There’s good reason Trump might want to distance himself from the slogan — it should be impossible for him to utter “drain the swamp” with a straight face these days given what he’s done since November 8.
One of Trump’s first actions as president-elect was to stuff his transition team full of lobbyists and Wall Street veterans. He did that despite saying in June that “if I am elected President, I will end the special interest monopoly in Washington, D.C.” and then the next month saying “I don’t want lobbyists, I don’t want special interests.” In October, spokeswoman Hope Hicks bragged to the Wall Street Journal about how registered lobbyists weren’t raising money for Trump. But Trump’s relationship to lobbyists changed almost immediately after he became president-elect.
Being rich isn’t the same as being corrupt, but it’s hard to insist you’re serious about ushering in a different way of doing business in Washington when your cabinet is the richest in history, with a combined wealth of well over $9.5 billion — greater than that of one-third of U.S. households combined. Not only are Trump’s choices rich, but they’re also well-connected insiders, with secretary of state nominee Rex Tillerson currently working as CEO of oil and gas giant ExxonMobil and treasury secretary nominee Steve Mnuchin having worked as a banker at Goldman Sachs. Mnuchin later become owner and chairman of OneWest bank, an institution that was described as a “foreclosure machine” by the California Reinvestment Coalition.
Trump’s pick of Goldman Sachs executive Gary Cohn as his director of the National Economic Council had some Trump supporters crying foul before November was even through.
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