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Guest Post by Christopher R. Barron

In 2016, I worked for one of the largest lobbying firms in Washington, D.C. Despite our reputation as a “Republican-leaning” lobby shop, I was the only Trump supporter in our entire firm. My support for Trump, and indeed my insistence that he would win the presidency, were constantly the butt of jokes in client meetings and client pitches: “This is Chris; he supports Trump, and he thinks Trump will win! HAHAHA.”

A little after 2:30 a.m. the day after Election Day, right after the race was called for Donald J. Trump, I got a text from my boss asking me if I could meet the president of the firm for breakfast that morning. Suddenly, it wasn’t so funny that I had been a vocal supporter of Trump. Despite the fact that the overwhelming majority of lobbyists in DC had opposed Trump and actually wrote checks to his opponent, the Trump administration was willing to work with them. When Trump was ascendant in DC, the swamp happily requested—and were given—meetings with members of the Trump administration.

Not surprisingly, once the political tide turned against President Trump, the DC swamp once again turned on President Trump. Late in the first Trump administration, I was asked to come in and interview for a job with the White House. I told very few friends about the interview but did confide in a former long-time lobbying colleague, who was a GOP Chief of Staff on the Hill and who I thought of as a mentor. Her response was, “Personally, I hope you don’t get the job. The people who work in this administration won’t be remembered fondly for it.” Indeed, in the wake of the overwrought hysteria over January 6th, you would be hard-pressed to find more than a handful of lobbyists who were willing to publicly support Trump.

If you want to drain the DC swamp in one easy step, here is how you do it: the Trump administration, at a bare minimum, should refuse to take a single meeting with a single lobbyist who supported Kamala Harris. A vastly superior option would be to only take meetings with lobbyists who openly supported Trump during the election and donated to his campaign. And it’s not just blacklisting the Harris-supporting swamp; this policy should include refusing to take meetings with lobbyists who lined the pockets of Trump’s primary opponents in 2024.

Almost none of the supposedly Republican lobbyists in DC wrote checks to support President Trump’s campaign in the primary. Indeed, most of them first propped up Ron DeSantis’ campaign and then were the driving force behind Nikki Haley’s kamikaze mission against Trump. The same energy and enthusiasm that President Trump has promised to bring the administrative state to heel should be employed to break the back of the swamp.

Like the entrenched bureaucracy, the swamp thinks that they run DC. They treat outsiders like Trump as temporary speed bumps. They will use this administration and line their pockets when it’s politically necessary, but at the first opportunity, they will work to destroy Trump, to stop his agenda, and to dismantle the political movement that he has built. If we are going to fundamentally change the trajectory that our country is on, then we absolutely have to fundamentally change the institutions in this country.

It is not enough to simply elect President Trump and to win the House and the Senate. To truly be successful in our effort to make America great again, we must break the back of the corrupt mainstream media, we must bring the administrative state to heel, and we must drain the DC swamp. Elections have consequences. Those of us who were vocal supporters in his first administration, and especially after January 6th, were shunned by the DC lobbying establishment—and that’s fine; like I said, elections have consequences. And it is past time for the new right to start employing the tactics that the establishment swamp has employed for decades.

This policy isn’t about vengeance or holding grudges; it is about recognizing that we cannot make lasting change without these kinds of reforms. If we simply allow the swamp to do business as usual, they will continue to undermine President Trump’s agenda—and get rich doing it in the process. The media is overwhelmingly run by liberals, the administrative state is overwhelmingly run by liberals, colleges and universities are overwhelmingly run by liberals, pop culture is overwhelmingly dominated by liberals, and the swamp is overwhelmingly controlled by liberals. It is time to change that.

Christopher Barron is a public relations and government affairs specialist and the president of Right Turn Strategies.

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