patrick.net

President Donald Trump is the best. I already thought he was great, but I became even more convinced of his genius when I saw the updated rules on clothes washers, dryers, and showerheads issued by the Department of Energy on December 15, 2020 (new rules on dishwashers came out recently as well). The new regulations relax stringent regulations on the amount of water and energy consumption permitted in household fixtures and appliances, which save energy but impair functionality.

I hear you thinking: do minor regulations on laundry, dishes and showers belong on the measuring stick of presidential greatness? ...

In fact, many of the environmental policies left-leaning governments impose on households are chiefly about getting people to burn a little incense at the altar of the green gods. Recycling, as experts know, is a prime example — aside from corrugated cardboard, aluminum and other scrap metals, recycling household waste is above all an exercise in time-consuming and financially unsustainable processing of materials that will end up in a landfill eventually anyways. The point is not to be effective: the point is to force people to participate, to offer their discomfort in sacrifice to the idols. ...

... high finance, national security, international diplomacy, and the rest of it, exist for one simple purpose — to create the conditions in which it is possible for a nation’s ordinary citizens to go about their business in safety, stability and peace, to earn a decent living, to pursue a few leisure activities, to raise a family. In short, to have a life. Keeping people in a constant state of mild discomfort and anxiety is not conducive to a happy life. It is, however, useful for keeping them under control. ...

At a rally in Wisconsin this summer he told the crowd, ‘Showerheads — you take a shower, the water doesn’t come out. You want to wash your hands, the water doesn’t come out. So what do you do? You just stand there longer or you take a shower longer? Because my hair — I don’t know about you, but it has to be perfect. Perfect.’

Connection established. Ordinary people have no hope of getting regulatory bodies to see reason about functionality in household appliances. But having a president who actually cares about how frustrating it is to have the equipment of daily life hamstrung before it even leaves the factory? A president who can look at a Green New Deal and succinctly translate it into everyman’s English, as he did at the second presidential debate: ‘little tiny windows’, which environmentalists do want — for other people — and which have an enormous, if gradual, impact on quality of life? ...

But it’s touching that even at the eleventh hour, Donald bothered to make this tiny change. His extraordinarily vocal enemies have worked themselves to the bone to make Trump sound like the most hated president in American history. But when he steps off the political stage, it is far more likely that he will do so as one of the most loved. As those who do the nation’s dishes and laundry know: it’s the little things.