Flashback: Is this why Trump was always complaining about flushing toilets?

On Thursday, the New York Times’ Maggie Haberman reported that when former President Donald Trump was in office White House staff found documents he had ripped up clogging toilets there.

Trump has denied the story, but Bloomberg reporter Jennifer Jacobs backed it up, tweeting, “Trump is denying he flushed documents down a White House toilet, but @maggieNYT’s reporting is 100% accurate.”

“Staff did find clumped/torn/shredded papers and fished them out from blocked bathroom toilet—and believed it had been the president’s doing, sources told me at the time,” she wrote.

This may put one of Trump’s past obsessions in perspective. During his presidency, he on many occasions made reference to his disappointment when it comes to flushing toilets.

At a December 2019 event at the White House, for example, Trump claimed his administration was “looking very strongly at sinks and showers and other elements of bathrooms.”

“People are flushing toilets 10 times, 15 times, as opposed to once. They end up using more water,” said Trump. “So EPA is looking at that very strongly, at my suggestion.”

Later that same month, as the House of Representatives debated the ultimately successful vote to impeach Trump, he complained that his remarks on toilet flushing had attracted ridicule.

At a rally in Battle Creek, Michigan, Trump remarked, “Ten times, right? Ten times,” referring to the need to repeatedly flush.

In a rally in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in Jan. 2020, Trump said, “Sinks, toilets, and showers — you don’t get any water.”

And a few weeks before losing his reelection bid, Trump returned to the topic at a rally in October 2020.

“So I won’t talk about the fact that people have to flush their toilet 15 times. OK? I will not talk about it. I’ll only talk about showers and — OK?” Trump told supporters.

The revelations about Trump’s document-handling processes come just as the House oversight committee has announced it will be investigating him for failing to turn over documents to the National Archives in apparent violation of federal law.

Fifteen boxes of records were retrieved from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago property last month, well after they should have been turned in — in January 2021, when his presidency ended.

In a statement, Rep. Carolyn Maloney, the committee’s chair, said, “I am also concerned by recent reports that while in office, President Trump repeatedly attempted to destroy presidential records, which could constitute additional serious violations of the [Presidential Records Act].”

Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.