Friday, January 15, 2021

Circling the Drain

By Kevin D. Willliamson

Friday, January 15, 2021

 

What is it with these people and toilets?

 

Donald Trump is, of course, a class-A strange-o, a man whose youngest son is named after the imaginary friend he invented to lie to the New York gossip pages about who he was cheating on his wife with. His gold-plated plumbing fixtures are about No. 1,883,441 on the list of weird things about Donald J. Trump, possessor of a Liberace-meets-Caligula sense of taste that can only be produced by the confluence of vast inherited wealth, neurotic masculine insecurity, and an IQ of 85.

 

But, seriously, what is it with these people and toilets?

 

Ivanka and Jared Kushner have been, as it turns out, forcing the Secret Service to rent a $3,000-a-month apartment because they are terrified by the prospect that one of the men or women who get up every day ready to take a bullet for one of these coddled imbeciles might, over the course of guarding their sorry lives, need to go potty. And though their house has a half-dozen or so bathrooms, these were declared off limits to the Secret Service. The agency ultimately ended up renting a studio apartment from one of the Kushners’ neighbors simply to have access to a toilet.

 

Seriously — what is it with these people and toilets?

 

You could easily imagine the president himself pulling a stunt like that, except that if it were Donald Trump instead of Ivanka, the chiseler in chief would have made sure that the Secret Service rented that apartment from him. Trump is a famous germophobe, but, more important, Secret Service agents fall into the category of human beings about whom Donald Trump cares the least: other people.

 

But, seriously — what is it with these people and toilets? The toilet tab for the Kushners’ security detail already has run into six figures. I trust all those talk-radio mouthholes who ruined their Dockers over Michelle Obama’s travel expenditures will give this due attention.

 

The pettiness of the Trumps would be shocking in a family of orthodontists in Phoenix, Ariz., or used-car dealers from Muleshoe, Texas. But Donald Trump is, allegedly, a billionaire. I suspect we’ll all get to watch that particular house of cards collapse in a spectacular fashion over the coming months, assuming that the soon-to-be-ex-president stays out of jail long enough to make another — what, sixth? — trip back to bankruptcy court. But even for a pretend billionaire, he’s small.

 

The president’s own current jihad is stiffing Rudy Giuliani on his legal fees. Trump is dissatisfied with the performance of American conservatives’ favorite thrice-married cross-dressing pro-abortion Manhattan liberal. One suspects that that weird brown hair-excrescence thing had something to do with it. Trump is, in his Guccionesque way, an aesthete.

 

And there’s the awkward fact of Giuliani’s having failed, in spite of his most abject scheming, to manage to overturn the presidential election that Donald Trump lost to a wobbly poltroon on the edge of 80.

 

How did that happen? You can’t say that Trump wasn’t on top of the issues. If your issue is, you know, toilets.

 

In 2019, Trump made an impassioned, detailed — detailed in his daft way — case for a national program to build big, beautiful, perfect toilets, complaining that, after years of misgovernment under Barack Obama et al., Americans are forced to flush too many times. In the nearest thing Trump has ever offered to a Gettysburg Address, he declared: “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, and in areas where there’s tremendous amounts of water, where the water 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. They take a shower. And water comes dripping out. Just dripping out. Very quietly. Dripping out.”

 

The result? Americans are forced to flush “ten times, 15 times, as opposed to once.”

 

Funny thing about that. Nancy Pelosi has flushed twice, but there he floats.

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