Joe Biden’s Return to a Respectable Swamp

8 min readNov 28, 2020

Donald Trump created a swamp the size of an ocean, but don’t expect Joe Biden to drain it.

In 2016, Donald Trump pledged repeatedly to “drain the swamp.” At his rallies, people chanted the slogan and cheered wildly for it. Clearly, they liked the idea.

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Trump vowed to clean up the corrupt culture of money and influence in Washington that was crushing the hopes and dreams of hard-working Americans. It was a rigged system. And only Trump could fix it because he knew exactly how it worked.

Boy, did he ever!

Not only did Trump not drain the swamp, he made it much bigger and much worse. He actually transformed the term “swamp” into something completely different. Jeff Hauser of the Revolving Door Project put it this way in an interview with MarketWatch.

[Trump] turned it on its head to mean that people who stood in the way of what money wanted were the swamp. If you were an environmental scientist at the EPA, and you stood in the way of relaxing standards for emissions into drinking water, you were part of the swamp.

The “new” swamp became experts and scientists, while the “old” swamp of lobbyists and money only expanded.

According to The Center for Responsive Politics, the amount of money lobbyists spent increased every year under Trump. An Associated Press report found that Trump named more lobbyists to cabinet positions than Bush and Obama did over their eight years. Former lobbyists run the Department of Defense, Department of the Interior, and Department of Labor, just to name a few. And that doesn’t include former corporate executives and billionaires in there either. Trump also had a record number of cabinet members replaced because of corruption and ethics problems.

On top of all that, a ProPublica investigation in early 2018 found that “at least 187 Trump political appointees have been federal lobbyists.” By the end of 2019, the number of lobbyist in the Trump’s administration had ballooned to nearly 300. That’s bad. Compare that to a Washington Post report about Obama that counted a respectable 65. Of course, that doesn’t include the slew of former Goldman Sachs employees in Obama’s reign, or their gross influence that put banks above you.

Is Joe Biden going to change any of that? Not likely. Although the swamp will become about lobbyists and money again, it’s still going to be a swamp. The system is still going to be rigged. And don’t hold your breathe for big changes in healthcare and economic inequality, or regulation of big corporations, especially technology.

Here’s why. Biden’s Counselor to the President is Steve Ricchetti who co-owned a lobbying firm that worked with pharmaceutical companies. His Chief of Staff is Ronald Klain, a member of a lobbying firm that worked for mortgage companies. Secretary of Defense Tony Blinken co-founded WestExec Advisors, a consulting firm who got rich off defense contractors and the government. General counsel to Biden’s transition is Jessica Hertz, a senior Facebook attorney who worked on blocking regulations. And as reported by Gizmodo, 47 members of Biden’s transition team have ties to the tech world, including, Airbnb, Alphabet, Amazon, Dell, Dropbox, LinkedIn, Lyft, Salesforce, Stripe, and Uber.

So far, the swamp is doing well with Joe Biden. Let’s hope it doesn’t get any worse than that.

Joe Biden’s Return to a Respectable Swamp

Written by labu dass

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