Trickle-down asininity: The deep meaning of Donald Trump’s shallow shower head obsession
Our once and perhaps future president did so much to destroy America’s democracy and inhabitants that it’s easy to forget his enthusiasm for counterproductive intervention in trivial matters. No wonder it took Joe Biden’s Energy Department nearly a year to get around to cleaning up one of his predecessor’s pettiest projects: shower head deregulation.
The idea that the nation’s plumbing is too efficient so preoccupied Donald Trump that he just couldn’t get the shower out of his head. He was talking about it weeks before his electoral humiliation and making policy on it the month before he was unwillingly pried from power. Last December, his administration went so far as to create a loophole in long-standing efficiency standards to allow some shower heads to spew forth more hot water per minute.
This turns out to have been even less consequential than it sounds. That’s because in the absence of an outcry from manufacturers, consumers or anyone other than Trump, no noticeable new market for wasteful plumbing materialized before more efficient heads prevailed and the policy was reversed this week.
It’s nevertheless worth pausing to gawk at the intricate asininity of it all. The uncontroversial standard in question, which limits water flow to 2.5 gallons per minute, has been part of federal law for nearly three decades, so the Trump administration had to find a way to work the president’s will through administrative rule-making. It did so by redefining the standard as applying not to entire shower heads but to separate nozzles, allowing higher-end fixtures with two or three different nozzles to use two or three times as much water.
This wasn’t the former commander in chief’s only foray into the intimate details of household water and energy use. He also slowed the transition to energy-conserving LED light bulbs; authorized a new class of inefficient dishwashers, washing machines and dryers; and talked enough about the inadequacy of modern toilets that many observers braced for him to blow the lid off commode regulation.
Even Trump’s most frivolous fixations are united by a rejection of any consideration beyond his most selfish whims. While none of these initiatives had much resonance with the public or some of the industries that supposedly stood to benefit, they seemed deeply and precisely personal for him: He blamed advanced light bulbs for the tangerine tint of his skin and low-flow showers for the inscrutable arrangement of his hair. At least we were spared any further explanation or codification of his grievance with toilets.