Trump publishes Tom Cotton's mobile number in a fight over permanent daylight saving

President Donald Trump on Saturday posted a mobile number he presented as Senator Tom Cotton's, and told people in Arkansas to use it. The bill he wants is the Sunshine Protection Act, which would make daylight saving time permanent. Cotton, an Arkansas Republican and usually a Trump ally, has said he will oppose year-round daylight saving. He repeated that opposition on Saturday.

Trump had opened the argument on Friday on Truth Social. Republicans in the Senate, he wrote, had to move on what he called the "No More Changing of the Clocks Act," officially the Sunshine Protection Act. Changing the clocks twice a year, he said, costs the country a fortune and is bad for crime, for stress, for sport, and for almost everything else. Saturday's post named Cotton as the senator holding the bill up. "Everybody in Arkansas, Tom Cotton, a friend of mine, is holding up a very important Bill," he wrote, and then gave the number. "Call Tom on his cellphone ... and let him know." A third post the same day said that if Cotton were putting Arkansas first he would give the state an extra hour of daylight, and spare people the twice-yearly reset of clocks in houses, farms and workplaces.

What the bill actually does

The Sunshine Protection Act does not create an extra hour. It chooses which of the two existing hours the country keeps. Under permanent daylight saving time, sunrise and sunset both fall later by the clock in winter. Cotton's objection, which he has made in earlier Congresses as well as this one, is the winter morning: children and farm workers in Arkansas would start the day in the dark. Permanent standard time, the other available choice, keeps the earlier sunrise and moves the sunset forward. The bill Trump is pushing is the later-sunset version. The Senate has not put it on the floor schedule.

A version of the same bill passed the Senate by unanimous consent in 2022 and then died in the House. The politics have not simplified since. States cannot, on their own, adopt permanent daylight saving time. They can opt for permanent standard time. That asymmetry is why a federal bill is the only route to the change Trump described, and why a single senator who will not give consent can hold a unanimous-consent request. Cotton is using that hold.

The number

Posting a senator's mobile number is not a legislative step. It is a direction to a state audience to make the senator's phone unusable. NBC News reported that Trump "appeared to" share the number. The Washington Post reported that he revealed it. Cotton did not, in the Saturday statements carried by those accounts, confirm the digits or say the line had been flooded. Other Republicans on Capitol Hill were unhappy enough that the episode was still being broadcast as a Monday morning item. A president publishing a colleague's personal number, in a party that holds the Senate, is a pressure tactic that does not need the bill to pass in order to land.

Cotton's position has not moved in public. He remains against year-round daylight saving. Trump's three posts treat that position as a betrayal of Arkansas rather than as a disagreement about winter mornings. The "friend of mine" line in the second post is the frame: alliance is assumed, and the hold is the offence. The number is the instrument.

What happens to the clocks

Nothing in Saturday's posts changes the next transition. The United States still moves the clocks twice a year unless the Senate passes a bill the House also passes and the president signs. Cotton's hold blocks the fast route. A recorded vote would test how many Republicans will defy him in order to give Trump the later sunset. That vote has not been scheduled. Until it is, the operative fact from the weekend is the number on Truth Social, and a senator who has said he will not trade a winter sunrise for it.