With 13 days until Inauguration Day, U.S. President-elect Donald Trump held a news conference at his Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach, Florida, on Jan. 7, 2025. While delivering opening remarks, he spent some time talking about water, showerheads, faucets and rain.
Two X users, who for years have regularly and repeatedly published videos related to U.S. politics, posted a portion of Trump's comments about water. Users replying under both posts expressed confusion as to what Trump was attempting to convey.
Independent journalist Aaron Rupar published (archived) a 47-second clip with the caption, "Trump: 'It's called rain. It comes down from heaven. And they want to do no water comes out of the shower. It goes drip drip drip … you can have all the water you want. It makes no difference.'" As of this writing, the post had received around 2 million views.
In another post, X user Acyn Torabi (@Acyn) — a researcher and senior digital editor for the progressive network Meidas Touch — published (archived) a 44-second version of the video with the caption, "Trump: They also want to go back, and they have already started that to when you buy a faucet, no water comes out. Even in areas that have so much water, you don't know what to do. It's called rain. It comes down from heaven."
If one cross-references Trump's January 2025 comments with his previous statements about water supplies, it appears he was relitigating past disagreements with the Biden administration about energy standards. He has a history of ridiculing part of the U.S. Energy Policy Act of 1992 specifying a maximum water flow rate of 2.5 gallons per minute for showerheads and faucets — a standard manufacturers followed with the implementation of flow restrictors.
Trump claimed, accurately, that he had ended a policy related to the restriction of water flow rates during his first term in office (his administration issued a new rule in December 2020, and the Biden administration reversed the rule one year later).
In June 2024, Snopes reported that Biden's 2020 presidential campaign had highlighted some of Trump's previous statements about water, but the transcriptions by the campaign's rapid-response account staff left out his specific mentions of flow restrictors — an omission that misleadingly made Trump's thoughts more difficult to comprehend. The Biden campaign never responded to our questions about why the clarifying portion of Trump's statements was omitted.