President-elect Donald Trump is already signaling he is going to "fill the swamp" with his new administration loaded up with lobbyists, insiders, and profiteers of every description, David A. Graham wrote for The Atlantic on Friday.
It's an observation some other experts have made — and it's something that dominated Trump's first term in office as well, despite his consistent pledges to "drain the swamp." But this time, he wrote, it will be at a level no one has yet seen.
Even Trump himself appears aware of this, he noted, because the "drain the swamp" catchphrase "has begun to vanish from his repertoire. Last month, The Washington Post calculated that Trump had used it 'just 59 times on Truth Social, his social media site, in the past two years — fewer times than he wrote about it on Twitter in October 2016 alone.' The shift isn’t just semantic, either. Trump’s staffing decisions, his transition design, and his own behavior show that he is uninterested in even keeping up appearances this time. Trump himself will never say it, but the credo of his second term is coming into focus: Fill the swamp."
For example, he wrote, Trump's chief of staff, longtime GOP strategist Susie Wiles, was for years a lobbyist with Ballad Partners, as was his choice for attorney general, Pam Bondi. Moreover, he "is also picking many people who come straight from industries that the government regulates or does business with ... includ[ing] Commerce Secretary – designate Howard Lutnick, the CEO of the financial firm Cantor Fitzgerald; Linda McMahon, the former head of World Wrestling Entertainment and now the nominee to lead the Education Department; and the Treasury nominee Scott Bessent, a hedge-fund mogul."
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And then, of course, there's tech billionaire Elon Musk, who, while he won't be a formal member of the Trump administration, is heading up Trump's outside task force to advise how to slash trillions in government spending — a position he will be able to use to cement his own firm's position in government contracts.
These staffing choices, taken together, reveal Trump has complete disdain for the very concept of his own pledges to purge Washington of careerists and insiders, wrote Graham.
"Even during the 2016 campaign, Trump used to tell crowds that he was ambivalent about 'Drain the swamp' as a mantra," Graham concluded. "'This is a phrase — I tell you, I didn’t like it,' he told a crowd in Raleigh, North Carolina, on the eve of the election. 'I thought it was hokey.' He’s clearly now decided that the concept of draining the swamp is hokey too."
