Thankfully, Donald Trump did not get his petulant way to make daylight saving time permanent and standard time returned when the clocks did their “fall back” and ended DST, which began on March 8. We averted a very dark winter, with pitch black mornings. Clocks will again “spring ahead” on March 14, 2027 and return to standard time next Nov. 7.

Trump says he doesn’t like the twice yearly switching and wants to stay on DST year round, which would mean more light in the afternoons and he’s emphasized how that will help p.m. golfers like himself. We get it that Trump wants more time on the links before dinnertime, but it’s not worth plunging the country into dark mornings during the winter months.

In New York City, under DST the sunrises have been getting later and later after 7 a.m. If that continued without last night’s “fall back,” sunrise in the dead of winter wouldn’t be until 8:20, after school starts, so kids would be walking in the dangerous darkness to get to class for months.

But Trump is relentless and he cheered when the House passed the stupid Sunshine Protection Act in the middle of the summer on a vote of 308–117, and even though the Republicans followed Trump by a margin of 193-22, Rep. Elise Stefanik, who represents far northern New York, was a no, as winter mornings in the North Country would much darker.

The Sunshine Protection Act, sponsored by a Florida congressman, protects afternoon sunshine at the expense of morning sun and the impact is greater the farther north you go, so while Florida winter mornings won’t be too dark, 1,000 miles further from the equator makes a big difference.

Happily, the Senate has said no, led by Sen. Tom Cotton. We aren’t frequent fans of Cotton, but here he is seeing the light and blocking the bill. For his resistance Trump has attacked Cotton, even telling the world the senator’s personal cell phone number so he could be harassed. But Cotton never budged and the bill died. We assume Cotton got himself a new phone number.

Cotton is correct in saying that the United States tried winter time daylight saving time, in 1974 and it was universally hated as sunrise became too late for school starts and other normal morning activities. Congress quickly repealed it.

Passing it again, as Trump demands, would produce the same problem of being too dark in the mornings and the Sunshine Protection Act would have to be repealed.

In China, which spans what should be five time zones east to west (the continental U.S. is smaller with four zones), the Communist dictatorship imposed a single time nationwide, so in far western China winter sunrise is sometimes after 10 a.m. Maybe that is something that Trump likes.

It’s a small annoyance to spring ahead and fall back, but now so many household clocks are now fully automated — as are the ubiquitous smartphones — maybe the only thing to be adjusted manually is the microwave.

An easy way to remember when is standard time and when is DST, is to think of daylight saving time as “daylight summer time” and summer is the only time that it should be used.

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