Retired stench packer Harold Farper has recently lifted the lid on his experiences being part of the team brought in to remove the stench of the first Donald Trump administration from the White House, prior to Joe Biden taking office in 2021. “They had to bring in all the top stench removal experts from around the world for that thing,” the sixty eight year old Ealing resident revealed in the second volume of his best-selling autobiography, ‘Confessions of a Master Stench Packer’, the sequel to the equally popular ‘Adventures of a Stench Packer’s Mate’. “Obviously, with my thirty years of experience, working for some of the UK’s top stench packing firms on some of their biggest jobs, I was a natural choice.” According to the veteran stench packer, the White House job was the biggest he ever tackled. “The state of the place after Trump was kicked out was atrocious – there was no way that the Bidens could have moved in before we’d completely cleansed every room of the stench of Trump,” Farper reveals. “It was clinging to everything – the carpets, the furniture, the drapes. It was so thick that every time you touched anything in there, you could feel the layers of encrusted stench on your fingers. It was so bad that it was actually beginning to visibly stain the walls.” The stench wasn’t just down to Trump himself, the stench operative claims. “While you can virtually see the cloud of pungent stench surrounding him – that’s what causes his orange skin, not tanning, as everyone seems to think – a fair amount of it was down to unsanitary habits of his staff,” explains Farper. “Of course, many would argue that it wasn’t their fault, that the toilets were all so backed up with classified documents they’d tried to flush away that they had no choice other than to piss and crap all over the place.”
The thick fog of stench permeating the White House immediately post-Trump meant that the stench packers assigned to the task faced a tough job. “For one thing, the atmosphere was rank, toxic even, we all had to wear biohazard suits and respirators while we were in there,” recalls Farper. “If you didn’t, within seconds your eyes would start stinging and you’d be gagging and choking. The Oval Office was the worst – there was this orange haze in there, clinging to everything. I don’t know how the poor bastards who worked there had been able to stand it. Perhaps the extended exposure to the stench helped them build up some kind of immunity.” The nature of the job meant that the heaviest duty stench cleansing and packing equipment had to be employed. “The stench removal turbines had to be specially built for the job, with suction on a scale we’d never had to employ before and revolutionary quadruple layered filters to remove all of the stench before recycling the air,” says Farper. “The amount of clean odours that had to be collected and packaged in order to be infused into the White House atmosphere in order to completely cleanse the stench were simply colossal, harvested from thousands of acres of fragrant woodlands and pastures.” The packaging for the removed stench was also specially constructed for the job. “We tried using some of the industrial standard sealed crates, but the stuff started eating through the sides, it was so pungent,” notes Farper. “In the end, we had to have some lead lined metal crates specially constructed to contain the extracted stench.”
Disposing of the removed stench proved a further challenge for the removal team. “Ordinarily, we’d take it to a stench recycling plant, where the most toxic parts can be separated and re-used in various noxious industrial chemical processes, while the rest is diluted with fresher smells before being released into the atmosphere,” explains Farper. “But this stuff just couldn’t be recycled, it was far too poisonous to be diluted or otherwise rendered harmless. Usually in such cases, we look at landfill, but the Trump stench was just so toxic that we couldn’t take the risk of seepage – stuff like that could render hundreds of square miles of land unusable for centuries, killing all plant and animal life.” The stench operative claims that some thought was given to blasting the waste into space, but the plan was vetoed by NASA on the grounds that any alien race encountering it might take it to be a declaration of hostilities and launch an attack against the earth. “Obviously, dumping it in the ocean was a non-starter – our seas are already polluted enough as it is,” says Farper. “In the end, we were forced to store it in a top secret military facility formally used for underground nuclear tests, deep beneath the earth’s surface. Obviously, it has to be guarded around the clock – if any of that stuff fell into the hands of terrorists, there could be dire consequences for us all.”
The White House cleanse wasn’t the only sensitive job handled by Farper in his thirty year career as a stench packer: in ‘Adventures of a Stench Packer’s Mate’, he described how he was involved in the clean up at Kensington Palace after the death of the Queen Mother. “As you can imagine, having been the residence of a three hundred year old woman, the place was full of old person stink,” he says. “It was like the mummy galleries at the British Museum.” He also handled the operation at Buckingham Palace following the state visit of President Trump. “That was nowhere near as bad as the later White House job – we only had to focus on the few rooms that he’d been in,” the stench packer remembers. “In truth, the stench was pretty mild, but Her Majesty The Queen was very particular about that sort of thing – it’s notable that she didn’t feel the need to bring us in after other presidential visits.” Farper has also been called in on a number of international jobs, including clearing Bolsonaro’s stench from Brazil’s presidential palace, following his election defeat and cleansing Zimbabwe premier Robert Mugabe’s official residence following his death.
Having crowned his career with the Trump White House job, Farper is now enjoying a well earned retirement from the high pressure world of stench packing. “I don’t envy the poor buggers who are going to have to clean up the White House after Trump’s second presidency ends,” he reflects as he relaxes in his seaside bungalow in Eastbourne. “It’s bound to be even worse than the first time around – it has been so much more intense so far and he’s had so many other absolute stinkers in there, like Elon Musk and J D Vance. It wouldn’t surprise me if they were forced to demolish the whole building, declare the site toxic for the next century and just start again with a new White House on a new site.” But does the expert stench packer think that the problem of stench, particularly in political spaces, is getting worse? “It’s all those right-wingers they keep electing these days,” he opines. “There’s no doubt that they are enveloped in a stench that clings to everything and everyone around them. It’s the stench of evil – of evil and corruption. It follows them everywhere.”
