With a trio of indictments looming overhead, Donald Trump took time to assure his voters that he was focused on what really matters heading into 2024 — his shower's water pressure.
During the keynote speech of a GOP dinner in South Carolina on Saturday, Mr Trump told the crowd that modern water pressures just weren't getting the job done.
Though Mr Trump has proven in past speeches that he does not need segues — preferring instead to crash from topic to topic without regard for logic or causality — he did lead into his shower rant, sort of, by complaining about regulations.
“You know I have this gorgeous head of hair – when I take a shower, I want water to pour down on me. When you go into these new homes with showers, the water drips down slowly, slowly,” Mr Trump told the diners.
It is unclear where Mr Trump — whose two main domiciles are a luxury golf resort in Florida and a gilded skyscraper in Manhattan, both of which he owns — is experiencing these shower troubles.
“You have suds, beautiful nice wonderful suds, a lot of money, Procter & Gamble, all that crap that they sell they say is good, probably costs ’em about two cents and they sell it for $10," Mr Trump said. "It takes you 10 minutes to wash your hair. You know what you do? You just stay in the shower about 10 times longer than you would have, it’s the same, you probably use more water. I broke all that up.”
It's not the first time Mr Trump has complained about his bathroom activities being disrupted by water conservation efforts.
In 2019 he made the telling-on-himself admission that Americans had to flush their toilets "10 times, 15 times, as opposed to once," blaming water regulating standards for his apparent need to flush a dozen times per use.
“You turn on the faucet and you don’t get any water. They take a shower and water comes dripping out. Just dripping out, very quietly dripping out,” he said at the time. “People are flushing toilets 10 times, 15 times, as opposed to once.”
The water issue was one of the few things Mr Trump did while in office that aligned with his early campaign promises; he directed the Department of Energy to ease up water conservation standards for showerheads. The former president may have changed the rules, but it didn't really change the way products were manufactured. Nearly all commercially available showerheads during his presidency adhered to the previous standards.
Joe Biden reversed the measure following Mr Trump's presidency.
Perhaps the most baffling element of Mr Trump's water gripes is his insistence that easing up regulations would actually save water.
“[Americans] end up using more water. So [the] EPA is looking at that very strongly at my suggestion,” Mr Trump said in 2019.
And later in 2019:
“You go into a new building or a new house or a new home and they have standards only you don’t get water. You can’t wash your hands practically, there’s so little water comes out of the faucet. And the end result is you leave the faucet on and it takes you much longer to wash your hands,” Mr Trump said.
He then told his supporters that his administration would be "looking at" the concept of "rain" and "opening that up."
It is unclear what he was talking about, but here is what he said.
“There may be some areas where we’ll go the other route – desert areas – but for the most part you have many states where they have so much water – it comes down, it’s called rain. They don’t know what to do with it,” he said, laughing at what presumably was a joke. “So we’re going to be looking at opening up that I believe. And we’re looking at changing the standards very soon.”
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