This week, as the global economy struggled to adjust to whipsawing tariff policies, President Trump signed an executive order to address another national crisis: weak shower head pressure.
The order, aimed at reducing bureaucracy and regulation, reverses limits on how much water can pour out of a nozzle per minute, which were implemented by the Obama and Biden administrations in an attempt to conserve water.
Mr. Trump, while signing the order, noted that, in particular, he doesn’t appreciate that weak pressure hinders him from getting a good hair wash.
“In my case I like to take a nice shower, to take care of my beautiful hair,” he told reporters in the Oval Office on Wednesday. “I have to stand under the shower for 15 minutes until it gets wet. It comes out drip, drip, drip. It’s ridiculous.”
Weak shower pressure has been one of Mr. Trump’s longstanding pet peeves. But the whole thing may have sounded familiar — a little too familiar — for anyone who has been watching Netflix’s recent screwball mystery series, “The Residence,” in which President Perry Morgan, played by Paul Fitzgerald, has a similar pet peeve, with a White House usher explaining that he demands “pressure like a fire hose.”
As the White House staff tries to get the pressure right, President Morgan is vocally disappointed. “A rumor of a mist,” he declares after one attempt. At one point, NASA gets involved.
The Shondaland show, which features stars like Uzo Aduba, Giancarlo Esposito and Randall Park, revolves around a murder at the White House during a state dinner, unleashing a sprawling whodunit in the mansion, with details about the building and its history that are drawn heavily from Kate Andersen Brower’s nonfiction book, “The Residence: Inside the Private World of the White House.” It premiered last month and rocketed into Netflix’s top-10 most-watched shows.
The water pressure incident was a quirky scene that proved almost too prescient, and Paul William Davies, the writer and producer of the show, took some time on Friday to discuss how he finds the whole thing “thoroughly amusing.”
This show leverages the White House’s many rooms, secret passageways and quirky staffing details. How much of it is fact and fiction?
Obviously, the big picture part of it — the dead body in the White House — is 100 percent fiction. But, as much as I possibly could, I tried to draw on, or at least be inspired by, things that did actually happen that I thought were kind of fascinating. So I used quite a bit of stuff that Kate Brower had in her book — anecdotes, specific things about relationships or just incidents and so forth. And other things that I had found doing research outside of the book as well. So, there are a fair number of things in the show that I think people would be surprised to realize that they were actually rooted in some real White House history.
So is the shower scene based on fact?
It is. It’s based on a thing that happened with President Johnson, who was obsessed with his shower — both the water pressure and the water temperature. And when he moved into the White House, immediately after the Kennedy assassination, obviously, he became very fixated on the low water pressure. To the extent that, as Kate reports it, he threatened to leave, to move out of the White House and to move back to where he lived in Washington. And it was like a multiyear effort to kind of tackle the plumbing in the White House to achieve what he wanted, which was apparently unreal, like he wanted a fire hose.
There was one plumber who worked in the White House who did, at one point, bring in folks from outside, the Park Service and other federal entities, to see if they could work on the water pressure, and also had people leave the White House to go look at other buildings that he had been in to see if they could kind of replicate the systems.
Have you tested the water pressure at the White House?
I have not.
There’s just something about shower water pressure that feels so personal and relatable. It’s one of those things that reminds you, ‘Oh, presidents, they’re just like us.’
Yeah. I mean, it really does go to the fact that this is the home of the president. You know, it’s an old building — there’s lots of quirks to it, and the water pressure is certainly one of them. And to your point, it is very relatable because at the end of the day, that’s where somebody is living and waking up and going to bed and doing all the things that we all do in our places.
So what were your thoughts when you saw life imitating art in this way?
It made me laugh because I hadn’t really thought about the water pressure thing as being something that would come back up again. There are a couple of other things in the show: I have a scene between two senators where they talk about buying Greenland and also abolishing the Department of Education. Both of which have obviously come up as concepts in the last couple of months. And I’ve gotten a lot of people come to me saying, “Wait, when did you write this?”
But the shower thing kind of surprised me because it seemed like such a particular obsession of President Johnson’s that I didn’t expect to hear about it.
When did you write those references to Greenland and Department of Education?
A couple of years ago.
Wait — are you a clairvoyant?
Well, there’s a third thing in that speech about fracking under San Francisco — that’s the only one left. I haven’t heard anything about that.
OK, I want to get a little bit personal — what is the water pressure like in your house?
It’s terrible. It’s actually bad and I do appreciate a strong shower. I don’t think I would survive something like President Johnson’s, but somewhere between what I have in my house and President Johnson’s would probably be good.
This interview was edited and condensed for clarity.
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