This is the seventh post in the Wetland Wednesday series, edited by Gabrielle McLaren

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Following Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign promise to rid Washington D.C. of corruption and bureaucracy, the phrase “drain the swamp” gained popularity especially amongst Trump supporters and conservative politicians. Republican Congressman Mike Gallagher devotes a section of his official government web page to addressing the “swampy” character of American politics and government. Eric Bolling, a conservative commentator and author of The Swamp, dedicates the entire book to examining and developing an action plan to address the “murky pool of corruption and cronyism” in Washington D.C. In 2021, republican U.S. Representative Warren Davidson went so far as to designate a bill that would require federal agencies to relocate their headquarters outside of Washington D.C. as the Drain the Swamp Act. More recently, in January of 2024, republican Missouri Senate President, Caleb Rowden, was recorded referring to American politicians as “swamp creatures” who “remind [him] more of his children” than respectable government officials. In what follows, I track the metaphor’s historical political usage and suggest its deeper roots in Western economic and human-nature relations characterized by an emphasis on increased utility, domination, and control of nature. 

Swamp-based rhetoric is not unique to the 21st-century political landscape. According to etymologist, Barry Popik, swamp draining as a metaphor for addressing corruption and smearing political adversaries originated amongst 20th-century American left wing activists and politicians. Popik identifies Victor Berger, the first socialist elected into the U.S. Congress in 1910, as one of the earliest to apply the metaphor to an explicitly political context, referring to the capitalist system. Shortly after, the metaphor was picked up by other political organizers with socialist and communist commitments. Thus, prominent labor organizer and anti-capitalist Mary Harris Jones stated in 1913: “The capitalist and striker — both men are all right — only they are sick; they need a remedy; they have been mosquito bitten. Let’s kill the virulent mosquito and then find and drain the swamp in which he breeds.” 

“The capitalist and striker — both men are all right — only they are sick; they need a remedy; they have been mosquito bitten. Let’s kill the virulent mosquito and then find and drain the swamp in which he breeds.” 

-Mary Harris Jones, 1913

It wouldn’t be until the Reagan administration that the metaphor would register amongst conservatives, representing an overarching desire to cut federal expenditures and address government overreach. In 1982, Ronald Reagan told his administration: “I’m here to drain the swamp of over-taxation, over-regulation and runaway inflation that has dangerously eroded our free way of life.” For Reagan, the swamp served as a practical metaphorical tool for quickly criticizing a set of welfare-state economic and political policies; a critique that would come to characterize neoliberal Reaganomics of the 1980s. 

“I’m here to drain the swamp of over-taxation, over-regulation and runaway inflation that has dangerously eroded our free way of life.” 

-Ronald Reagan, 1982

Whether Reagan, or Trump, is aware of the metaphor’s leftist origins is perhaps unimportant. However, a connection worth establishing is the continuous use of the swamp as a negative referent for larger societal issues. Generally speaking, the metaphor has been utilized by politicians and activists in the United States to indicate an intention to rid institutions of various agents of corruption and harmful political and economic ideologies and to eliminate the larger context—the swamp—which supposedly ‘breeds’ these kinds of figures. 

According to environmental philosopher Irene Klaver, swamps get their negative connotations with the rise of a utilitarian mindset from early modernity onwards into the settler colonial era. Swamplands figured into the early Euro-American settler imagination as an obstacle to frontier survival, and thus as a potential threat to colonial projects. Murky land and water were in the way of settlers’ preferred agricultural practices and small town-formation. In other words, they were in the way of progress. Swamps needed to be drained, mastered, and controlled, to be changed into stable productive lands. Klaver points out how this entailed a radical mentality shift from Indigenous peoples, who had lived for millennia in and with North America’s swamplands. Furthermore, during settler colonial expansion, swamps came into view as a place of disease and disorder, impediments to travel, and antagonistic to agricultural development. Swamps’ unpredictability became a source of fear. Under this Euro-American utilitarian and affective mentality shift, swamp draining became a method for developing and establishing what would come to be the modern United States. The throbbing center of the “drain the swamp” metaphor, Washington, D.C., is partially built on reclaimed land. Once, before the area was colonized, it was a flourishing eco-system—a healthy and thriving swamp. 

Not only does the “drain-the-swamp” metaphor build upon a history of wetland drainage and Indigenous dispossession in the United States, but the metaphor’s success also requires its ongoing production to function. That is, for the metaphor to work, the swamplands and those who make use of them need to be continuously represented in a negative light. 

Popular American cinema became an excellent vehicle for furthering the swamp devaluation. In widely divergent films such as Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979) and the children’s animated film Shrek (2001) swamps are depicted as spaces of uncertainty, chaos, waste, disgust, and threat. In both films, the audience gets the sense that swamps are places to be avoided. Shrek, and his soon-to-be wife Fiona, are perceived as irrational, monstrous, and downright gross by the townspeople when choosing to make the swamp their home. In Apocalypse Now, the main protagonist, Captain Willard (played by Martin Sheen) is sent on a mission through the Vietnamese wetlands only to ultimately plan his escape. The takeaway from both is the sense that swamps are a place where no “rationally” minded person would want to find themselves—and if they did, they would leave. 

That is, for the metaphor to work, the swamplands and those who make use of them need to be continuously represented in a negative light. 

Even though perceptions and attitudes towards the swamplands have somewhat changed for the better in recent years with notable efforts being made to conserve wetland ecosystems, this bleak set of connotations still dominates our thinking of swamps and is actively being reproduced, making the “drain the swamp” metaphor a powerful one for creating a sense of endangerment and threat amongst audiences. These affective dimensions have become an effective trope to instill fear, worry, and paranoia.

These affective dimensions have become an effective trope to instill fear, worry, and paranoia.

The metaphor is currently taking on a more expansive agitational quality: no longer solely directed to corrupt institutions, it now also includes specific groups of people who are perceived to have any kind of political, financial, or cultural power. In The Swamp Eric Bolling describes “swamp creatures” as those people who are politically ambivalent, covert, persuasive with words, sexually perverse, careless with taxpayer money, and even goes as far as to make claims about their smell. Boiling is quite vague when it comes to identifying who exactly the swamp creatures are. Seemingly, they are anyone he disagrees with–but he also imagines them as a global, elite secret order, echoing themes of antisemetic propaganda in the 1930s. The book, targeted towards a public conservative audience, factors into a larger world-building picture that makes insider/outsider distinctions based on individuals’ alleged allegiance to maintaining and perpetuating the existence of the swamp. These are the sort of disconcerting descriptions operative behind the swamp metaphor as it is being popularized by conservatives today. 

Feature Image: Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.