President Donald Trump has had enough of water efficiency standards and is taking a stand. At the White House on Friday, Trump said he ordered a federal review of those standards because they are making bathrooms unusable. “People are flushing toilets 10 times, 15 times, as opposed to once. They end up using more water,” Trump said.
It isn’t just the toilets that are an issue, though. “We have a situation where we’re looking very strongly at sinks and showers and other elements of bathrooms, where you turn the faucet on in areas where there’s tremendous amounts of water, where it rushes out to sea because you could never handle it. And you don’t get any water. You turn on the faucet and you don’t get any water,” Trump said. The result of this situation is “you can’t wash your hands practically, there’s so little water comes out of the faucet” and then you “end up using the same amount of water.”
The president said that his administration is looking into “opening up the standard” of regulations to save water. He recognized that may not be possible in all areas of the country but that doesn’t mean everyone should suffer from a toilet that doesn’t flush well. “There may be some areas where we’ll go the other route—desert areas,” he said. “But for the most part, you have many states where they have so much water that it comes down—it’s called rain—that they don’t know, they don’t know what to do with it.”
He also complained about energy-efficient lightbulbs that “give you an orange look,” a statement he has made before. “The new bulb is many times more expensive, and, I hate to say it, it doesn’t make you look as good,” Trump said. “Of course, being a vain person, that’s very important to me. It gives you an orange look. I don’t want an orange look. Has anyone noticed that?”
As could be expected, Twitter soon lit up with jokes about the president’s comments, with many taking particular aim at how Trump seems to believe it’s common for people to flush 10 to 15 times. The jokes went beyond Twitter with CNN’s Anderson Cooper dedicating his “Ridiculist” segment to the president’s comments.
