News Journal: Trump has made the swamp worse, not drained it

“I’m going to drain the swamp in Washington!” There wasn’t a more successful applause line in Donald Trump’s campaign repertory. He said it loud and he said it often. No phrase better captured the anti-government fervor that animated so many of his followers. He’s going to go to Washington, they thought, to get rid of all the corruption and all the alligators — the lobbyists, the special interests, the bureaucrats — that we hate. But what do you think Trump himself meant by “drain the swamp?” In fact, did it mean anything at all to him? “You know,” he said in an October 2016 interview with CNN, “that phrase started about a week ago, and I thought it was terrible. I didn’t like it at all. I said I don’t know; I just don’t like it. And now it’s become one of the hottest phrases anywhere in the world and I’m saying I like it.” In other words, whatever “drain the swamp” means, the crowds love it when I say it and that’s good enough for me. No wonder then, that a few months later there has never been a better time to be an alligator in Washington. Start at the very top, with a President who sells hotel rooms to anyone who wants something from his government, and doesn’t disclose their names. A Trump hotel within walking distance of the White House has had many foreign visitors looking to do business with the federal government. It made $2 million in the first four months of the year, almost $4 million over forecast. To make matters worse, the hotel building is owned by the federal government and was leased to Trump before he became president. Last month, CREW (Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington) issued a statement about their lawsuit against the White House saying: “After waiting months for a response to our request for comprehensive visitor logs from the President’s multiple visits to Mar-a-Lago and having the government ask for a last minute extension, today we received 22 names from the Japanese Prime Minister’s visit to Mar-a-Lago and nothing else. The government does not believe that they need to release any further Mar-a-Lago visitor records. We vehemently disagree. The government seriously misrepresented their intentions to both us and the court. This was spitting in the eye of transparency.” Step down to cabinet and agency administrators following the President’s example in soaking taxpayers for private air travel. And each, in his or her own way, doing whatever can be done to feed the alligators. The EPA no longer allows its employees to use the words “climate control” as it follows the lead of the fossil fuel industry. The Education Department hires executives from the for-profit universities that it no longer intends to regulate. Wall Street lawyers and lobbyists now run all the financial regulatory agencies. There has never been a better time to be a corporate or Wall Street lobbyist in the expanding Washington swamp. Because the primary qualification for a government job has become past loyalty to Trump, hundreds of important positions in this administration are still unfilled. But those that have been filled are nearly all friends, former partners or campaign workers. Despite short tenures in their jobs, Politico reports that many are already leaving the White House to monetize their government service, “talking to headhunters about positions as in-house government affairs experts at major companies, or as executives at trade associations.” Once out, they will join an army of Trump associates and campaign workers who have been lobbying since day one of the administration. Politico also identified a number of individuals who left the transition and quickly jumped back in to lobbying; the Trump ban on lobbying for six months was loosely written and has been rarely enforced. After a review of lobbying disclosures, the website found that “many are registered to lobby the same agencies or on the same issues they worked on during the transition.” You rarely read about individual examples of all this because of the complete lack of transparency in the Trump administration. It is the first administration in modern times not to disclose when lobbyists come and go in the White House. Supreme Court justice Louis D. Brandeis got it right when he said, “sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants.” No president in recent history has done such a good job of keeping sunlight out of his administration. Despite all the secrecy, though, I don’t think I have read a newspaper in the past few months that didn’t have at least one story about how this administration has become a captive of special interests. How, one has to ask, can the man who campaigned on draining the swamp justify to his base what has actually happened? The answer is that Donald Trump seems to have a special genius for deflecting criticism and changing the terms of promises he has made. Here is his relevant tweet: “Drain the Swamp should be changed to Drain the Sewer — it’s actually much worse than anyone ever thought, and it begins with the Fake News!” Got that? It is the media’s fault. It makes me think of the old Adlai Stevenson quote, “I’m too old to cry, but it hurts too much to laugh.” Ted Kaufman is a former U.S. senator from Delaware
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