DAYLIGHT RAVING TIME

Donald Trump confused literally everyone with his pledge to abolish daylight saving time. In fact, it’s a glimpse of the chaos and myopic self-dealing that lies ahead. (Hint: Trump loves Florida. Florida loves golf. Golfers love sunshine….)

• Daylight saving time is confusing enough. I mean, be honest: Do you get it? The extra hour of sleep is great, then losing one is terrible. Why do we do this again? Did our great-great-great grandpas need more light to plant more sorghum, or something? Was it a German scheme to save energy in World War I? Whatever. Ending this mess is one of those rare proposals that Americans on both sides of the aisle actually agree on.

• President-elect Donald Trump seized that populist position this week. But in typical fashion, he bewildered even his own party with a lack of detail about how he thinks we should actually set our clocks — permanently forward, or permanently back? “The Republican Party will use its best efforts to eliminate daylight saving time, which has a small but strong constituency, but shouldn’t,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. That sounds simple enough: Get rid of daylight saving in favor of what’s called permanent standard time. Scientists actually agree with that proposal, saying it’s better for your health because we’d get more light exposure in the morning, rather than the evening.

• So what’s all the fuss about? Lawmakers, including some of Trump’s closest allies, don’t agree with scientists on the matter. Shocking, right? Last year, Florida Sens. Rick Scott and Marco Rubio — his choice for secretary of state — introduced legislation to make daylight saving time the norm everywhere, and Rubio recently advocated for the bill. The leaders of Trump’s government efficiency commission, perennial manchild Elon Musk and tech bro Vivek Ramaswamy, also called changing clocks “annoying” and “inefficient” recently, but didn’t clearly say which time they prefer.

Donald Trump famously resides in the Sunshine State and cares a lot about what his Florida folk think — 16 of his cabinet picks have connections there. And Florida does not like permanent standard time… because… golf.

• Florida Men love nothing more than an excuse to crack cold ones in the sunshine and talk business all day long with their best buddies. The longer the sun’s up, the longer they can hit the green, which is Trump’s favorite thing to do (besides blasting off late night tweets while scarfing down Big Macs and a Diet Coke). It checks out that Trump would want to make his friends happy. But there’s also some tension with the mega-rich ski industry, which prefers shorter days.

• “The best thing about golf is long summer nights. You will golf less if we get rid of daylight saving. So if you’re going to choose one, you would choose daylight saving, not get rid of daylight saving,” one Republican lawmaker told The Hill. “But then that won’t work well with the ski industry. They like to start earlier.”

• One House Democratic aide who has been following the issue put it more bluntly. “No one knows what the fuck he meant,” he told What A Day. “Something that no one was really tracking, as virtue of Truth Social, has people talking about it … Any clarity that we get would be great, but we’re gonna let them figure that out on their side.”

• This particular shitshow foreshadows what’s to come more and more often next year: In the wee hours of the morning, the president of the United States will blast out his position on some fundamental issue — like, exactly what time you should wake up every day — most likely after being swayed by his closest buddies or late night Fox News binges. “You’ve gotta be fucking kidding me,” every underpaid 22-year-old Capitol Hill staffer whispers to themselves, struggling to craft a witty tweet for their boss’s account that simultaneously supports the president’s cryptic position while making it clear that, yes, we understand what’s going on (note: they don’t). Take Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AK)’s tweet, for example.

When it comes to the mysterious inner workings of Donald Trump’s mind, sometimes the simplest explanation makes the most sense: “I think he just doesn’t want the clocks to go back and forth,” said Rep. Greg Steube (R-FL). “I would imagine he supports Florida’s position.”

EV MACHINA

Donald Trump looks determined to kill a key tax credit favoring electric vehicles. And yet criticism is mounting that his plan amounts to a punishing blow to the U.S. auto industry, as climate reporter Stephanie Ebbs reports. 

President Joe Biden’s landmark climate plan, the Inflation Reduction Act, includes a $7,500 tax credit to push Americans to buy electric vehicles, along with other industry incentives. Trump wants it gone. And he’s being egged on, ironically, by the self-styled “first buddy,” EV-car pioneer, Elon Musk — who has said that ditching the tax credit  “will only help” his Tesla EV car company and be “devastating” for his competitors.

Carmakers have already invested hundreds of billions of dollars on EV manufacturing and one of the biggest trade groups has warned Congress that pulling back incentives would make it harder for American car companies to compete with China.

“It would be so counterproductive,” U.S. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm recently told reporters. “You eliminate these credits, and what do you do? You end up ceding the territory to other countries, particularly China.”

Trump’s approach doesn’t make sense, Bloomberg columnist Liam Denning agreed — in part because he seems prepared to leave in place other subsidies for manufacturing EV components, like batteries. That means there will be stimulus for the supply of electric cars, but not demand.

“Trump’s approach is like building factories to nowhere, setting the auto industry up for failure,” he wrote.

This story is supported by our nonprofit partner, Crooked Ideas.

NEWS NEWS NEWS

Donald Trump and Elon Musk came out against the $100 billion government spending bill backed by House Speaker Mike Johnson in a bizarre joint statement posted on Vice President-elect JD Vance’s social media. Now, Johnson’s back to the drawing board to create a new plan to avoid a government shutdown this weekend. “Republicans must GET SMART and TOUGH. If Democrats threaten to shut down the government unless we give them everything they want, then CALL THEIR BLUFF,” Trump said. This implies that Republicans are not smart and tough? Hmmm….

The House Ethics Committee secretly voted to release the highly-anticipated report into former Rep. Matt Gaetz’s alleged misconduct while in office, CNN reports. Gaetz resigned from Congress during his short-lived bid to become Donald Trump’s attorney general, temporarily blocking the release of the report. Thank you, House Ethics Committee, for the Christmas present we’ve been asking for!!

A person in Louisiana was diagnosed today with the first severe case of bird flu in the United States, prompting California to declare a state of emergency. More than 60 people in the U.S. have been diagnosed with the illness this year, but this is the first case originating in someone who had contact with a backyard flock, health officials said.

The Supreme Court agreed to hear a case from social media platform TikTok on January 10, before a nationwide ban on the app is set to go into effect. Lawmakers oppose the app’s Chinese ownership over national security concerns. But Trump said he has a “warm spot” for TikTok, so who knows what will happen.

The Senate easily passed a $895 billion defense bill (no surprises there), which includes a controversial policy restricting gender-affirming care to servicemembers’ kids. We’d like to add our official analysis of this development which is: Fuck that.

Disney executives agreed to settle Trump’s defamation case against ABC News over fears about facing a conservative Florida jury, retaliation from the president-elect — and that he could bring the case to the Supreme Court in an effort to overturn a landmark First Amendment decision, the New York Times reports. Cool! Can’t wait for him to be president again.

The U.S. sent a man back to Kenya after holding him at Guantanamo Bay for 17 years without charging him. (Seventeen fucking years!) Fifteen other men, who have never been charged and were cleared of wrongdoing, are still awaiting release.

Two NASA astronauts who have been stuck on the International Space Station since June won’t be able to return to Earth until March or April, the agency announced. Well aren’t they lucky! Brb, sending in another application to NASA….

Donald Trump’s former chef confirmed that yes, he did really have a button on his Oval Office desk to request Diet Coke.

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