Since Donald Trump heard the venerable phrase “drain the swamp” a few months before he was elected president, he has regularly used the metaphor as Trumpian shorthand for cleaning up government corruption. Of course, that promise, among so many others, has been outrageously ignored, both by the president and his family members and by those hovering around the White House like highway vultures, eyes peeled for self-aggrandizing opportunity.

The list is long and continues to grow longer, but the most recent swamp creature is the president’s daughter Ivanka Trump, who’s also a White House adviser. Her fashion and homewares business was the happy recipient recently of 13 trademarks from the Chinese government, along with provisional approval of eight more. The first daughter now owns 34 Chinese trademarks.

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It’s family tradition, of course. A few weeks ago an Indonesian developer building a Trump-branded resort outside Jakarta finalized a deal involving $500 million in loans from the Chinese government. Three days later, the president announced that he wanted to bail out the Chinese technology firm ZTE, which was about to be hobbled by U.S. sanctions for selling products to Iran and North Korea and then lying to federal investigators. Purely coincidental, of course.

“Ever since Trump and his family arrived in Washington they have essentially hung a for-sale sign on the White House by refusing to meaningfully separate themselves from their own business interests,” Bloomberg’s Tim O’Brien has written. “That’s certainly not lost on the companies that do business in or with Washington. They know that in Trump’s swamp, you pay to play.”

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It’s not just a family thing. We’re learning more and more about the sleazy business practices of Michael Cohen, the president’s personal attorney. Although Cohen wanted to be part of the administration, he had to settle for standing at the gate taking admission fees to the pay-to-play field presided over by the oligarch in the White House.

Not only did Cohen pay hush money on Trump’s behalf to porn star Stormy Daniels, using a shell corporation and a pseudonym for the man who soon would be president, but he also used his access to attract huge sums of money from groups seeking to influence the U.S. government. The pay-to-players Cohen hit up include Novartis, a global pharmaceutical company that paid him $1.2 million and a New York investment firm whose biggest client is a company controlled by a Russian oligarch named Viktor Vekselberg. From naked porn stars to naked corruption, there’s nothing subtle about Cohen’s cashing in.

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Inside the oligarchy, Environmental Protection Agency administrator Scott Pruitt would seem to be the reigning prince of sleaze, though he has ample competition. The Boomer Sooner alacrity of the former Oklahoma attorney general to spend thousands of taxpayer dollars on his own creature comforts — first-class air travel, luxury hotel accommodations, 24-hour security detail — is Teapot Dome brazen, but Trump tolerates it. As long as his man at EPA continues to deconstruct the agency he’s supposed to be administering, he seems to be safe.

He’s safe, for example, to travel to Morocco (with a side trip to Paris), purportedly trying to sell natural gas, a fossil fuel, to the Moroccans. According to the Washington Post, the trip was arranged by Richard Smotkin, a Pruitt pal and Comcast lobbyist who, shortly thereafter, registered as an agent for the Moroccan government. The Moroccans pay the well-placed Mr. Smotkin $40,000 a month.

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Pruitt’s Moroccan jaunt cost the taxpayer $100,000. It’s hard to imagine that we got our money’s worth, hard to imagine his ethics-flouting escapades are what Trump supporters had in mind when they voted to “drain the swamp.”

As Southeast Texans know, most swamps don’t need draining. They provide flood control and water purification, act as a coastal storm buffer and are the habitat for wonderfully unique plants and animals. In light of their benefits, we need a more accurate metaphor for what’s happening in Trump’s Washington. Instead of swamp, we prefer cesspool.

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Come November, every American — Republican, Democrat or independent; Trump supporter or Trump hater — needs to think like a plumber. Under Trump, the odiferous D.C. cesspool is backed up. It desperately needs draining before the stench becomes a permanent part of our national character.