Trump’s True Mandate from Voters: Make Life Easier

By Noah Rothman 

Thursday, April 10, 2025 

 

For years, a fashionable delusion has made your life unnecessarily difficult. It was a faith that maintained that the modern American lifestyle is unnatural and immoral. It prescribed a dramatic, compulsory reimagining of the macroeconomy and a fastidious effort to police and stigmatize the private conduct of individuals. It was possessed of immense confidence and, simultaneously, it was self-conscious enough that it hid its true aims from all but fellow true believers. 

 

In 2023, I described this phenomenon as a “war on things that work” because that was its primary manifestation. Informed ostensibly by climate catastrophism, elected officials at all levels waged a crusade against the appliances and technologies that contributed in small but measurable ways to an essential, cumulative convenience. Sometimes, those officials were honest about their objectives, but they often weren’t — a tacit acknowledgement that their means, methods, and goals would not be broadly adopted in the absence of deception and coercion. 

 

In Donald Trump’s campaign for the presidency, he explicitly opposed this intolerable contrivance, and he won a mandate to push the crusaders back. That’s exactly what he’s doing. 

 

The White House held a signing ceremony in the Oval Office on Tuesday to tout the president’s executive order restoring Trump 1.0–era regulations that lifted artificial limits on water pressure in household appliances. With this order, the administration would “ensure that Americans have choice in the consumer market,” said White House Staff Secretary Will Scharf. “If they want a low-flow showerhead, they can buy one.” The president cut him off: “They don’t,” he declared. 

 

Trump has ample evidence in support of that conclusion. It’s not hard to find consumers complaining about the degree to which low-flow showerheads produce an unsatisfyingly flaccid water stream, resulting in longer rinse times and cooler temperatures. A cottage industry has sprung up online informing consumers as to how they can pirate their showerheads to remove built-in flow governors. 

 

Consumers’ frustrations aren’t limited to showerheads. Trump’s edict will liberate appliances like dishwashers, toilets, and washing machines, which currently struggle to perform while operating within limits arbitrarily determined to be ecologically friendly. Consumers have routinely observed that these new, climate-conscious devices consign their users to the very manual labor the devices are supposed to obviate. “For the love of all that is holy, help us make dishwashers work right again,” one exasperated consumer told the Wall Street Journal. This appeal has been heard and answered. 

 

Trump has been accused of taking aim at “high-efficiency household items,” which illustrates another plague on consumers unleashed by the green cultural revolution: euphemisms. “Efficiency” was the word we used to describe the speed and efficacy with which an appliance completes a task. Today, the word describes inputs — water, air, oil, gasoline, and so on — and an appliance’s requiring fewer inputs is the sole criterion for efficiency, regardless of whether it costs more time and money. 

 

The administration’s counterattack against the forces that resent your quality of life doesn’t begin and end with plumbing fixtures. To the degree that it can, the Trump administration is reversing the Democratic Party’s surreptitious effort to render natural gas obsolete by making the sale of gas-powered furnaces and stoves more expensive and proscribing gas hookups from being installed in new construction. The Trump administration is stripping grants from the green energy nonprofits that had lobbied in favor of the attack on gas-powered appliances (a campaign that either wasn’t happening or wasn’t happening fast enough, depending on the audience Democrats were addressing), and it has prohibited the Consumer Product Safety Commission from engaging in that sort of social engineering. 

 

The administration isn’t overlooking refrigeration while it seeks to liberate heating elements. Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency is reversing a Biden-era rule that artificially increased the cost of refrigerants — a program speculatively designed to increase the popularity of heat pumps as an alternative to traditional air conditioners by rendering their competitors’ cost-prohibitive. “The people, not the government, should be choosing the home appliances and products they want at prices they can afford,” said Energy Secretary Chris Wright amid the withdrawal of regulations governing coolers, air compressors, and refrigeration inputs. That will surely vex those who insist that air-conditioning “is emblematic of all the insanity and paradoxes of what we consider progress” — those for whom “non-tech, carbon-neutral solutions” to heat exhaustion are presumably ethically superior — but the rest of us may rejoice. 

 

Unfortunately, there is only so much the Trump administration can do. The president has directed his administration to lift the industry barriers that drove the incandescent light bulb into obsolescence, but we’re two decades into that project, and the domestic manufacturers and supply chains that once made those bulbs readily available are gone. Likewise, a gallingly elitist struggle to liberate Americans from gasoline-fueled outdoor landscaping equipment, which gets big jobs done faster and better than electric alternatives, is being waged primarily at the local level — beyond the federal government’s reach. On that front, however, the Trump administration’s reversal of a fanciful Biden-era initiative to all but dispense with the internal combustion engine in the next decade sends a valuable signal to producers and consumers alike. 

 

From substantive measures, such as directing executive agencies to “incorporate a sunset provision into their regulations governing energy production,” to minor but welcome revisions to the lunatic status quo ante, such as welcoming plastic straws back into federal facilities, the president is delivering outcomes that are in line with consumers’ preferences. That is what he was elected to do: reverse the minor inconveniences that Democrats, in deference to an environmental Luddism popular among the activist left, imposed on the country. 

 

The president would be better served by redoubling his efforts to make daily life marginally less expensive and more convenient. The grandness of his ambition to remake the world economy has led him to take the opposite course in recent weeks. That project is reflective of the very hubris that led voters to sour on Democrats. The public wanted “normalcy” from Joe Biden, but what it got was pomposity and nuisance. By focusing on the small things, all of which contribute meaningfully to average quality of life, Trump could avoid the trap into which Biden stumbled. 

 

Voters don’t want to be treated like pawns in a great game. They don’t need their choices circumscribed because some functionary in the halls of power decides they’re living their lives all wrong. They want the impediments in the way of their pursuit of happiness removed. Trump should avoid the temptation to succumb, as Joe Biden did, to the allure of engineering top-down revisions to the existing social and economic compact. Showerheads and gas stoves may seem like small beer, but there’s a lot to be said for making people happy. Capital-H historians may be disdainful of such modest objectives, but voters’ gratitude more than compensates for these experts’ contempt.