to drain the swamp
6
7.9
- idiom
- US
:
limpiar el pantano
- To use Walter Laqueur's metaphor, the idea is to "drain the swamp so that the mosquitoes will disappear."
- Trump promised to drain the swamp
- promised to drain the swamp
- drain the swamp of corruption
It is time to drain the swamp in Washington DC.
- It is time to drain the swamp in Washington DC.
- And that's when you want to provoke a movement to put America first, to drain the swamp.
- He ran as as being a cleaner up of corruption who would get rid of, who would get who would, you know, drain the swamp, so to speak.
- But The thing is, when you're talking about draining the swamp, you're talking about rolling back the biggest honeypot in the history of the world.
- The guy was draining the swamp at the highest level and Lyndon Johnson was the swamp.
Examples
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The committee aims to drain the swamp by cutting wasteful spending and improving transparency.
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It's time to drain the swamp.
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We need to drain the swamp.
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It's time to completely drain the swamp and start over.
Blog text (25) -
It is time to drain the swamp in Washington DC.
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Many citizens believe we must drain the swamp to ensure good governance.
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To achieve real reform, we need to drain the swamp of outdated practices within the organization.
Synonyms
51
4.5
Force unwanted people or things out of a place, often using water
3
4.0
To remove unwanted people or things to make a group work better
To remove wasted effort and slow processes from a company or system
Antonyms
How Thorough
85
6.6
49
6.3
- US
6
7.9
433
1.0
228
3.7
Surface Forms
Morphology
The literal meanings of 'drain' (remove liquid) and 'swamp' (wetland/entrenched mass) make the basic idea of removing unwanted or excess elements inferable, so a learner who knows both words can guess a sense of clearing something out. However, the political nuance—eliminating corruption, inefficiency, or entrenched people—is a metaphorical, culturally loaded extension rather than a directly compositional meaning, so full understanding is not guaranteed at B1 without prior exposure.
Etymology
Drain the swamp comes from the image of people who drain a swamp to remove bad water, insects and disease so the land becomes clean and useful. So, to drain the swamp today means to clear out 'corruption' or other 'bad' parts of an organization.