Trump Says He’ll Kill Daylight Saving Time, But Maybe He Really Wants It To Be Permanent

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President-elect Trump on Friday said he and fellow Republicans would make a full effort to liberate Americans from daylight saving time and its twice-yearly clock adjustments — which take a human toll that ranges from annoyance to death.

“The Republican Party will use its best efforts to eliminate Daylight Saving Time, which has a small but strong constituency, but shouldn’t! Daylight Saving Time is inconvenient, and very costly to our Nation,” wrote Trump in posts to his own TruthSocial platform as well as X. 

While his statement was welcome news to many people across the political spectrum, it prompted immediate confusion about what exactly he was proposing. There are two approaches to ending those aggravating clock adjustments on the second Sunday in March and first Sunday in November:

  • Eliminating daylight saving time, which would mean year-round “standard time” 
  • Making daylight saving time permanent 

Many people who detest the changing of the clocks casually call for “doing away with daylight saving time,” not appreciating that, taken literally, it would mean their summers would have earlier sunrises and sunsets. It’s not clear if Trump unintentionally fell into using that language, or if he really wants to see permanent standard time — which is already the state of affairs in Arizona and Hawaii.  

Like so many of the nation’s ills, daylight saving time sprang from the warfare state: It was first introduced during World War I with the goal of conserving fuel. Woodrow Wilson’s interventionist idiocy unjustly killed 115,516 American service members, and daylight saving time keeps on taking lives on the home front. Researchers at the University of Colorado at Boulder found that around 30 traffic-accident fatalities a year may result from the disruption in sleep rhythms, while another study found a 3% daily spike in total mortality in the week after the spring clock adjustment.   

Permanent daylight saving time is appealing to people who want to enjoy more daylight when they leave work. It also has the support of retailers, restaurants, recreation leagues and other organizations that do better with more light at day’s end. Criminals may oppose it: Research has found that dangerous crime increases 7% when daylight saving time ends each fall.  

That’s not to say permanent daylight saving time is a no-brainer. That option comes at the price of many more Americans in northern states waking up to darkness at 8am and even later during the winter months. “A lot of people prefer to have that daylight at the end of the day instead,” University of Pennsylvania clinical psychology professor Philip Gehrman told the New York Times. “But those mornings are going to get dark.” Those dark mornings are cited as a potential safety risk to children waiting at bus stops and walking to schools.  

Meanwhile, many sleep experts say permanent standard time is the healthier option for the human body. “If you get too much light too late in the evening, it disrupts your sleep, and we are essentially creating a months-long environment in which we are actually receiving light at a time that is later in the day than is optimal for our health,” public health professor Dr. Adam Spira of Johns Hopkins told CNN.  

A 2021 AP-NORC poll found that only 25% of Americans want to keep flipping the clocks back and forth, while 43% said they wanted standard time all year, and 32% said daylight saving time should be  made permanent. It’s likely many respondents would change their stances — in both directions — if they had a deeper understanding of each option’s implications.

In November, Trump wing-men Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy — who are heading up his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) — both hinted that they’d like to see an end to the clock changes. Trump’s son, Don Jr, immediately chimed in, saying, “Leave it daylight saving time always.” 

In 2022, a bill to make daylight saving time permanent passed the Senate via unanimous consent, but hit a brick wall in the House. That “Sunshine Protection Act” was introduced by Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, who’s been nominated to serve as Trump’s Secretary of State.   

It’s a topic many people are passionate about, which is why it’s a shame Trump didn’t throw it into this year’s presidential election mix. In the wake of his announced opposition to the clock changes, social media lit up with people sharing their own views on the topic: 

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