Trump Seeks Primary Custody of America’s Evenings

WASHINGTON— Following the Senate’s failure to act on permanent daylight saving time before clocks rolled back Sunday, the White House has filed an emergency fictional petition seeking primary custody of America’s evenings.

The petition, submitted to nobody with jurisdiction and read aloud by a senior aide standing next to a decorative lamp, asks that the hours between 5 p.m. and bedtime be placed in a “stable, enriching, pro-family environment” where they can continue supporting patio dinners, youth soccer, retail spending and the national belief that a person who has answered emails all day is about to take a walk.

“The evening has expressed a clear preference,” Trump said in the parody filing. “It wants to be bright, active and seen. It does not want to be shoved into darkness at 4:37 like it has done something wrong.”

The White House described the twice-yearly clock change as an unnecessarily traumatic co-parenting arrangement in which the nation keeps telling daylight it will be home for dinner, then handing it a backpack and sending it across town to morning.

Sen. Tom Cotton, the Arkansas Republican whose opposition has helped stall the bill, immediately requested that the Senate appoint an advocate for winter sunrises, which he said had been treated “like a deadbeat parent just because it refuses to show up before 8 a.m.”

Cotton’s office submitted a competing schedule under which daylight would spend weekdays with children waiting for buses and alternating weekends with adults trying to convince themselves they enjoy November. The proposal insists that nobody is against a pleasant evening, but cautions that a permanent arrangement could leave morning light “standing outside a locked school at 8:15 holding a casserole dish it made from scratch.”

The custody dispute has put Senate Majority Leader John Thune in the position of a mediator whose separating couple consists of the President of the United States, an Arkansas senator and the concept of late-afternoon visibility. Thune reportedly offered to hear both sides after the election, when the Senate returns to confront an overloaded agenda and, for once, a problem literally caused by running out of time.

Complicating the matter, the House-passed legislation would allow states to observe daylight saving time year-round. Had it become law before Sunday, Americans in most states would not have changed their clocks. Now, any immediate effort to make daylight saving permanent could require the country to jump forward again in the middle of winter—a development White House aides are calling “a fresh start” and everyone else is calling “absolutely not at 2 a.m. on a Tuesday.”

That wrinkle has transformed the custody proceeding. Trump’s team no longer merely wants evenings placed in its care; it wants the federal government to arrive unexpectedly in December, announce that it is suddenly later than everyone thought, and leave the nation to explain itself to toddlers, airline schedules and every microwave clock that has been blinking since 2013.

Senate skeptics have countered that the daylight-saving debate should not be settled by whichever official can most convincingly promise an extra hour of grilling. Their proposed compromise would establish a nationally recognized “ambiguous hour,” during which Americans could experience the emotional benefits of 6:30 p.m. without Congress technically committing to where the sun should be.

The White House rejected the offer as a transparent attempt to create another hour that senators could spend saying there is no clear path forward.

By late afternoon, sources close to the sun said it was exhausted by the proceedings and had asked whether it could simply be emancipated from Washington, a request the Senate promised to consider as soon as it finds a calendar.