For more than four centuries, Shakespeare’s famous “To be, or not to be” has been the existential question.
Four years ago, while taking a shower, President Donald Trump was also contemplating the nature of life, the human condition, his navel, and the hardships of shampooing his big, beautiful hair under a shower that comes out, drip, drip, drip.
For Trump, the existential question was whether ’tis nobler to suffer the humiliation of shampooing one’s beautiful hair in a drip-drip shower, or to take up arms against a sea of tyrannical regulations.
He bravely chose the latter, declaring battle against “the left’s war on water pressure.” He has been fighting not only against the very unfair deep state showerhead bureaucracy, but also against even more unfair toilet flushing mandates, and against all manner of ridiculous regulations that have been preventing Americans from washing their hands properly, cleaning the dishes thoroughly, washing their clothes adequately.
In his second presidential term Americans are finally seeing the concrete results of this crucial battle for the right of every American to waste use our precious water to their hearts’ content.
Yesterday, Trump issued the 1,250,000th Executive Order of his short but momentous presidency — probably the most consequential order for the future of our country.
By the authority vested in him by the Constitution and laws of the United States, under an order titled “Maintaining Acceptable Water Pressure in Showerhead,” Trump repealed “a previous 13,000-Word Regulation Defining “Showerhead,” replacing it “[t]o the extent any definition is necessary” with the Oxford English Dictionary definition of “showerhead…in one short sentence.”
Trump added for effect, “Notice and comment is unnecessary because I am ordering the repeal…”
According to the White House, the order restores “sanity to at least one small part of the federal regulations,” and ends “the Obama-Biden war on water pressure and make America’s showers great again” by allowing showers to put out 2.5 gallons-per-minute, raising the output from the present EPA standard of 2 gallons-per-minute.
But “It’s not just showers,” the Trump administration says, it is also about “everyday appliances like gas stoves, water heaters, washing machines, furnaces, dishwashers, and more…appliances [that] worked perfectly fine before Biden’s meddling piled on convoluted regulations that made those appliances worse.”
Trump says, “We’re going to get rid of those restrictions. You have many places where they have water, they have so much water they don’t know what to do with it. But people buy a house, they turn on the sink, and water barely comes out. They take a shower, water barely comes out. And it’s an unnecessary restriction.”
As Trump signed the executive order, he reiterated his years-long grievance. “I like to take a nice shower, take care of my beautiful hair…have to stand in the shower for 15 minutes until it gets wet. Comes out drip, drip, drip. It’s ridiculous.” He added, “What you do is you end up washing your hands five times longer, so it’s the same water…And we’re going to open it up so that people can live,” he added.
Indeed, Americans will now be able to take proper showers again, give their toilets one big, beautiful flush, wash their hands only once. In other words, they will be able to live again.
Ah, the joys of re-defining the word “showerhead.”
