Drain the swamp

And you find that there is, amongst elected officials, a point where they stop caring And I used to be able to do this more frequently, and I think this is an unscientific yardstick, Scott, about the power of the political parties.

But pretty much since the beginning of the Tea Party movement, I've watched politicians become less and less interested in going on live radio.

Some of them.

Some of them will actually pay cash money.

But you have to understand, politicians running for office don't want to answer questions like that because it's bad enough when people that don't support them ask those questions.

And this is really the essence of why I wish we would stop asking elected officeholders to fix our problems for us.

Tea Party movement, Drain the Swamp, all these things were campaigns of the negative.

Please stop doing these things.

He's covering it for a lot of his big donors, no doubt about it.

But the guy that spoke about Drain the Swamp, The swamp monster is draining the swamp, is part of the swamp.

He is a swamp monster himself.

I said that from the very beginning.

And I think Ken rightfully criticized it.

He wrote a book that we promoted at the time called Drain the Swamp, which was all about this.

Like he shows up and he's like whisked away into these rooms.

And basically it's like, this is what you're going to do.

But it's also very hard to disagree with.

Why would you not want to make America great again? Even better, three words, drain the swamp.

It's perfect storytelling.

And if you look at like, so Trump in 2016, I think it was the Clinton election.

You're going to start drawing attention to some of this BS.

And, you know, not for nothing, a lot of Republicans voted for Drain the Swamp.

And, you know, I'll vote against communism every time, George.

But let's be honest here.

could,

could, So anyway, it's been busy for the Drain the Swamp team in the last four days.

I'd also, two quick things.

I recommend Record Lows by C.J. Green, a new book that's out, which I read, which I enjoyed.

Astonishingly, cynically, that's the meta message to Trump's main campaign slogan each of the three times he's run for president.

Drain the swamp.

It worked even though it was an outrageous lie.

Democrats who have actually been trying to do something about corruption for years need to appropriate the anti-corruption met, theme as their main message because universally it works.

Boss Tweed's graft by Thomas Nast's biting cartoons helped bring down New York's Tammany Hall by converting complex examples of corruption into the simple story of stolen public money.

The Watergate scandal turned corrupt abuse of power into a national reckoning that forced Richard Nixon from office and fueled sweeping electoral gains for reformers like Jimmy Carter, while more recent scandals like George Santos' reinforced clean government as a winning local message.

At the national level, Donald Trump's Drain the Swamp campaign and the rigged system critiques advanced by Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren show that across the ideological spectrum, framing political battles as struggle against entrenched self-dealing elites remains one of those consistently reliable ways to get energized voters to the polls and win power.

It makes perfect sense that this should be the Democrats' main strategy.