I’m so old I remember when Donald Trump was making his rally audiences scream in delight by yelling “DRAIN THE SWAMP! DRAIN THE SWAMP! DRAIN THE SWAMP!”

But now that it’s clear he won’t be draining any swamps — in fact, he’s doing the exact opposite, hiring Wall Street billionaires and Goldman Sachs execs to run the United States — he’s cracking down on people who still use that embarrassingly hypocritical phrase.

People like Newt Gingrich, for example.

According to Newt Gingrich, a top ally who told NPR in an interview that aired Wednesday morning, he was instructed not to use the phrase anymore because it has fallen out of favor with Trump.

“I’m told he now just disclaims that,” Gingrich said on “Morning Edition.” “He now says it was cute, but he doesn’t want to use it anymore.”

Gingrich said he had “written what I thought was a very cute tweet about ‘the alligators are complaining,’” but that “somebody wrote back and said they were tired of hearing this stuff.”

Gingrich actually drafted two tweets in recent days about draining the swamp — tweets that apparently earned him the rebuke.

By now it’s no mystery that Trump is an unredeemed con man, exploiting the ignorant propagandized right wing base by playing on their delusions, but damn is this ever obvious.