Trump has appointed 4x as many lobbyists as Obama

Politics
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At the halfway mark of President Donald Trump’s first term, his administration has hired a lobbyist for every 14 political appointments made, welcoming a total of 281 lobbyists on board, a ProPublica and Columbia Journalism Investigations analysis shows.
With a combination of weakened rules and loose enforcement easing the transition to government and back to K Street, Trump’s swamp is anything but drained. The number of lobbyists who have served in government jobs is four times more than the Obama administration had six years into office. And former lobbyists serving Trump are often involved in regulating the industries they worked for.
Even government watchdogs who’ve long monitored the revolving door say that its current scale is a major shift from previous administrations. It’s a “staggering figure,” according to Virginia Canter, ethics chief counsel for the D.C.-based legal nonprofit Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. “It suggests that lobbyists see themselves as more effective in furthering their clients’ special interests from inside the government rather than from outside.”

Drain the…swamp?

Edit: How do you guys reconcile this with the “drain the swamp” rhetoric? Is Trump failing do drain the swamp? Or lobbyists are not part of the swamp?

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Fill the swamp!

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Get in while the gettin’s good.

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Only the best corruption.

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This is where the Trumpists show up to clarify that their narrow definition of “draining the swamp” somehow happens to be…exactly what Trump is doing.

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I’m sure they won’t disappoint.

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@acsirip

I’d recommend expanding the OP with some of your own thoughts and opinions.

Single line posts with just a link and quote from an article with just one original sentence might get the thread deleted dontyaknow.
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.^^^^

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Of course he has. It was a good slogan, but the swamp is undrainable as long as there is money involved.

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The difference is that Donald Trump only hires the best lobbyists. Obama wishes he had the hiring skills that Trump does. All of Obama’s lobbyists were corrupt. Trump actually wants what is best for America while the democrats are just trying to enrich themselves. Sad.

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“Drain the Swamp” was never anything more than propaganda to feed to the sheople. Trump has proven himself to be the Gold Standard of the Establishment politician.

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Can’t wait to see how to Trump worshipers explain this one. Maybe something about fake news, sheople or Trump Man Bad memes?

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TDS!

…

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At least there won’t be any lobbyists left to influence our politicians, right?

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Trump was speaking in hyperbole when he said drain the swamp

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done, tks for the heads up.

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Seems like a lot of co-outrage here over some loosely defined terms.

For starters:

What do people consider the “swamp”? (And is that definition of “swamp” the same as the “swamp” that Trump is looking to clean up?)

And what defines a “lobbyist”? (And why is someone with lobbying on their resume necessarily a pariah?)

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Trump runs government the way Tony Soprano ran a sporting goods store.

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The usual obfuscation part of the discussion arrives early.

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Absolutely not. They are all serious questions, if you are willing to tuck away your knee-jerk opposition to anything a non-lib says.

Give it a try.

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I think many of us are just tired of explaining easily comprehensible things to Trump supporters who go out of their way to feign ignorance of basic reality. I’m already having flashbacks to like a 30 post exchange in which one pretended Twitter posts copied directly from Trump’s feed were some kind of deep state plot against him.

It’s tiresome. We don’t need to define lobbying. We shouldn’t need to define the corruption, self dealing, and lying that makes up the “swamp”.

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