President Donald Trump signed a new executive order Wednesday in pursuit of a familiar and elusive goal: “Undoing the left’s war on water pressure.”
The President on Wednesday directed Energy Secretary Chris Wright to roll back Obama- and Biden-era rules limiting pressure in shower heads. In particular, he railed against efficiency standards getting in the way of grooming his iconic coiffure.
“In my case I like to take a nice shower, to take care of my beautiful hair,” Trump told reporters while signing the order in the Oval Office on Wednesday. “I have to stand under the shower for 15 minutes till it gets wet. It comes out drip, drip, drip. It’s ridiculous.”
In a fact sheet that accompanied the executive order announcement, the White House framed the new order as a push by Trump to undo overregulation that “chokes the American economy, entrenches bureaucrats and stifles personal freedom.”
But the president has long gone after policies that aim to conserve water in the bathroom.
“My hair, I don’t know about you, but it has to be perfect, perfect,” he said outside the White House in 2020.
In August 2020, the energy department embarked on a rule change that would allow individual shower nozzles, but not an entire shower head, to emit up to 2.5 gallons of water a minute. The Biden administration announced plans to reverse that rule in July 2021.
As the White House fact sheet put it, “the shower wars continued.”
“I take a shower, I want that beautiful head of hair to be just lathered,” Trump said at a Turning Point Action event in Detroit in June 2024. “I want it to be lathered beautifully. And I get this best stuff you can buy and I dump it all over. And then I turn on the water and the damn water drips out. I can’t get the stuff out of my hair. It’s a horrible thing.”