It’s hard to remember now, but “Drain the swamp” wasn’t always just a trite anti-elite slogan for Donald Trump. During the 2016 campaign, it was the motto of the then-candidate’s proposed ethics plan to clean up D.C.’s corrupt lobbyist class, including by forcing “consultants” and “advisers” to register as lobbyists and instituting a lifelong ban on senior executive branch officials lobbying on behalf of a foreign government.
“We are going to have a new government that serves the people,” Trump promised audiences that October. “It hasn’t done that in a long time.”
Two years later, Trump’s calls to “drain the swamp” have taken on a new tone. Far from cracking down on lobbyists, Trump has turned the phrase into a weapon against his own Justice Department as it investigates whether his campaign colluded with Russian attempts to meddle in the 2016 election. Which has led to some interesting verbal calisthenics from the president in the wake of Tuesday’s conviction of one of D.C.’s swampiest swamp rats: Trump’s own former campaign manager Paul Manafort, who ran afoul of federal law by “consulting” for pro-Russian interests in Ukraine, then squirreling his profits away in offshore bank accounts and lying to the IRS about them.
Enriching oneself by tax and bank fraud in the service of a foreign power—intolerable swamp rat behavior? Not according to Trump, who came staunchly to Manafort’s defense in an interview aired on Fox & Friends Thursday morning.
“I have great respect for what he’s done in terms of what he’s going through,” Trump said, praising Manafort for his unwillingness to “flip” under pressure from prosecutors. “He worked for many, many people, many, many years, and I would say what he did, some of the charges they threw against him, every consultant, every lobbyist in Washington probably does.”
One certainly hopes that not every lobbyist in Washington is currently getting away with what Manafort did: feloniously swindling his own country to ensure all his ill-gotten gains were put to useful ends, like buying mansions and $15,000 ostrich-skin jackets. If they are, well, why hasn’t Trump gotten cracking? Surely lancing such pustules should rank just as high on the D.C. clean-up list as kicking out FBI agents who send too many political texts?
Its October deployment as cover for the infamous Access Hollywood tape notwithstanding, Trump’s “Drain the Swamp” plan drew wide praise from government reform advocates during the campaign. Aaron Scherb, director of legislative affairs for the nonpartisan advocacy group Common Cause, said at the time that “these are certainly steps in the right direction.”
“We were cautiously optimistic that, if he were elected, he would do some of those things,” Scherb told THE WEEKLY STANDARD Thursday. “But it’s largely been lip service—instead of draining the swamp, the Trump administration’s unfortunately been swimming in the swamp with scandal after scandal, on a near daily basis. … We’ve been very disappointed and astounded by the number of scandals in this administration.”
Scherb agreed with the president on one point: bad lobbyist behavior is a widespread issue. “There is a larger systemic problem with underground lobbying and the number of lobbyists, people who are essentially lobbying but just not reporting under the Lobbying Disclosure Act or under the [Foreign Agents Registration Act]. You’ve seen since the Mueller investigation has started there have been quite a few firms who have retroactively filed under FARA, and I think until you see any sort of real enforcement, any kind of resources given to the Department of Justice to enforce FARA or the Lobbying Disclosure Act, we’re going to continue to see those kinds of violations.”
Of course, Manafort’s misdeeds—the tax and bank fraud, the alleged money laundering—went far beyond simply running afoul of FARA.
“Paul Manafort is one of the most egregious actors in the system,” Scherb said, “and the fact that he was so closely connected to President Trump and the Trump campaign is indicative of how poorly this administration views ethics and ethical issues.”
It’s obvious by now that President Trump’s definition of “the swamp” is much the same as his definition of “fake news”: it covers anyone in a position of influence in Washington who refuses to bend the knee to him personally and fall into step with his agenda. Thus we see the odd spectacle of Trump characterizing Manafort, previously one of Washington’s most established swamp leeches, as a brave maverick who “the swamp” wants to bring down. An odder spectacle still when you consider that Manafort was convicted, not by the Department of Justice, but by a jury of his peers—the kind of everyday American citizen for whose sake Trump was supposedly draining the thing in the first place.
