Toiletgate: Flush, Dammit, Flush!

 

by Pa Rock

Citizen Journalist

Running for President wasn't really an idyllic endeavor for Donald Trump.  He didn't have some grand personal vision for the improving the state of the nation or ts people.  Trump was just an aging grifter who wanted to stoke his ego, settle a few old scores, and make as much money as he could off of the presidency.  He knew from the outset that his political strength would be with the slow-witted and gullible, and those were the voters that he relentlessly cultivated.

Trump did not bring much in the way of original thought to the White House because he was not known for his thinking skills.  He possessed no idealism nor a sense for the betterment of humanity.  With Trump, it was all about Trump - first, last, and always!  Any originality that did emanate from the Trump White House always focused on his needs.

Like that odd tirade that he unleashed a couple of years ago about low-flow toilets and sinks.  When he did his business on the presidential commode, he wanted to be able to whoosh it away with one simple, yet powerful, flush - and he whined loudly about having to occasionally double-or- triple-flush.  He was a real estate tycoon and he had better, more productive ways to spend his time than with flushing!

But now it is beginning to look as though Donald John Trump may have had ulterior motives in wanting to soup-up the White House toilets.

Presidents are required to safeguard their records, all manner of historical artifact or communications generated from their time in office,  and when they leave office their records MUST BE, by law, turned over to the National Archives.  Among other things, the Presidential Records Act of 1978:

" . . . established that Presidential records automatically transfer into the legal custody of the Archivist as soon as the President leaves office."

That transfer of records to the National Archives did not happen, at least with some records - including some stamped both "Secret" and Top Secret," when the Trump administration rolled out of town in January of 2021.  Just last week, in fact, representatives of the National Archives traveled to Trump's Mar-a-Lago complex in south Florida and seized fifteen boxes of presidential records that had been illegally taken and stored in Florida.

That seizure of presidential documents seems to have opened the floodgate for stories about Trump's impulse to keep his affairs private - even if "his" affairs were really the nation's business.  Stories re-surfaced about Trump routinely tearing up documents after he had finished with them, and then aides would struggle to piece and tape them back together.   The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) has said that Trump tore up "numerous" documents when he was President, documents that were supposed to have been preserved.

(Some credited Trump's long history of being involved in lawsuits as his impetus for always trying to destroy the paper trail of anything he had been involved in.)

There is, however, even more to this latest surge of stories about Trump hiding or destroying records from his administration.  Maggie Haberman, a reporter for the New York Times, is apparently going to press with a book focusing on the Trump single term as President.  Among other things, her book will reveal that members of Trump's staff recalled finding Trump's White House toilet clogged with documents.  Trump has called those stories of flushed documents "categorically false."

The fact that Donald Johnny used his presidency to rage against low-flow toilets is finally beginning to make sense!

Flush, dammit, flush!