White House residential staff reportedly found wads of printed paper clogging Trump's toilet

New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman unveiled the name and title of her book on former President Donald Trump on Thursday, and Axios, which says Haberman's Confidence Man will be "the book Trump fears most," got a sneak peak at some of her discoveries. Trump, for instance, reportedly has told people he has kept in contact with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un since leaving office. But the most eye-catching scoop involves clogged toilets.

Whiile Trump was in office, White House residence staff would occasionally discover wads of printed paper clogging a toilet and believed Trump had tried to flush it down, Axios reports, citing Haberman's book. Trump was, at times, fixated on toilets that wouldn't flush, as The Washington Post's Philip Bump noted.

Axios calls Trump's reputed toilet-clogging "a vivid new dimension to his lapses in preserving government documents," a polite nod to the 15 boxes of papers the National Archives had to retrieve from Mar-a-Lago last month to put Trump in compliance with the Presidential Records Act, his possible mishandling of classified documents, and his habit of ripping up papers after reading them, among other long-reported compliance issues.

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Top White House officials were so "deeply concerned" about Trump's handling of sensitive national security material that one of this chiefs of staff, John Kelly, "tried to stop classified documents from being taken out of the Oval Office and brought up to the residence because he was concerned about what Mr. Trump may do with them and how that may jeopardize national security," the Times reported Wednesday.

Former Trump aide Omarosa Manigault Newman wrote in her 2018 Trump White House book, Unhinged, that she saw Trump "put a note in his mouth" in the Oval Office "appeared to be chewing and swallowing the paper," a shocking action for a famous "germaphobe."

You can read more about Haberman's reporting at Axios. Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America comes out Oct. 4.

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Peter has worked as a news and culture writer and editor at The Week since the site's launch in 2008. He covers politics, world affairs, religion and cultural currents. His journalism career began as a copy editor at a financial newswire and has included editorial positions at The New York Times Magazine, Facts on File, and Oregon State University.