The Swamp Still Looks Pretty Healthy
by
Waiting for accountability in Trump’s second term.
For nearly a decade, Americans were told that powerful institutions had been weaponized against a sitting president and his supporters. Intelligence agencies, federal law enforcement, and political operatives were accused of bending the machinery of government toward partisan ends.
The promise from President Donald Trump was clear: expose it, clean it up, and drain the swamp.
Now more than a year into Trump’s second term, many voters are beginning to ask a simple question: Where are the results?
A recent Rasmussen Reports survey suggests that frustration may be growing. Approval ratings for FBI Director Kash Patel are slipping. Only 40 percent of likely voters view Patel favorably. Even more striking, just 32 percent believe he is performing better than previous FBI directors, while 37 percent think he is doing worse.
Those numbers are not catastrophic. But they are a signal.
For the mainstream press, this is just another fluctuation in Washington approval ratings. For many Trump supporters, however, it reflects something deeper — the growing perception that promises of accountability have yet to materialize.
The disappointment isn’t ideological.
It’s transactional.
Patel built his reputation by exposing what many Americans believe was a coordinated effort inside the national security bureaucracy to undermine Trump during his first term. As a senior investigator for the House Intelligence Committee working with Jim Jordan and Devin Nunes, Patel helped uncover problems with surveillance warrants targeting Trump associate Carter Page.
He later documented what he viewed as systemic corruption in his book Government Gangsters, arguing that unelected bureaucracies had accumulated enormous power with little public accountability.
In other words, Patel understands the problem.
That’s precisely why expectations for him are so high.
For years, Trump and his allies faced a barrage of investigations, subpoenas, indictments, and televised hearings. The Russia collusion probe. The Mueller investigation. Two impeachments. Criminal indictments. The unprecedented FBI search of Trump’s home at Mar-a-Lago conducted by the FBI.