President Donald Trump is clearly flush with complaints about gadgets that don’t use massive amounts of water. In his latest odd diatribe — at his Michigan campaign rally Wednesday night — he insisted “women tell me” that dishwashers now use an inadequate “four drops of water.”
The attack on water-saving dishwashers follows Trump’s complaints earlier this month about water-saving toilets that have to be flushed up to 15 times to be … effective. He didn’t name the brand. But he did say then that he had directed Environmental Protection Agency officials to look into the issue.
This time he recalled the good old dishwasher days: “Remember the dishwasher? You’d press it, boom! There’d be like an explosion. Five minutes later you open it up, the steam pours out. Now you press it 12 times.”
Trump’s dishwasher and toilet attacks are linked to his administration’s efforts to roll back water conservation as well as energy efficiency requirements for products. His complaints about dishwashers echoed a petition to “Make Dishwashers Great Again,” promoted by the conservative group FreedomWorks, which has ties to an organization founded by fossil-fuel billionaires Charles Koch and his late brother, David Koch.
The EPA’s website promotes water conservation. It notes that using water efficiently is crucial because officials in at least 40 states expect “water shortages to occur over the next several years.″
But during Trump’s exposition on toilets this month, he insisted: “For the most part, you have many states where they have so much water… It’s called rain. They don’t know what to do with it.”
At the Michigan rally, Trump threw water on media howls about his earlier toilet complaint by noting that he had also targeted water-conserving sinks and showers. But the collective media’s head was clearly into the toilet.