WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump on Saturday urged people in Arkansas to call Republican Sen. Tom Cotton and shared what appeared to be the senator’s personal cellphone number, escalating his campaign to get the Senate to make daylight saving time permanent.
In a string of Truth Social posts, Trump accused Cotton of holding up the Sunshine Protection Act, noting that a single senator can stall a bill. The number in one post carried an Arkansas area code. A call to it by The Associated Press went unanswered, and the voicemail box was full. Fox News Digital and Newsweek also called without reaching the senator.
Cotton, who chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee and is a member of the Republican leadership, restated his opposition in a post on X on Saturday afternoon. He argued that Congress has adopted permanent daylight saving time before and reversed course once Americans experienced very late winter sunrises. “Arkansans don’t want their kids going to school in the pitch dark, and I’ll always put Arkansas first,” Cotton wrote.
Trump fired back that if Cotton were truly putting Arkansas first, he would give the state an extra hour of evening light and spare residents from changing their clocks twice a year.
A bill stalled in the Senate
The House passed the Sunshine Protection Act 308-117 in July with bipartisan support, but the Senate has not taken it up. In October 2025, Cotton objected when Republican Sens. Rick Scott of Florida and Tommy Tuberville of Alabama and Democratic Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island sought to move a Senate version by unanimous consent, according to Fox News. Several other senators from both parties also oppose the idea.
Backers of the bill, the White House among them, say year-round daylight saving time would shift sunlight to the evening, when people are most active. Cotton and other critics say it would push winter sunrises so late that many children would wait for school buses in darkness. Cotton has said some Arkansas communities would not see the sun rise until after 8 a.m. in winter, KATV reported.
Speaking to reporters on Saturday before leaving the White House for a rally in Vandalia, Ohio, Trump said Americans are tired of resetting their clocks and of being late for dinner and important meetings as a result. Polling suggests the twice-yearly switch is unpopular: In a 2025 AP-NORC survey, 47% of U.S. adults said they opposed the current system and only 12% backed it, while 40% were neutral.
The posts drew pushback from at least one Republican colleague. Sen. John Kennedy of Louisiana, who called Trump a friend and praised Cotton, said Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that he did not think the tactic would change Cotton’s mind. “I don’t think he should have given out Tom’s cell phone number,” Kennedy said.
Trump has done this before. In 2015, when both were seeking the Republican presidential nomination, Trump gave out the cellphone number of Lindsey Graham, then a senator from South Carolina, at a rally in that state after Graham criticized him, Fox News and the AP reported. Graham, who later became a close Trump ally, died in July. Trump and Cotton are not considered close, the AP reported, and earlier this year Cotton briefly resisted Trump’s effort to delay the confirmation of Jay Clayton as director of national intelligence.
What’s next
Senators are not due back in Washington until Nov. 3, Election Day, so no vote on the bill can happen before the midterms, Fox News reported. Clocks in most of the country will fall back to standard time on Nov. 1, two days before the election. Cotton, who is on the November ballot in a race not expected to be competitive, gave no sign Saturday of dropping his objection, so supporters would still need a way around it once senators return.
