This is the title I chose for my personal blog, which is meant to give me an outlet for one of my favorite crafts – writing – plus to use an image from my favorite sport, golf. Out of college, my first job was as a reporter for the Daily Astorian in Astoria, Oregon, and I went on from there to practice writing in all my professional positions, including as press secretary in Washington, D.C. for a Democrat Congressman from Oregon (Les AuCoin), as an Oregon state government manager in Salem and Portland, as press secretary for Oregon’s last Republican governor (Vic Atiyeh), and as a private sector lobbyist. This blog also allows me to link another favorite pastime – politics and the art of developing public policy – to what I write. I could have called this blog “Middle Ground,” for that is what I long for in both politics and golf. The middle ground is often where the best public policy decisions lie. And it is where you want to be on a golf course.
The New York Times wrote a “political memo” this last weekend that ran under this headline: Trump’s Trial Challenge: Being Stripped of Control
It was a good piece of journalism.
The story started this way:
“Everything about the circumstances in which the former president comes to court every day to sit as the defendant in the People v. Donald J. Trump at 100 Centre Street is repellent to him. The trapped-in-amber surroundings that evoke New York City’s more crime-ridden past. The lack of control. The details of a case in which he is accused of falsifying business records to conceal a payoff to a porn star to keep her claims of an affair with him from emerging in the 2016 election.”
Of the four criminal cases Trump is facing, the current case is the most acutely personal. People close to him are blunt when privately discussing his reaction: He looks around each day and cannot believe he has to be there.
More from the Times:
“For the first few minutes of each day during jury selection, a small pool of still photographers was ushered into Part 59 on the 15th floor of the courthouse. Trump, obsessed with being seen as strong and being seen generally, prepared for them to rush in front of him by adjusting his suit jacket and contorting his face into a jut-jawed scowl. But, by day’s end on Friday, Trump appeared haggard and rumpled, his gait off-center, his eyes blank.”
Of course, at one point, he also fell asleep.
He has often seemed to fade into the background in a light wood-paneled room with harsh neon lighting and a perpetual smell of sour, coffee-laced breath wafting throughout.
It is hard to recall any other time when Trump had to sit and listen to insults without turning to social media or a news conference to punch back. And it is just as hard to recall any other time he has been forced to be bored for so long.
Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin said the process in court makes Trump look like a “shrinking man.”
“For months, the news coverage of Trump’s legal ordeal eagerly amplified the four-times-indicted former president’s narcissistic spin: He would use his trials to his benefit, dominating the 2024 campaign.
“Last August, the New York Times insisted that Trump’s trials display ‘an upside-down reality where criminal charges act as political assets — at least for the purpose of winning the Republican nomination.’”
And this final thought from the Times:
“Many in Trump’s orbit are pessimistic about the case ending in a hung jury or a mistrial, and they see an outright acquittal as virtually impossible. They are bracing for him to be convicted, not because they cede the legal grounds, but because they think jurors in overwhelmingly Democrat Manhattan will be against the polarizing former president.
“But the shared sense among many of his advisers is that the process may damage him as much as a guilty verdict. The process, they believe, is its own punishment.”
So, from me, punishment, either by process or result, is what Trump deserves as he has catered over the years to his own whims and caprice, no matter the damage done to others or, for that matter, to America.
Now, he wants the country’s highest political office. Perish the thought.
Perspective from the 19th Hole 