But it turns out that he doesn't know shit about shit. Last week the Oracle of Mar a Lago had this to say:
“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 the water rushes out to sea because you could never handle it — you turn on the faucet, you don’t get any water,” [geeze, this guy is so inarticulate and incoherent] he said Friday at a White House meeting about small businesses and reducing red tape.When Donald Trump says "people," he means Donald Trump. Apparently the notorious germophobe is totally full of shit, and needs to flush the toilet 15 times every time he takes a dump.
Mr. Trump also noted that “people are flushing toilets 10 times, 15 times as opposed to once” and that “they end up using more water,” according to a transcript of the discussion.
The reason there are rules mandating low-flow toilets and shower heads is that water shortages are rampant in many parts of the country, particularly in the Southwest, California and Montana. There's a thing called "senior water rights," which means that if you build a new house, the guy who owns the old farm up the river has the right to stop you from watering your lawn. Or even flushing your toilet, if the previous owner of the land didn't use water for that. It's really a bogus law, but it's endemic out west.
Even in places where there's plenty of rainfall, the deep underground aquifers that supply many suburbs (like mine) with drinking water are being completely drained, and those aquifers literally take millennia to replenish.
The average person urinates six to eight times a day. Defecation rates are more variable, ranging from three times a day to three times a week. Since people urinate between two and 14 times as often as they defecate, water usage should be optimized for urination.
You don't need much water to flush urine: the 1.6 gallons used in low-flow toilets is way more than enough. Frequent bowel movements are also likely to have lower stool volume, and require less flushing. Yeah, some bowel movements might require two, three or four flushes (but 15? Gimme a break!), using three to six gallons.
But so what? Instead of wasting the five to seven gallons of water that old-style toilets used every time you take a leak, just flush the number of times needed. If the "average" person urinates six or seven times more frequently than defecating, they're using only 10 gallons of water a day with a low-flow toilet, as opposed to 30 to 40 gallons as was the case with older toilets. Does it really make any sense to for every American needlessly flush 15,000 gallons of water down the toilet every year to satisfy Donald Trump? That would be four and a half trillion gallons of water!
In some countries toilets have two flush modes: one that uses a small amount of water and another that uses more. But why bother with that gimmick when you can just flush again if needed? One improvement in toilet design that's clearly necessary is a way to make the porcelain slicker, so that excrement and stains just don't stick. We definitely need to make toilets easier to clean, now that Trump is kicking all his undocumented maids out of the country: heaven forbid he'd have to clean his own bathroom!
Come on, Republicans. Don't you long for the days when a president didn't say something completely stupid and make a fool out of himself five, six, seven, ten times a day? Trump is making it so easy for the guys on late night TV to ridicule him. Just impeach him and save yourselves the embarrassment of having to defend his every stupid tweet and utterance...
By the way, it was a Republican, George H. W. Bush, who signed the original 1992 law mandating the 1.6 gallons per flush standard. Not all Republicans are horrible wastrels.
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