The Swamp, by Eric Bolling

Former Fox News host Eric Bolling has some advice for President Trump.  In The Swamp: Washington's Murky Pool of Corruption and Cronyism and How Trump Can Drain It, Bolling runs through a sordid history of Washington politics and offers modest recommendations for the Trump administration.

The bulk of Bolling's book is a historical tour of the continual fount of corruption that is Washington, D.C.  This is not a new phenomenon; it dates back to the country's founding.  As Lord Acton said, "Power tends to corrupt, absolute power corrupts absolutely."  Throughout American history, the power of government has been on an upward trend, and levels of corruption have kept pace.  Bolling writes, "Washington is a city of no-bid contracts and general cronyism despite the constant pretense of scrupulous ethics rules and press watchfulness."

Moving into the modern era, Bolling will disabuse you of any notion that the supposed corruption of the Trump administration is anything new.  He reminds us of the scandal-ridden Bill Clinton administration (which was not necessarily out of the norm) and points out that "Many Clinton supporters went into the 2016 election so dead set against Trump being president that they were willing to overlook decades of wrongdoing by the Clintons."  By electing Trump, an outsider who had never been elected to public office, Americans chose another option besides "watching control of the Swamp lurch back and forth between two parties that were opposites on things that don't matter and all too similar on things that do."

The temptations for anyone in elected office in Washington are great.  "Once you're in Washington, no matter how many emails you get from constituents, the voices of the public will never be quite as loud as the voices of the lobbyists and fellow politicians sitting right there in the room with you day in and day out--including the ones pleading for more spending and more special favors at endless committee hearings."

Bolling's solution: tune it out!  Ignore the bureaucracy's demands!  He writes, "The haters are going to hate--and scream--whether you make a 1 percent cut in a single program's budget or a 90 percent cut in every program's budget, so you might as well aim for the latter while you're at it."  Sounds good to me.  Time will tell whether Trump will continue to shake things up.  "We have a strange, unexpected chance to break with business as usual" in Washington.  Trump really needs to figure out how to reduce spending while he reduces regulations.  Deficits are way up under him.  Will he live up to the promises that got him elected?  We'll see.