WASHINGTON, DC—White House officials and media contributors gathered in the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room Thursday morning to hear Press Secretary Sarah Sanders make an executive announcement. She scarcely made it through greeting those in attendance, however, before U.S. President Donald Trump elbowed in and took the podium. Insisting that he wanted to be the one to deliver the news and “make America great again,” the president announced plans to implement a “new” savings initiative that sounds suspiciously like the current practice of Daylight Saving Time (DST).
“We definitely did not get enough daylight this winter…. I had a lot of golf on my plate these past few months, and there just hasn’t been enough light to fit it all in.” The POTUS continued by listing other downsides to the lack of daylight, including limited tanning schedules, before mentioning the golf thing a few more times.
He went on to suggest that the Obama administration was to blame for the current “daylight deficit” and that he has come up with a “totally original” solution for the darkness much of the nation experiences in the winter months.
“The problem is that previous presidents just didn’t know what they were doing. I’m a smart guy - the smartest I know - so to get out of this mess, we’re gonna do things my way,” President Trump asserted while jabbing the podium with his index finger. Making no mention of DST, he then announced that on March 11, 2018 (the date DST would begin anyway), the nation will set their clocks ahead two hours to start building daylight reserves.
Some form of Daylight Saving Time, the practice of setting the clocks ahead one hour for part of the year, has been observed in the United States for the last century, mostly as a way to coordinate schedules with available sunlight. The president’s plan to change the clocks is certainly not original, and his ideas about seasons appear misinformed, as the amount of daylight at a given time and place is not actually affected by clocks, but by earth’s changing position relative to the sun.
Trump has since tweeted that his private club, Mar-a-Lago, will be setting the clocks ahead three hours on Sunday to ensure that it “never runs out of sun.” Although the president clearly does not understand how daylight, saving, or time actually work, his conservative followers are showing support for the plan via Twitter and other social media platforms.
It is unclear what actual change Donald Trump expects from his plan, and when asked about Arizona and Hawaii, who haven’t observed DST for 50 years and are expected to opt out of the “new” plan, he responded dismissively that “They are free to make that call, but they’d better not be asking for government handouts when they run out of daylight next year.”