Lobbying used to be corporations courting government so that they could be more profitable, expand, and ultimately grow the economy. It has now become corporations courting government for taxpayer money so that they can pay back campaign donors and gamble risk-free.
When was that?
Or rather, when was it never not both?
No matter what era you study, business and government in the US have always been intimately intertwined. It's certainly nothing you can lay at the doorstep of this administration specifically . . . and actually something that goes back a couple centuries. It's worse now because of some major cultural changes in how the government operates (cf. Citizens United decision), the global scale and funding of corporations, and how a certain voluble subset of our political class views the role of government as it relates to industry -- namely that government should be teensy, unobtrusive, and laissez faire. All of these things have contributed to the capture of government by other interests (which, btw, I don't limit simply to corporations . . . unions, and other NGOs also have influence, but by sheer size of resources, corporations win out).