Donald Trump seems to spend an unusual amount of time thinking about toilets.
Back in 2019, he bizarrely claimed: “People are flushing toilets 10 times, 15 times as opposed to once.” He repeated this claim at a Michigan rally the following year. “Ten times, right, 10 times,” Trump complained. “Not me, of course not me, but you,” he added while pointing at an unfortunate audience member.
A couple of years later, he was back to the toilet talk: angrily disputing claims by the New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman that he’d once clogged a White House toilet by attempting to dispose of documents in it.
I regret to inform you that the president is once again responsible for a national conversation about toilets. In a fitting encapsulation of Trumpism, explosive diarrhea has become a midterm talking point. Food recalls and stomach-churning parasites have been a mainstay of the news this year and Democrats are milking the issue.
In August, for example, the Democratic party’s official Twitter/X account highlighted the number of foods that have been recalled in 2026 and demanded that RFK Jr resign from his role as health secretary. Last month (which happened to be Food Safety Month – who knew?), the Rhode Island congressman Gabe Amo argued that Trump’s cuts to the federal workforce had contributed to decreased food safety. The senator Elizabeth Warren similarly accused “slashed food safety agencies” of contributing to the “cyclospora outbreak” and demanded Trump be held accountable in November.
To be fair, the number of food recalls during Trump’s second term is not remarkably different than it was under Joe Biden. What is different, however, is the scale of the problem. The US only recently declared the end of the largest ever recorded cyclosporiasis outbreak, which was linked to contaminated lettuce. That resulted in 570 hospitalizations and two deaths.
Also different is the fact that, as Warren noted, the Trump administration seems hellbent on dismantling the regulations and systems that help keep consumers safe. Ever since 1995, there has been a federal-state partnership called the Foodborne Diseases Active Surveillance Network (FoodNet) which tracks infections caused by various pathogens, including Cyclospora.
Starting on 1 July, however, the CDC downgraded this program so that mandatory surveillance for the 10 state health departments that participate in the program was limited to Salmonella and E Coli. This downgrading of pathogen surveillance didn’t cause the Cyclospora outbreak, but it might have made it harder for health authorities to respond to it.
And it’s not just food that the current administration is making less safe: the air we breathe and the water we drink are all getting more dangerous in the name of maximizing corporate profits.
On Monday, for example, the Trump administration announced it was relaxing rules that govern how fuel-efficient auto companies have to make their new gasoline-powered cars and light trucks. The rationale given by Sean Duffy, the reality show star turned transportation secretary, is that removing stringent pollution-control requirements will reduce the average costs of new vehicles by $1,300.
We’ll see if that actually happens (corporations are not keen on passing on cost savings), but even if it does reduce car prices, it’s going to cost consumers and the environment in other ways. Reduced efficiency will increase fuel spending, for one thing. And the change is poised to create more air pollution and worsen climate change.
The Trump administration is also working to roll back regulation of toxic air pollutants. Earlier this year the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) proposed weakening air pollution limits on ethylene oxide (EtO), a known carcinogen that is used to clean medical devices. A Biden-era rule finalized in 2024 required stringent testing for hazardous emissions and required emitters to cut the amount of EtO they were producing.
If the EPA is successful in overturning these rules, then tons of the carcinogenic gas will continue to be released into the community. And it’s obviously not people in the vicinity of Mar-a-Lago breathing in the brunt of this poisonous air, is it? It’s people in largely low-income neighborhoods.
Then there’s our water supply. A Biden-era rule set drinking-water limits for several Pfas (commonly known as “forever chemicals”). You know what happened next, don’t you? The Trump administration is trying to roll back those limits, arguing that the standards are expensive and legally flawed.
They’ve also terminated a regulatory review of Pfas-contaminated sewage sludge fertilizer that is used on farmland. What does that mean? Well, according to comments submitted by the Southern Environmental Law Center to the EPA, “if PFOA levels are 9.4 parts per billion [as witnessed in sludge tested in Maine], then more than 54 children out of 10,000 who eat 1-2 meals of fish per week on crop farms could get cancer later in life from those meals alone.”
In short: if you thought the diarrhea-inducing lettuce was bad, then I’m afraid things only look likely to get worse. If Trump isn’t reined in at the midterms, the whole country is going down the toilet.
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Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist
