Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton is defending his opposition to permanent daylight saving time after President Trump shared his cell number and pressed him to back the House-passed bill.
Breitbart News reported that Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) publicly defended his opposition to making daylight saving time permanent, even as President Donald Trump blasted him for holding up the measure and shared the senator’s cell phone number so constituents could call.
The fight centers on The Sunshine Protection Act. The U.S. House passed the bill in July by a bipartisan 308-117 vote. Trump says Cotton has kept it bottled up in the Senate for months.
Cotton’s answer is straightforward. He says Congress has tried permanent daylight saving time before, Americans hated the dark winter mornings that followed, and Arkansas families should not send kids to school before sunrise.
In a post on X, Cotton laid out why he will not rubber-stamp year-round daylight saving time. He does not deny that changing clocks is a nuisance. He argues the cure has already failed.
Cotton said:
“No one likes changing the clock, me included, but Congress has enacted permanent Daylight Savings Time multiple times before and repealed it each time once Americans experienced absurdly late sunrises in the winter,”
He added the line that defines his position:
“Arkansans don’t want their kids going to school in the pitch dark, and I’ll always put Arkansas first.”
That is the core of the dispute. Cotton is treating the bill as a state-level safety and lifestyle question, not a national sloganeering contest. Dark winter mornings land hardest on rural families, school schedules, and morning commutes, the people senators are elected to represent.
Internal party fights over process and priorities are hardly new, including earlier Senate clashes involving Cotton on other oversight fights.
Trump took the opposite view and made it personal. On Truth Social, he argued that real loyalty to Arkansas means more evening light and an end to the twice-a-year clock scramble in homes, farms, and workplaces.
Trump wrote:
“If Tom Cotton were putting Arkansas first, he would give them an extra hour of daylight and, more importantly, they wouldn’t have to run all over their houses, farms, work places, and everywhere else, twice a year, having to change their Clocks, and often forgetting to do so,”
He followed with a political jab tied to his own record in the state:
“That is really putting Arkansas FIRST, and I know, because, unlike Tom, I won that Great State, three times, and by almost 40 points!”
Trump also reminded followers that the House had already acted. He said the chamber approved The Sunshine Protection Act “long ago” by that 308-117 tally, and charged that the bill “has been held up in the Senate, a place where things go to die, by Tom Cotton, for months!”
Trump has kept a heavy public schedule into the midterm season, a pace he has described in plain terms while pushing a full travel blitz across the map.
Trump did not stop at criticism. He shared Cotton’s cell phone number on Truth Social and encouraged people to call the senator and urge support for The Sunshine Protection Act.
The move turned a procedural Senate hold into a direct public pressure campaign. Voters who want permanent daylight saving time were pointed straight at Cotton’s phone. Cotton answered by restating the winter-sunrise problem and his duty to Arkansas, not by surrendering the hold.
Trump also offered his own reading of history. He said permanent daylight saving time was dropped in the past because lawmakers used it as a “negotiating chip” for bigger bills, and that “Everybody loved it, but it was given up in order to get bigger, better, and more consequential ‘things.’”
Cotton’s account differs on the lesson of those earlier experiments. In his telling, the policy was tried, the late winter sunrises proved “absurd,” and Congress repealed it for a reason.
Party discipline fights can get noisy fast, as when a Michigan GOP chairman resigned after anti-Trump posts surfaced and forced a loyalty reckoning.
The legislative facts on the table are narrow and clear. The House passed The Sunshine Protection Act in July, 308-117. The bill would lock the country into permanent daylight saving time and end the spring-forward, fall-back ritual.
Trump says Cotton is the reason it has not moved for months in the Senate. Cotton says the old permanent-DST experiments produced dark mornings that families rejected, and he will not impose that on Arkansas schoolchildren.
No injuries, closures, or enforcement actions ride on this fight. The stakes are schedule, safety at the bus stop, farm and work routines, and whether a popular House bill dies by Senate inaction.
Cross-aisle vote-counting still decides outcomes in this Congress, including moments when House Democrats split and handed Trump a win on a hard-fought measure.
For now, the public record shows two Republican power centers talking past each other. Trump wants the extra hour of evening light and an end to forgotten clock changes. Cotton wants winter sunrises early enough that Arkansas kids are not walking to school in the dark, and he says that is what putting the state first requires.
Polling and midterm pressure will keep shaping every visible GOP dispute, especially with coverage noting Trump’s approval numbers under midterm strain in separate national surveys.
The senator has not released a longer floor roadmap in the available statements. He has not matched Trump’s phone-number tactic with a retreat. He has repeated the same constituent test: dark mornings, schoolkids, Arkansas first.
Voters who hate the clock change want a simple national fix. Parents who remember pitch-black winter bus stops want a senator who will not forget them. Cotton is betting the second group is right, and that a senator’s job is to hold that line even when the pressure goes straight to his cell phone.