I'LL SAY IT AGAIN: TO THE TRUMPERS, "THE SWAMP" ISN'T CORRUPTION -- IT'S US

Many newspeople are putting this story by Glenn Thrush of The New York Times into the wrong frame:

Mick Mulvaney, the interim director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, told banking industry executives on Tuesday that they should press lawmakers hard to pursue their agenda, and revealed that, as a congressman, he would meet only with lobbyists if they had contributed to his campaign.

“We had a hierarchy in my office in Congress,” Mr. Mulvaney, a former Republican lawmaker from South Carolina, told 1,300 bankers and lending industry officials at an American Bankers Association conference in Washington. “If you’re a lobbyist who never gave us money, I didn’t talk to you. If you’re a lobbyist who gave us money, I might talk to you.”

Thrush's Times colleague Trip Gabriel tweets:

Swamp draining, via Mick Mulvaney: “If you’re a lobbyist who never gave us money, I didn’t talk to you. If you’re a lobbyist who gave us money, I might talk to you.” https://t.co/mEhSkp7zat

— Trip Gabriel (@tripgabriel) April 25, 2018

The Daily Beast headline is "DRAIN THE SWAMP? Report: Mick Mulvaney Encouraged Pay-to-Play With Lobbyists." A photo of Mulvaney that accompanies New York magazine's write-up is captioned "It’s simple: Keep filling the swamp."

But as I regularly tell you, the Trumpers don't believe that "draining the swamp" means eliminating corruption -- to them, "draining the swamp" means eliminating their enemies.

Elsewhere in the article, Thrush writes:

In his remarks, Mr. Mulvaney also announced a series of moves intended to reduce the [CFPB]’s power....

Such moves include cutting public access to the bureau’s database of consumer complaints, which the agency had used to help guide its investigations.

“I don’t see anything in here that says I have to run a Yelp for financial services sponsored by the federal government,” he said.

To Trumpers, that's the swamp. It's the Obama-era people who decided that the complaints should be posted and the holdovers who continue to take those complaints seriously, as well as the ordinary Americans who file the complaints and those of us who want the bureau to function as it did prior to Trump's inauguration.

the Trumpers believe that Mulvaney is a very effective swamp-drainer -- and by their definition he is.