From crusading against showers he feels don’t sufficiently wash his hair to reversing protections for a small fish he calls “worthless”, Donald Trump’s personal fixations have helped shape his first environmental priorities as US president.
While withdrawing the US from the Paris climate accords and declaring an “energy emergency” were among Trump’s most noteworthy executive orders on his first day in office, both were further down a list of priorities put out by the White House than measures to improve “consumer choice in vehicles, shower heads, toilets, washing machines, lightbulbs and dishwashers”.
Meanwhile, a separate Trump executive order titled Putting People Over Fish instructs federal agencies to divert more water from northern California to the southern part of the state, which has been ravaged by drought and wildfire. The order blames the “catastrophic halt” of water due to protections for the delta smelt, a small endangered creature that Trump recently called an “essentially worthless fish”.
While Trump has long complained about poor water pressure in home appliances and has repeatedly attacked California for its water policies, experts said that trying to further these grievances through the presidency will hit inconvenient roadblocks.
“It was very striking that the White House memo included toilets and shower heads as a presidential priority. It really was something,” said Andrew deLaski, executive director at the Appliance Standards Awareness Project. “But I think Donald Trump’s concerns are somewhat out of date, to tell you the truth, and backsliding on federal standards for appliances would be illegal.”
When he last was president, Trump scrapped stricter energy efficiency standards for lightbulbs and created loopholes for less efficient appliances such as dishwashers and showers. These moves, which were later reversed by Joe Biden, followed years of complaints by Trump over water pressure.
“You know, I have this gorgeous head of hair. When I take a shower, I want water to pour down on me,” the president said in 2023. “When you go into these new homes with showers, the water drips down slowly, slowly.” Trump separately claimed in 2019 that “people are flushing toilets 10 times, 15 times, as opposed to once” because of a lack of water pressure.
Under federal law, the Department of Energy has to review appliance standards every six years to improve or maintain – but not degrade – efficiency benchmarks. Proponents of the rules say they have helped save Americans money through less wasted energy and water, as well as help lower planet-heating pollution. Polling shows the standards are broadly popular with the public.
But Trump, some Republicans, and gas and homebuilding lobbyists have cast the rules as overreach, and unified Republican control of Congress and the White House could see rollback of the standards, or at least eliminate the tougher rules put in place by Biden.
“No doubt some people don’t like their shower heads and there is a nostalgia for old things, but testing shows there is a broad array of product choices that work very well while saving energy and water,” said deLaski.
“There were some performance problems with some products but that was back in the 1990s. Consumers generally like their efficient products now. The president may be operating on some out-of-date information and I’m sure there are very good showers in the White House.”
The disastrous wildfires in Los Angeles, meanwhile, have resurfaced Trump’s animus towards the delta smelt, which he said is being lavished with water that should be rerouted to southern California to fight the blazes. “Los Angeles has massive amounts of water available to it,” Trump said on Tuesday. “All they have to do is turn the valve.”
Experts say this rhetoric misstates a more complex situation in California, where water resources, under pressure from rising global heating, are being closely managed for big users such as agriculture and, to a lesser extent, cities. Water reservoirs in California were full of water when the wildfires erupted and there is no “valve” that could have released more water from the north.
“Very little additional water is released to support the delta smelt,” said John Durand, a scientist at the University of California, Davis, who has researched the Sacramento-San Joaquin river delta ecosystem, where the smelt – a translucent, silvery fish only a couple of inches long – has been pushed to extinction by water diversions, pollution and development.
“The smelt isn’t as charismatic to many people as salmon,” Durand added. “It’s more of an indicator species that points to more species extinctions to come if we don’t moderate water use …
“It may be amusing to leverage this fish but it doesn’t surprise me as there has been 150 years of leveraging everything in Californian water wars to help support power and money.”
Environmental groups said Trump is maneuvering to weaken endangered-species protections in order to bolster fossil fuel interests and developers. The energy emergency order signed by Trump demands that these protections be set aside for projects considered to be imperative.
“It’s sickening that President Trump is viciously exploiting the deadly Los Angeles wildfires to condemn endangered fish that had nothing to do with the fires to extinction,” said Kierán Suckling, executive director at the Center for Biological Diversity. “Those fish do stand in the way of big agribusiness and developers cashing in on destroying our environment.”
