RHONE: The one promise I wish Donald Trump would keep

“The Republican Party will use its best efforts to eliminate daylight saving time, which has a small but strong constituency, but shouldn’t,” Trump posted at the time on social media.

But recently, he took a step back, casting the debate as a 50/50 issue that doesn’t excite him enough to follow through on that promise.

“It’s something I can do, but a lot of people like it one way. A lot of people like it the other way,” he told reporters in the Oval Office.

How much longer will we be forced to plot how we will manage the time change — going to bed earlier, taking afternoon naps, increasing light exposure or delaying our morning routines — all to accommodate an outdated relic of society that many of us do not want?

Congress first introduced daylight saving time in 1918 to conserve fuel during World War I. The belief was that adding more daylight hours would shorten the amount of time people turned on their lights, resulting in energy savings. But reports from the energy sector after the war showed the savings were minimal. The industries that most benefited from an additional hour of daylight were retail, sports and recreation.

Farmers demanded that Congress return to standard time in 1919. For more than 40 years, except during World War II when daylight saving time was again mandated, states and localities had the option to start daylight saving time whenever they wanted to or not at all. The period, dubbed a “chaos of clocks” in 1963 by Time magazine, continued until 1966 when the Uniform Time Act was introduced. The transportation and communications industries had complained of coordination issues and lobbied Congress to do something.

States could choose to remain on permanent standard time, but if they wanted to have daylight saving time, they had to do it on the same schedule — six months of daylight saving time from late April to October and six months of standard time for the rest of the year.

Over the last half-century, the formula has been tinkered with, ultimately extending daylight saving to a full eight months with only four months of standard time. In 1986, lobbyists from the golf and barbecue industries pushed for daylight saving to be extended a few weeks longer to stretch their season. In 2005, the candy industry did the same so kids could spend another hour trick-or-treating on Halloween.

The largest swath of Americans, based on Gallup polls dating back to 1946, do not desire more daylight saving time. They want permanent standard time, including during the summer, which is to say, many of us are fine losing an extra hour of evening light for eight months of the year and using blackout curtains in parts of the country where the sun might rise as early as 3 a.m. or 4 a.m.

In 2021, Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp signed legislation that does the opposite and would move Georgia permanently to daylight saving time if the Uniform Time Act of 1966 is repealed. States currently can opt out of daylight saving and opt for permanent standard time, but the only states exercising that option are Hawaii and Arizona.

In theory, it sounds good to always have an extra hour of light in the evening. But in practice, we only need to look back to 1973 when the OPEC oil embargo resulted in an emergency permanent daylight saving time — and Americans hated it.

That experiment was supposed to last for two years and lower energy demands by 2%. But Americans disliked it so much, it only lasted for eight months. It turned out waiting until 8 a.m. or 9 a.m. for sunlight in winter was not ideal, even if it meant the sun didn’t set until 6 p.m.

Parents did not like it because it forced kids to go to school in the dark and resulted in the deaths of several children. Farmers have never liked it because they rely on the sun and the seasons to determine their schedules, not a clock regulated by Congress.

Health experts have pointed out that daylight saving is disruptive to the natural rhythm of our bodies, especially in the spring, when we wake up with less mood-boosting serotonin and go to sleep with less sleep-inducing melatonin.

As Trump said, daylight saving benefits “a small but strong constituency,” and history has shown us who that is and who that isn’t.

It isn’t parents. It isn’t kids. It isn’t farmers. And it isn’t anyone interested in Making America Healthy Again.

We’ve been fighting the same fight for more than a century, and not much has changed, though history has also shown us the best way to move forward.

Trump might not be excited by daylight saving time, but I wish he would keep his promise and get rid of it.

Read more on the Real Life blog (AJC.com/opinion/real-life-blog/), find Nedra on Facebook (facebook.com/AJCRealLifeColumn) and X (@nrhoneajc) or email her at nedra.rhone@ajc.com.