[quote][R121] the White House has been properly funded since the age of strong presidents, post WWII. I don’t know where this idea came from that it’s note.

Rodent falls from the ceiling at White House Syracuse.com Oct 2, 2019 — Mice, rats, cockroaches and other creepy-crawlies aren't new to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., proving an enduring problem for commanders in chief and ...

Vermin have infested the White House Petula Dvorak | Washington Post Columnist

WASHINGTON — Of course the White House is infested.

Mice, rats, cockroaches, ants. Raccoons, even. This has been going on for 200 years.

Traps galore, according to the reporters who are there every day and familiar with the yelp of a colleague whose toes were nearly tickled by a scampering rodent.

This is nothing new in an old house.

And it’s a little glass-housey of President Donald Trump — veteran of numerous health code violations in his properties across the country — to talk about vermin in Baltimore.

This is the guy who comes from a city that lionized a rat who scavenged a slice of pizza in a subway station. And this cheap shot about rodents in Baltimore is how he took a racist swipe at Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Md., over the weekend when he called the congressman’s district a “rat and rodent infested mess.”

You wanna talk pestilence? The nation’s capital is in the middle of a huge, public infestation.

And let’s take a look at the history of Trump’s current (when he’s not at Mar-a-Lago, with its 78 health code violations) residence — the White House.

This place has been rat-infested for much of its history.

“The rats have nearly taken the building, so it has become necessary to get a man with ferrets,” is how first lady Caroline Harrison reported it Oct. 9, 1889, according to “America’s First Ladies: A Historical Encyclopedia and Primary Document” by Nancy Hendricks.

The Roosevelts’ housekeeper Henrietta Nesbitt was horrified by the mice, rats, squirrels, cockroaches and black ant infestations she found when they moved in, according to her 1948 book, White House Diary.

“I tried to get one of the entomologists to figure out how many generations of cockroaches had grown up there since President Adams,” Nesbitt wrote.

That administration modernized the kitchen. But that did little for the rest of the White House.

The National Security Council, during the Ford administration, had to evacuate the secure Situation Room in the basement of the White House thanks to a rat. Classified journal notes obtained by The Washington Post in the 1990s logged a rat incident on Nov. 25, 1975:

“Meeting was held in the Roosevelt Room rather than the Situation Room because one of the ladies saw a large rat in the Situation Room immediately before the meeting,” a staffer wrote. “I looked, but couldn’t find anything to club. The rat probably escaped into the wall space where the sliding map boards fit.”

Or that time President Jimmy Carter was the meanest he’s probably ever been, fuming when the Oval Office reeked from dead rodents rotting in the walls.

And maybe Trump forgot about the swimming rat?

“It did not look like a Walt Disney rat, I’ll tell you that,” first lady Barbara Bush told the Houston Post in 1990, after a rat swam with her while she did her daily laps in the White House pool. “I was out of that pool so much faster than I thought I could.”

“I swim with a mask, and it just went right by in front of me,” she told the Houston Post. “Fortunately, George Bush was there and drowned the beast. It was horrible.”

The current administration has placed numerous work orders to capture rats, mice, cockroaches and stink bugs, according to an investigation by the NBC 4 investigative team. Trump famously called the place “a dump” when he was moving in.