MARYLAND — President Trump wasn’t always America’s swamp-drainer-in-chief.

The president revealed the origins of his iconic “drain the swamp” battle cry on Saturday — telling a crowd he hated the term and thought it was “a little hokey.”

“I was given that expression,” Trump told the Conservative Political Action Conference, the annual conservative summit, on Saturday. “A speechwriter gave it to me and said ‘Drain the swamp.'”

“I said, ‘That’s so hokey.’ I said, ‘That’s the worst, I don’t want to use it,'” he added to laughter from the crowd.

“Anyway, it ends up in one of the speeches. I said ‘We will drain the swamp’, right, the place went crazy,” he said.

“I said, ‘Let’s try it again’ and we did it again and the place went wild.”

The slogan has become one of Trump’s most iconic and refers to his pledge to rid Washington of corruption and officials that are working to undermine his legislation.