Toiletgate: More about Trumpzi's and toilets

Trump's toilet obsession just took a dark turn. 

Echo report published in Vanity Fair written by Bess Levin

"Maggie Haberman reports Trump has told people that since leaving office, he has remained in contact with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un—whose 'love letters', as Trumpzi once called them, were among documents the National Archives retrieved from Mar-a-Lago." So that’s nice for them. (Oh paleeze!)

Axios first reported on Wednesday one of the accounts Maggie Haberman details in her forthcoming books is that White House staffers regularly found ripped-up printed paper clogging a toilet in the presidential residence during Trump's time in office. 


Maggie Lindsy Haberman is an American journalist. She is a White House correspondent for The New York Times and a political analyst for CNN. 

Of the many obsessions that Donald Trump inflicted on the public during his four years in office—his hatred of windmills, the heights of politicians, hydroxychloroquine—one of the most bizarre was his fixation with toilets. Specifically, his insistence that it took an inordinate number of flushes to clear the bowl. “People are flushing toilets 10 times, 15 times as opposed to once,” he told reporters from the Roosevelt Room in 2019, claiming the EPA was looking into the alleged problem. “Ten times, right, 10 times,” he told rallygoers the following year. “Not me, of course not me. But you,” he said, pointing to a random member of the crowd, who we assume was mortified by the accusation.

In Trump’s telling, toilets were suddenly requiring nearly a dozen flushes due to onerous environmental regulations, which he insisted were not only killing businesses, but also creating scenarios in which people were spending half their day in the bathroom. Except, not one person—even among those who were similarly anti-regulation—ever came forward to claim that they, too, were flushing 10 to 15 times. This was clearly a Trump-specific issue. That made the whole thing not just ridiculous but deeply uncomfortable, in that it forced the American people to 1) picture the president sitting on the toilet, and 2) ponder the seemingly horrifying things coming out of him that necessitated an absurd number of jiggles of the handle.

But on Thursday, a new theory emerged: Perhaps it wasn’t Trump’s diet or the tiny demons that live inside him that required him to flush, flush, and flush again, but the fact that he was shoving documents down the bowl?

While TFG Trump was in office, staff in the White House residence periodically discovered wads of printed paper clogging a toilet—and believed the president had flushed pieces of paper, Maggie Haberman scoops in her forthcoming book, Confidence Man.

Why it matters: The revelation by Haberman, whose coverage as a New York Times White House correspondent was followed obsessively by Trump, adds a vivid new dimension to his lapses in preserving government documents.… The news of White House toilet-flushing comes as the National Archives has reportedly asked the Biden Justice Department to examine Trump’s handling of White House records, amid the congressional investigation into the January 6 assault on the Capitol. The Washington Post reports that National Archives officials “suspected Trump had possibly violated laws concerning the handling of government documents.” The National Archives later retrieved 15 boxes from Mar-a-Lago, the Post reported. Archives officials found possible classified material in the returned boxes, The New York Times learned.

In response to the toilet claim, Trump insisted in a statement that the allegation was “another fake story,” one “simply made up by a reporter in order to get publicity for a mostly fictitious book.”

News of Trump’s decision to abscond with more than a dozen boxes of presidential records comes alongside detailed reporting on his habit of shredding documents that were meant to be preserved and turned over to the Archives without issue. “The ripping was so relentless that Trump’s team implemented protocols to try to ensure that he was abiding by the Presidential Records Act,” according to the Post, which involved “aides from either the Office of the Staff Secretary or the Oval Office Operations team [coming] in behind Trump to retrieve the piles of torn paper he left in his wake,” and then painstakingly 

Good riddance to TFG*

“jigsawing the documents back together, using clear tape.” One person familiar with the matter told the Post, the Archives staff was “stunned at how many papers they received from the Trump administration that were ripped,” calling it “unprecedented.” Also seemingly unprecedented? A president perhaps disposing of official government property via the toilet; we just hope and pray no one was tasked with fishing out and drying off said property.

*The Former Guy