Donald Trump may have performed more pirouettes on tariffs last week than Rudolf Nureyev used to do during Act Three of Swan Lake, and he may have tanked the bond market and nearly set off a global recession. But don’t worry, America. He just made showering great again.
You no doubt missed this news, because you stick your nose in fake news rags like this one instead of real American outlets like The Federalist, which is where I happened to catch this vital announcement last week: “Trump Restored Showerhead Freedom, Now Let’s Fix the Sneaky Regulation Process.” The president on Wednesday signed an executive order that, in the words of the official White House announcement, would kick-start a process for “undoing the left’s war on water pressure.”
I wish you to know that this is a matter I treat with the utmost seriousness. When we were house-hunting some years ago, realtors were somewhat taken aback to watch as, in each bathroom, I turned the shower on to check out the pressure. Interesting, one of them exclaimed; no one ever does that. Well, said I, there aren’t many routines in life more important than a satisfying shower, so I think that if everyone thought about it for five seconds, everyone would.
Still and all—forced into a choice between a stable global economy and trade regime on the one hand and killer water pressure on the other, I’d speedily opt for the former. Not that Americans should have to face such a choice. It is my firm conviction that we should be able to have both. But in Donald Trump’s America, it looks like we have to choose.
We are barreling our way toward a full-blown trade war with China—with the exception of certain electronics, because even Donald Trump has the sense to know that $3,000 iPhones will be blamed squarely on him (though the latest Nureyevan turn is that this exception may be only temporary). Who will win such a war?
The administration’s view is clear: America! Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, rapidly losing whatever standing he had as a potential voice of reason in this administration, said last week, after China announced retaliatory tariffs: “I think it was a big mistake, this Chinese escalation, because they’re playing with a pair of twos. What do we lose by the Chinese raising tariffs on us? We export one-fifth to them of what they export to us, so that is a losing hand for them.”
Writing in Foreign Affairs, Adam Posen argues that Bessent has it backward. Posen acknowledges that it might be defensible long-term policy to re-shore the production of the countless goods that we import from China (both finished products and raw materials used in a parade of consumer and industrial items). But to start a trade war with the country that supplies those goods before the re-shoring has even really begun is courting disaster.
Posen, noting that the U.S. trade deficit with China is around $263 billion, writes: “To the degree that the bilateral trade balance predicts which side will ‘win’ in a trade war, the advantage lies with the surplus economy, not the deficit one. China, the surplus country, is giving up sales, which is solely money; the United States, the deficit country, is giving up goods and services it does not produce competitively or at all at home.”
Seems to me that China has a lot of power in this relationship. Already, during the last Trump trade war, China stopped buying soybeans from the United States and turned to Brazil. “Look at where they’re blacklisting U.S. companies, hitting U.S. farmers, cutting us off from critical minerals—that’s a tool kit that they’re very comfortable wielding,” Melanie Hart, senior director of the Atlantic Council’s Global China Hub, told CNN. “They have experimented with it in many other countries. They’ve been developing it for years. They have a bunker that they’ve been building for this moment.”
Sure, the Chinese don’t want to lose access to their largest export market, but there are reasons to think that they will hardly crumple before Trump’s demands. For one thing, being a civilization that has been around for several thousand years instead of a couple hundred, they think in terms of longer historical arcs. For another, Xi Jinping and his party don’t have to face the voters anytime soon (or ever). Add to this Trump’s fidgety, to put it politely, nature. Xi will wait Trump out. He already is—the Trumpies have been saying they want Xi to call, and China has been responding that Xi isn’t ready.
And are we really confident that Mr. Art of the Deal is a better negotiator than the man who wormed his way into the position of being president for life, winning a 2018 congressional vote to end term limits by a margin of 2,962 to 2? I’ll bet you right now that Xi wrangles some key concessions out of Trump. We can’t know what they might be. I’ll just say that if I were Taiwanese, I’d be more than a little nervous that Trump might agree to something that would allow Xi to tighten the tourniquet around my country in some way.
But, hey—shower freedom has returned to America. Which, par for the course, is a lie anyway. For starters, as ProPublica reported, Trump’s executive order “will have virtually no effect because manufacturers have little interest in making showerheads that exceed the current limits.” Moreover, I have extensive experience showering as an American adult under eight different presidential administrations of both parties, and I can report to you that there is no Republican or Democratic way to take a shower. If you have bad water pressure, it’s probably because there’s a lot of crud built up in your hot water pipes, and you should replace them. Also, your showerhead might have a water restrictor, which is pretty easy to remove. Here’s a video on how to do it (please don’t tell TNR’s climate editor!). Or go buy a new one at Home Depot or Lowe’s, where you will be dazzled by a mind-boggling array of showerheads with 60, 80, even 100 jets that propel water out of the head as if it were spraying out of a fire hose.
Like these. All made in China.
