Let it never be said that Donald Trump, for all his mealy-mouthed rambling, was nothing less than a master communicator. From the ubiquitous success of his “Make America Great Again” slogan to his co-optation of the phrase “fake news,” to any number of his random asides, intentional (?) jokes, and sincerely hilarious screw ups, the former president has somehow managed to sear a lifetime’s worth of deeply weird idioms and catchphrases into the poor, overtaxed crevices of my brain. And of that laundry list of Trump-isms crowding my frontal lobe, perhaps none sticks out more than the time he insisted without prompting that “people are flushing toilets 10 times, 15 times, as opposed to once” — what I took, at the time, to be an attempt to universalize his personal gastrointestinal experience following a lifetime of eating like a drunk college sophomore.
How wrong I was. According to just released reports from New York Times journalist Maggie Haberman’s forthcoming book on the Trump presidency, the White House toilets during the Trump administration were frequently clogged. Only, the clogs weren’t the result of massive fast food feasts, or double servings of ice cream (at least, they weren’t solely the result of his gormandizing). Instead, it turns out, the West Wing’s plumbing was catastrophically backed up with paper. Printed paper. Important paper.
