Trump is plumb obsessed


With the US and the world reeling from the pandemic, the economy staggering, large numbers of people unemployed and finding it hard to make ends meet, losing their health insurance, and getting evicted, what is Trump obsessing about? Plumbing. No, really. He seems to have a fixation that water does not come out fast enough from the showers to make his hair ‘perfect’ and he wants the regulations changed.

I don’t know what he is talking about. Why would taking a longer shower affect how your hair looks after it dries? Does he think that hair keeps absorbing water and that the more it absorbs the less ‘perfect’ it is, whatever that means? How self-absorbed with your looks can you get? This is in addition to his earlier complaints that new water saving devices were adversely affecting the performance of toilets, dishwashers, and washing machines.

The US president’s hair-washing complaints on Wednesday prompted the government to propose an easing of shower pressure standards.

The Trump administration proposed rule changes that would allow shower heads to boost water pressure, after Donald Trump repeatedly complained that bathroom fixtures do not work to his liking.

The Department of Energy plan followed comments from Trump last month at a White House event on rolling back regulations. He said he believed water does not come out fast enough from fixtures.

“So what do you do? You just stand there longer or you take a shower longer? Because my hair – I don’t know about you, but it has to be perfect,” he said.

Last December, Trump said environmental regulators were looking at sinks, faucets and toilets to revise rules meant to conserve water and fuel that heats it.

“People are flushing toilets 10 times, 15 times, as opposed to once,” Trump told a meeting of small business leaders at the White House.

The showers, low-flow toilets, washing machines, and dishwashers I have work just fine. I suspect that it is the shoddy construction of his own properties that is the cause of his complaints.

I swear, he becomes more and more like an Onion parody by the day.

Comments

  1. blf says

    Hair furor has been ranting about low-flow showers, toilets, and so on for quite some time. It’s probably little-to-nothing to do with his extreme narcissism, but his extreme Obama Derangement Syndrome: Some of the regulations were, or at least hair furor “thinks” they were, implemented during President Obama’s administration. Ergo, they must be bad — Obama’s responsible, so it cannot be good.

    Both The Hill (Energy Department proposes showerhead standards rollback after Trump complains) and Snopes (Did Trump Decry Low-Flow Showers and Dishwashers During a Pandemic?) discuss this ranting and how stooopid it is.

  2. Matt G says

    If you had told any republican back in 2014 that THIS is what their party would look like in 2020, they would have said “impossible.”

    What, exactly, does he see when he looks in the mirror? Is there no one who can point out that the emperor has no clothes?

  3. Tadas says

    Perhaps he’s a Seinfeld fan. There’s a scene about showers not having enough water pressure to rinse out the shampoo. Everyone is running around with flat hair.

  4. Mark Dowd says

    Also the sexism. I do not want to imagine the storm of bullshit that would occur if a WOMAN had complained they needed to change regulations in order to make their hair “perfect”.

  5. johnson catman says

    I agree with Marcus @3. Mano, you should have put “hair” in scare quotes when talking about that thing on the head of The Orange Toddler-Tyrant.

  6. nowamfound says

    the orange ferret wearing treason weasel puts so much product on that ferret on his head, it is difficult to shampoo. takes forever to dry

  7. jenorafeuer says

    And, of course, a lot of the long-standing complaints about low-flow toilets aren’t actually insurmountable…

    There have long been multiple ways to make low-flow toilets. The easiest cheapest is to just take a normal toilet and reduce the size of the tank. This also ends up reducing the effective water pressure, which causes the issues everybody complains about.

    There are lots of other ways to make toilets like that which fix the pressure issues by various means. One I’ve seen has the water in a tray that hangs at the top of the tank, and flushing just tips that tray over and drops the water, letting it pick up speed and force before it gets into the bowl. Others are more sophisticated. Generally the bowl itself is changed as well.

    Of course, when regulations are passed saying new buildings need to have low-flush toilets, but don’t specify anything more than that, what are contractors going to put in by default? The cheapest thing they can find that meets the qualifications. Since the qualifications only included water amounts per flush and not pressure, the cheapest toilets that met the regulations didn’t actually work all that well.

    And thus began decades of Americans complaining about low-flow toilets, because the regulations didn’t actually require contractors to use ones that worked, and people who didn’t know better assumed they were all like that. And then, of course, it slowly got rolled into the rest of the whole ‘libs are trying to take away our good stuff!’ attitude.

  8. machintelligence says

    I think the proper term for this is “stomping ants while the elephants are stampeding.”

  9. anat says

    In Israel all toilets have been very low flow for many decades. The design of the bowl is different -- much steeper than typical US toilets. The surface area of the water in the bowl is very small (which also means the user doesn’t see much of their ‘output’ before flushing -- this might be an aesthetic improvement, but also a possible problem if there is a medical reason to know). In addition to that, there is a choice of full flush and even lower flush volume. I would guess Israeli toilets create smaller aerosols and tend to contaminate surfaces in the bathroom less than US toilets if flushed with the lid open.

  10. Katydid says

    The first real push for low-flow toilets in the USA was in the early 1990s. I remember King of the Hill complaining about it in 1992. Early low-flow toilets weren’t great…but that was nearly 30 years ago and the technology has gotten better. Also, as someone pointed out upstream, if you pay for a decent toilet, you’re going to get one. Only the cheapest toilets have issues, but the cheapest *anything* often has issues.

    Trump is just trying to rile up his base any way he thinks will work.

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