I was recently in Home Depot shopping for a new toilet when I was stopped in my tracks by the bold print on an American Standard Champion (I know, it sounds like a prize-winning poodle) that claims it can flush an entire bucket of golf balls in one go, using 20 percent less water. Number one: whoever wrote that is just asking for trouble, daring do-it-yourselfers to experiment, flushing all sorts of unlikely objects down their Champion commode. And, um, Number 2: how did they know this would even work? I mean, who did American Standard know that loves to play golf and habitually flushes odd things down the toilet?
Donald Trump has been floating in scandals lately and his reputation, such as it was, is circling the drain. In her forthcoming book, Confidence Man, New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman writes that while he was president, Trump often tried to flush papers down his toilet, necessitating trips from the plumber to unclog the mess. Now we understand why Trump was obsessed with low-flush toilets, weirdly ranting at his rallies about how people now have to flush their toilets “10 or 15 times!”. Even hardcore MAGA fans would look at each other in disbelief. What the heck was he talking about?
Former White House aide, Omarosa Manigault Newman wrote in her book Unhinged that she once walked in on Trump and lawyer Michael Cohen when the president was in the process of chewing up and swallowing a paper document—which, one would think, might lead to yet another form of obstruction. “It must have been something very, very sensitive,” she speculates. Of course, it was common knowledge that Trump didn’t actually read his security briefings and maybe eating them was his way of digesting the information. Or maybe Homeland Security felt as safe handing sensitive materials to Trump as they would feeding classified papers to a goat. He was even more effective than a paper shredder.
And speaking of shredding paper, those fussy folks at the National Archives were horrified, reviewing White House documents to discover that many of them had been taped back together after Trump had torn them to pieces. And this week we learned that the Archives demanded that Trump return some 15 boxes of documents he had filched from the White House and squirreled away at his home in Mar-a-Lago (or, as late-night host Jimmy Kimmel calls it, following the toilet incident, “Mar-a-Cloggo”).
It appears that somewhere along the line, Trump missed out on some basic, vital information, like that the Presidential Records Act clearly states you can’t destroy presidential records. And don’t throw stuff down the toilet. This is one of the first things toddlers learn when they show they are ready to use the Big Boy potty.
The FBI is now in the process of reviewing the documents recovered from Trump’s Florida residence to determine how much of it is classified. And until they find someone able and willing to do a deep dive in Trump’s plumbing, they will have to seal his toilet lid “Top Secret.”