Can Trump keep me on side?

I’m in danger of falling out of love with Donald Trump. I was ecstatic when he beat Kamala Harris, delighted with his flurry of executive orders, particularly the one entitled ‘Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports’, and thrilled by his appointment of Elon Musk as head of the Department of Government Efficiency. But his flip-flopping over tariffs and the resulting market turmoil has led to a smidgen of buyer’s remorse. At the end of last week, my pension pot was worth 10 per cent less than it had been a couple of weeks earlier.

But then he does something that reminds me of what it is that I like about him. I’m talking about the executive order he signed last week to ‘make America’s showers great again’. Low water flow has long been a pet peeve of the US President, who claims that a rule dating back to the Obama administration, restricting the amount of water that can pass through a shower head to no more than 2.5 gallons a minute, has left Americans unable to wash properly.

‘I like to take a nice shower to take care of my beautiful hair,’ he said in the Oval Office, while signing the order. ‘I stand under the shower for 15 minutes until it gets wet. It comes out drip, drip, drip. It’s ridiculous.’

He overturned the law, which was designed to conserve water, during his first term, redefining what constitutes a shower head. Henceforth, the 2.5-gallon restriction would only apply to individual nozzles, not heads, which could comprise as many as eight nozzles. That meant people with ‘difficult’ hair like the President could blast themselves with up to 20 gallons a minute. But that tweaking of the definition was reversed by Joe Biden’s administration, which was anxious to reduce electricity consumption as part of its climate agenda.