"Draining The Swamp"

On October 17th, during a speech on ethics reform, Donald Trump announced, “It is time to drain the swamp in Washington, D.C.” A day later, he repeated the phrase in a tweet, adding the hashtag #draintheswamp for good measure. It was late in the campaign for a new slogan, but soon audiences were chanting it.

Trump’s use of the phrase was not the first. Ronald Reagan was fond of it back in the nineteen-eighties, and decades earlier, at the opposite end of the political spectrum, socialists had also sought to “drain the swamp”—of capitalism. Trump himself was wary of the locution at first. At a rally in Des Moines, he told the story:

Funny how that term caught on, isn't it? . . . I tell everyone, I hated it. Somebody said “Drain the swamp,” and I said, “Oh, that is so hokey. That is so terrible.” . . . I said, all right, I'll try it. . . . So, like a month ago, I said, “Drain the swamp,” and the place went crazy. And I said, “Whoa, what's this?” Then I said it again. And then I start saying it like I meant it, right? And then I said it—I started loving it, and the place loved it. Drain the swamp. It's true. It's true. Drain the swamp.