It is almost ten years since Donald Trump first promised America that he would be the president to “drain the swamp”, a slogan he admitted he initially “hated” and thought was “hokey”, but later adopted as a key part of his election platform.
Trump was not the first politician to use the slogan – Ronald Reagan appeared fond of the phrase – but this summer, a decade since he made the promise, Trump can be said to finally be acting upon it in a way that even the fiercest of his critics cannot deny. He has, after all, drained the reflecting pool at the heart of Washington DC not once, but twice- at a cost of $14m.
Washington DC is, famously, built atop a swamp. This was no accident: America’s founding fathers didn’t want the federal government to become too powerful, or to overshadow the rights of individual states. So rather than let the booming New York City become the nation’s capital, they built in Washington, knowing that between the swamp and humid climate, DC would never grow as large or as powerful as otherwise it might.
Shorts
Trying to manage a 21st-century superpower from a swamp, though, comes with its issues – and one of those has been managing the reflecting pool spanning the National Mall. The pool has been there for a century, designed to reflect the Lincoln and Washington Memorials, and the greenery between them.
