Given everything that’s happened in American politics over the last decade, it’s easy to forget one of the staples of the 2016 presidential campaign. As laughable as it might seem in hindsight, Donald Trump told voters that he saw the political establishment as a corrupt cesspool that he’d clean up in ruthless fashion.
Indeed, as far as the then-Republican candidate was concerned, he was the only candidate who could complete this necessary task — in part because he was a political outsider who had literally zero experience in public service and in part because his considerable personal wealth would immunize him to the demands of the donor class.
It led Trump to promise Americans he would “drain the swamp.”
A decade later, amid frequent allegations of White House corruption and reports that the president is profiting from his office in unprecedented ways, that vow has become the punchline to a sad joke. And it’s striking to see the problem spreading in systemic ways as the first year of the Republican’s second term comes to an end.
The New York Times reported this week on the nearly $2 billion raised by Trump and his allies since the president won his second term — a staggering sum for an incumbent who can’t run for re-election — which in turn “hints at a level of transactionalism for which it is difficult to find obvious comparisons in modern American history.”








