the pitch dark and that he would always put the state first, NBC reported. In a 2025 floor speech he warned that permanent daylight time would make winter a dark and dismal time for millions of Americans, and argued that farmers, construction crews, commuters and schoolchildren would start their days before sunrise.

He also pointed to history. Congress adopted year-round daylight saving time in 1974 during an energy crisis and repealed it less than a year later as public opinion turned, partly over concern for children traveling to school in darkness.

Supporters of the bill argue that ending the clock change would spare Americans the disruption of resetting their clocks and their sleep twice a year, and that extra evening light is better for commerce and leisure. Trump has framed it as an easy win for his party. Since before his second inauguration he has said Republicans would work to end what he called an inconvenient and costly practice.

The episode also revived questions about the president’s tactics with members of his own party. As a candidate in 2016, Trump published the phone number of Senator Lindsey Graham after Graham criticized him, Al Jazeera noted. Neither Cotton’s office nor the White House responded to Al Jazeera’s requests for comment, though a Cotton spokesperson pointed NBC to the senator’s post.