Donald Trump barely tried to pretend he was draining the swamp for four years, and now, he’s admitted it was all a farce.
The one step Trump supposedly took to slow the revolving door, an executive order to ban lobbying by senior administration officials for five years, he just scrapped on the way out the door. Trump’s top staff are totally free to become lobbyists this afternoon, just as Barack Obama’s staffers did, just as George W. Bush’s staffers did, and just as Bill Clinton’s staffers did. The swamp is thoroughly undrained.
Trump’s pledge to battle corruption was based on an absurd premise and false assumptions. The absurd premise was that Trump was so experienced in corruption that he alone could fix it. That was his argument at the 2016 convention, running against the nakedly corporatist and self-dealing Hillary Clinton. “Nobody knows the system better than me,” Trump said in Cleveland with a rakish chuckle, “which is why I alone can fix it.”
He didn’t fix it.
For one thing (if we’re being generous), Trump (like Obama) was naive about the nature of the swamp’s corruption. It generally didn’t involve direct bribery as in New York politics but subtle games of access and influence. Trump, however disagreeable and stubborn he may seem, proved to be the most impressionable president in modern times. That happens when you come to the job with no principles, barely any knowledge, and supreme confidence in your own instinct.
We saw the naivete early on, after Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico. The administration eventually waived the Jones Act with regard to Puerto Rico, but before the final decision was made, a reporter asked him if he would waive it.
“We’re thinking about that,” Trump responded, “but we have a lot of shippers and a lot of people … who work in the shipping industry that don’t want the Jones Act lifted.”
He was ready to continue ripping off Puerto Rico because the corporations that profited from the rip-off got his ear.
And while candidate Trump rightly pointed out that the Export-Import Bank was unneeded “featherbedding” for big banks and Boeing, President Trump was too fond of the military-industrial complex and flatterers such as Sen. Lindsey Graham. In the end, Trump revived the Ex-Im Bank, which conservatives had driven into dormancy by the end of the Obama administrations.
The biggest reason Trump didn’t drain the swamp is more straightforward: The man likes corruption.
Again, Trump bragged about the access and favors his donations would get. After Elliot Broidy pleaded guilty to bribing New York state’s comptroller, all other Republicans disowned him. Trump made him deputy finance chairman of the Republican National Committee.
Trump surrounded himself with shady foreign agents such as Paul Manafort and Rudy Giuliani for a reason: What most of us saw as abusing power, he saw as being a “killer” who was smart enough to get rich.
Trump was correct that the revolving door was at the heart of swampy corruption. He was right to issue his executive order barring his top aides from lobbying for five years.
It was cynical and corrupt 20 years ago when Bill Clinton and John Podesta revoked that executive order on his way out of office, swinging wide open the revolving door (pardon the clunky metaphor) for his aides to cash out and become lobbyists, including foreign agents. Fittingly, Podesta’s lobbying firm has since been disbanded after a foreign lobbying scandal.
And it was just as bad when Trump, who claimed to be running against Clintonian corruption, did the exact same thing.
(A quick aside about the media: The New York Times reported on Clinton’s rule in December 1992 beneath a headline “Clinton Team Issues 5-Year Lobby Ban.” But in my search of the New York Times archives for late 2000 and early 2001, I didn’t find a single mention that Clinton revoked the rule, much less a headline. Compare that to Inauguration Day. As of 9:30 a.m., the New York Times homepage, near the top, says, “In his last hours, Mr. Trump rescinded an executive order to bar former White House employees from lobbying after they leave.”)
President Biden’s administration will be full of all the ordinary corporatism and corruption of the average administration. It will be a departure from Trump mostly in that Trumpian corruption was more venal and his governance was less effective.
Trump, Broidy, Manafort, Giuliani, and others are gone. The swamp is as strong as ever.
