Trump Thrives Under Pressure (Literally)
Tren de Aragua was just a warmup. Now, he's going after the plumbing.
Poor President Trump just can’t seem to make any new Democrat friends these days. Ever since he first uttered the phrase border wall, he seems to be pushing progressives further and further away. As I type, they’re losing it over deportations, his restrictions on gender-affirming care for minors are making them murderous (how are thirteen-year-olds going to get developmentally disastrous hormones and disfiguring surgeries now?), they’re terrified that if we withdraw from the World Health Organization we won’t even know the next time we’re in a pandemic, and Tariffgate has them panic-hoarding solar lights on Temu before the price skyrockets from three to four dollars apiece.
TRUMP: What can we do to get these radical left lunatics off my back?
VANCE: Maybe stop calling them radical left lunatics?
TRUMP: You’d have to be brain-dead to think that’s happening.
VANCE: Getting rid of the income tax might help.
TRUMP: They don’t deserve it. Maybe if they were a little more appreciative I’d do it. But they haven’t earned it. Not even close. It’s a great thing to do and I’m a great President and I may do it someday—probably I will do it—I would almost say definitely. It’s a very good idea, tremendous really, and we’re looking at it very strongly. I like doing great things for great people. These people? Not so great.
VANCE: They really care about climate change.
TRUMP: Fake news. Paris Agreement? You’re fired. Next.
VANCE: Well, they’re always whining about your “divisive rhetoric”. Maybe you could-
TRUMP: Because they’re suckers and losers. All of them. I’m a winner, not a whiner. They’re like babies, whiny little babies.
VANCE [exasperated]: Well, do you have any ideas?
TRUMP [claps tiny hands together]: Water pressure.
VANCE: Water… pressure?
TRUMP: Not just water pressure, I’m talking big, beautiful, unbelievable water pressure! What if when they stepped into the shower—BOOM—they got hit with a yuge, incredible wall of water, like a spectacular wet hug from a firehose. I’m talking power like you’ve never felt. World class. Right now you get a stupid drip-drip-drip like you’re in a third-world hostel. Nobody wants that. This will be the Golden Age of American Plumbing!
VANCE: Water pressure.
TRUMP: We’re bringing it back, baby. Not just very good pressure; legendary pressure. Top-notch pressure. We’re going to Make Showers Great Again!
The Water Pressure Wars started when Obama, in a valiant effort to look like an environmental hero, implemented regulations that limited the water flow rate of showerheads, faucets, and even some toilets. The result? Cleaner consciences, dirtier loos, and lots of lukewarm, disappointing trickles and triple flushes. During Trump’s first term, he made headlines—accompanied by epic Fabio-style photos, natch—for moaning about mediocre shampoo lather and vowing to bring big-time power back to American bathrooms. He mocked the rules, pushed for deregulation, and signed orders to roll the restrictions back. But the bureaucratic gears spun like a dial-up modem in a thunderstorm, and many of his efforts were still tangled in red tape by the time he grudgingly turned the White House keys over to Sleepy Joe. Biden, aiming to undo basically anything Trump had ever touched, once again reinstated stricter water flow limits. (His administration claimed the move would save billions of gallons of water, reduce emissions, and make Greta Thunberg slightly less hysterical.) Meanwhile, millions of Americans were forced to take miserable, much longer showers—probably using just as much water (if not more) than they would have had they been allowed to own a mighty, efficient fixture—while they prayed for a new president who might actually care about their hair.
Boy, did they score.
Politico played the drama queen card this time around with a dire headline: Trump’s new executive order victim: Your shower. (First violent criminals, then useless federal employees, and now this? There’s simply no end to the victim list!) “The president has long gone after policies that aim to conserve water in the bathroom,” the subhead added, lest naïve Politico readers jump to the foolish conclusion that this is Trump’s first assault on lavatory luxuries. (Also, does anyone remember another time in history—apart from the past wackadoodle decade or two—when presidents piddled with appliances? Don’t they have wars to stop and deadly biological products to pull from the market and stuff?)
From the WhiteHouse.gov fact-sheet on the matter:
The Order directs the Secretary of Energy to immediately rescind the overly complicated federal rule that redefined “showerhead” under Obama and Biden.
Twice in the last 12 years, those administrations put out massive regulations defining the word “showerhead.” The Biden definition was a staggering 13,000 words. The Oxford English Dictionary, by contrast, defines “showerhead” in one short sentence.
President Trump is restoring sanity to at least one small part of the federal regulations, returning to the straightforward meaning of “showerhead” from the 1992 energy law, which sets a simple 2.5-gallons-per-minute standard for showers.
The Order frees Americans from excessive regulations that turned a basic household item into a bureaucratic nightmare. No longer will showerheads be weak and worthless.
As y’all know, I can be pretty prolific, but I’m not sure I could write a 13,000-word definition of the word showerhead if you locked me in a closet with a thesaurus for a year. But massive, out-of-control government waste is fake news, really.
I’m not going to lie; I’d take an aggressive 30-second shower over an anemic seven-minute one all day every day. But if I were in charge of protecting a nation’s people and ensuring their prosperity and you gave me a fat notebook and told me to start prioritizing my goals, I feel like “crank up domestic water pressure” would rank somewhere between “reorganize the White House snack cabinet” and “install bidets in space.”
How important is your shower’s pore-blasting factor (relative to world peace or not)? LMK what you think in the comments.
P.S. Yesterday I [not so] subtly asked any regular subscribers who could swing it to consider upgrading to a paid subscription. (I may have bribed sweetened the pot with a free book offer, but no arms were twisted in this solicitation.) Well, so many of you stepped up that I completely ran out of books. More are already on a truck bound for Austin, and I’m OCD-level organized, so you WILL get your book just as soon as humanly possible. If you were one of those amazing souls, please make sure you email me at myfirstname@myfirstandlastnames.com [I’ve been told this is what we do now to outsmart spambots *adds Proficient in IT Security to resume*] with your mailing info and how you’d like your book personalized. On a slightly sappier note, words cannot express my gratitude for your collective kindness, generosity, and apparent affinity for snark. I am like the luckiest girl in the entire Substack world. For real. XOXO
This is no small issue, Jenna. If you add up all the wasted minutes that low-flow shower heads cost the American people each day, it probably adds up to a lifetime. Low-flow shower heads KILL someone every day.
We built a house in 2023. Had the builder leave the packaged showerheads on the counter before they got installed. Came in at night to check the building progress and removed the regulators from the heads. Awesome showers!