Last year bout this time, Donald Trump was campaigning to his fans and talking about magnets when he shone a light on his renown stable genius.
It was an hour earlier, and after the time change this Sunday, it will be an hour later. Bear with me.
“All I know about magnets is this: Give me a glass of water, let me drop it on the magnets, that’s the end of the magnets,” Trump said.
Trump thinks water neutralizes magnetism. It does not.
His science and mental prowess are legendary, as he tells it himself. This is a man who thinks that windmills cause cancer, and he’s persuaded others to believe the same.
“I’m speaking with myself, number one, because I have a very good brain and I’ve said a lot of things… I know what I’m doing and I listen to a lot of people, I talk to a lot of people and at the appropriate time I’ll tell you who the people are. But I speak to a lot of people. My primary consultant is myself, and I have, you know, I have a good instinct for this stuff.”
Yeah, we’ve seen his brilliance play out in public over the last few weeks.
Those of us who can see the car headed for the cliff are losing a lot of sleep, and we’re about to lose a precious hour of that commodity again next week. I don’t have to tell you how much less quality D waves we’ve all gotten since the self-anointed one returned to the White House gold throne.
And given his strong record on science and common sense, don’t look to Trump for help here.
That we have not yet conquered the Daylight Savings Time conundrum is a testament to the times.
Given that the worm-eaten brain of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is the best we could do to put in charge of the science that protects our health and lives, it’s not surprise that the Sunshine Protection Act of 2024 — which would end the annual switch from Daylight Savings Time to standard time every few months — went the way of the Sunshine Protection Act of 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020…you get the picture.
A Monmouth University poll in 2022 revealed that only about a third of Americans don’t mind pushing their clocks ahead and back twice a year.
The U.S. Senate, which struggles regularly to count to 51, voted unanimously last year to end the twice-annual hour swap in the middle of the night.
Closer to home, Colorado passed a law in 2022 that would push the state into Daylight Savings Time forever, but it’s contingent on two other nearby states joining Colorado, Utah and Wyoming in making the leap to sensibility.
Dark and crickets there.
Determined, Marco Rubio, when he was a Florida Senator and not a Trump toady, last reintroduced the Senate Sunshine Protection Act. We live in a country, however, that, for political sport, flirts with economic meltdown by casually threatening debt limits and massive tariffs on our friends and enemies. Rubio got nowhere except a job at the White House. Another Florida senator, Rick Scott, yeah, that Rick Scott, has picked up the baton and is running with it this year.
And so, we begin, again, this time with the Sunshine Protection Act of 2025: Lock the Clock.
In the giant encyclopedia of incredibly stupid things humans have inflicted on themselves and the planet, which boasts such notable feats Congressperson Lauren Boebert and cappuccino-flavored potato chips, daylight saving time rises to the top of the list of heinous gaffes.
The story of time is marginally interesting. The story of saving it, not so much.
This gets a little nerdy here, but the gist is that ancient Egyptians had a thing for keeping track of time and the number “12.”
Way-old timers identified 12 stars moving across the sky after sunset that marked the night. After several hundred years of refinement, voila, the 24-hour day was created.
It wasn’t fancy, but it helped people know when to meet to watch mastodon demolition derbies.
Within a few hundred years, we were all winding watches to let us know when to get to the bank to cover last night’s hot check before it got there.
Then came electric light, full-time jobs and The Great War. Germans invented the game of moving the clocks ahead in an effort to conserve energy needed to generate electricity.
Of course Americans had to do the same thing.
After the Great War, when the Germans went back to pouting and inventing other stuff, we all forgot about daylight saving time, because it was ridiculous, and we love us some electric light in this country.
Then the Germans started up again, this time inventing World War II, and we all needed more of everything and decided we could get it if we just moved the clocks ahead one hour in the spring.
A lot of things didn’t make much sense about World War II, and this was one of them. So the war ends and the Germans go back to making great trochen riesling and skis, but we don’t shake off the daylight saving time.
Rather than scrap this ridiculous notion of “saving daylight,” we institutionalize the damn thing.
We say it saves energy, which several studies show it clearly does not. We say that we keep at it to appease the farmers, which is a lie. Farmers are smart, rational people. They don’t care if you call it Work-Thirty. When the sun’s up, there’s farming to be done.
And so for the past 60 years, we’ve been dragging this useless boat anchor all over the calendar, saying that we’re all too vacuous or too OCD to go back to having the celestial dog wag the intervallic tail.
I would prefer that we just keep standard time year-round, because I’m old and fall asleep before the sun sets after one beer at the end of June, but I support anything that ends something as dumb as a bucket of hair inflicted on me just because state and federal lawmakers love hand-wringing.
If we can get the White House away from gazing daily into the Gulf of Narcissus, maybe we can solve the time calamity and other real problems.
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