President Donald Trump offered an update Monday to perhaps his most popular campaign slogan that he said might more accurately address the realities of Washington politics. | Evan Vucci/AP Trump: Washington is a 'sewer' not a 'swamp'

After a little more than six months in office, President Donald Trump offered an update Monday to perhaps his most popular campaign slogan that he said might more accurately address the realities of Washington politics.

“Drain the Swamp should be changed to Drain the Sewer - it's actually much worse than anyone ever thought, and it begins with the Fake News!” Trump wrote on Twitter Monday morning.


Trump’s “drain the swamp” campaign pledge became a call-and-response crowd favorite during 2016 campaign rallies for Trump, a pledge from the outsider candidate to end what he saw as Washington’s culture of political corruption. In his address to last summer’s Republican National Convention, Trump explained that he had seen firsthand the flow of power and influence in Washington and that “I alone can fix it.”

But since moving into the White House, Trump has struggled to gain traction with his agenda, bogged down at times by ongoing investigations into Russia’s campaign to interfere in last year’s presidential election and allegations that individuals tied to Trump aided the Kremlin in those efforts. The president has labeled those investigations a “witch hunt” and said they amount to little more than Democrats searching for a way to excuse their surprising losses last November.

The president has also complained loudly about the coverage his administration receives from what he considers to be biased “fake news” media outlets, including CNN, The Washington Post and The New York Times. White House press secretary Sean Spicer, who has at times had a combative relationship with the press, announced last Friday that he would resign in order to give incoming White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci a “clean slate.”

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Trump’s promise to repeal and replace Obamacare, the first line item on a long list of policy goals, has stalled multiple times on Capitol Hill, most recently in the Senate, where negotiations are ongoing within the majority GOP caucus to find enough support for a procedural vote to move a repeal-and-replace bill forward. The House, which similarly struggled to find compromise on its repeal-and-replace measure, ultimately did so, narrowly passing healthcare legislation last spring.

The president has suggested that he does not intend to let setbacks on his healthcare agenda imperil other priorities, including a major rewrite of the U.S. tax code and an infrastructure plan on which he hopes to work with Democrats. But Trump’s tax plan, which has been outlined by the White House but only sparsely so thus far, is intended to go hand-in-hand with an Obamacare repeal, which would remove many of the healthcare legislation’s taxes.

