Norway’s tourism board has turned a presidential insult into a marketing win. After Donald Trump branded Norway a “sh*t house country”, Visit Norway launched an online campaign, “Are these the world’s best sh*t houses?”, showcasing the striking public toilets along the country’s most scenic roads.
Trump made the remark on Sunday 25 October at a campaign rally in Port Huron, Michigan, as he rallied support ahead of the US midterm elections on Tuesday 3 November.
Speaking about immigration, the president said he would welcome newcomers from some countries but not from Norway, “because I didn’t get the Nobel Prize … So I don’t want anybody from Norway.” Later in the same speech, he added: “Norway has become a sh*t house country, actually.”
This year’s Nobel Peace Prize went to international jurist Navi Pillay. The award is decided by an independent Norwegian committee, not by the government in Oslo.
Instead of a diplomatic response, Visit Norway updated an old page on its website, now titled “Are these the world’s best shithouses?”, and shared it on social media with captions such as “Norway makes shithouses great again!”
The toilets in question line the Norwegian Scenic Routes, a network of 18 tourist roads where architecture is designed to work with the landscape. All but one of the rest stops were designed by established or up-and-coming Norwegian architecture firms. Many look out over fjords and waterfalls, or sit beneath the northern lights.
The most famous is at the Stegastein viewpoint, high above the Aurlandsfjord, which DesignCurial ranks among the ten best public toilets in the world. On the island of Senja, a golden loo has become a popular stop. At Ureddplassen, on the Helgeland coast, the toilets stand next to a memorial to the crew of the submarine Uredd, which sank nearby during the Second World War. Others are more discreet: the one at Utsikten runs on solar power, while the one at Ostasteidn is designed so that moss will grow on its outer walls.
“The world needs a little laugh,” Evgenia Egorova, a senior consultant at Visit Norway, told public broadcaster NRK. She explained that the team had chosen to answer with kindness and a touch of humour. Jens Kjeldsen, a professor of rhetoric at the University of Bergen, said the tone was well judged. “It’s like the bully in kindergarten,” he told NRK. “If you get too serious, the bully wins.”
The joke has paid off. According to Skift, the toilet page drew more than 80,000 views from over 170 countries in just five days, around 540 times its traffic the previous week. Roughly one in four visitors was American, and Visit Norway spent less than $10,000 promoting the campaign.
Norway is not the first country Trump has described this way: he has used the same language about Haiti, Libya, Somalia and Yemen. This comment is a U-turn from his first presidency, when he called Haiti and African nations “shithole countries” and said he would prefer immigrants from Norway.
And there is more to come. The Norwegian Public Roads Administration, which develops the scenic routes and their facilities, already has its next project underway: a forest-inspired restroom built from the wood of 60 to 70 trees, shaped like an upside-down trunk whose roots hold up the roof.
