PERSPECTIVE FROM THE 19^TH HOLE: 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 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 of my professional positions, including as a Congressional press secretary in Washington, D.C., an Oregon state government manager in Salem and Portland, press secretary for Oregon’s last Republican governor (Vic Atiyeh), and 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 was struck by this quote from a Washington Post editorial the other day:

“Trump’s core problem has always been Trump — his intellect, his temperament and his character. No teleprompter or change of campaign staff will change that. The only reason he remains remotely competitive is that his opponent has her own character issues.”

Trump conducts himself like a buffoon without any of the qualifications to take the Nation’s highest political office. The only reason that he is halfway competitive these days is that he is running against a candidate, Hillary Clinton, whose record indicates that she has been of the most allegedly corrupt holders of a high political office, Secretary of State, which comes on top of other questionable dealings in her long public life.

Except that in the area of corruption, she has a strong competitor in Donald Trump.

Consider this list of Trump corruptions compiled by Paul Waldman for the Washington Post, which have not, for whatever reason, Waldman says, captured the attention of the nation’s media:

• Trump’s casino bankruptcies, which left investors holding the bag while he skedaddled with their money
• Trump’s habit of refusing to pay contractors who had done work for him, many of whom are struggling small businesses
• Trump University, which includes not only the people who got scammed and the Florida investigation, but also a similar story from Texas where the investigation into Trump U was quashed.
• The Trump Institute, another get-rich-quick scheme in which Trump allowed a couple of grifters to use his name to bilk people out of their money
• The Trump Network, a multi-level marketing venture (a.k.a. pyramid scheme) that involved customers mailing in a urine sample which would be analyzed to produce for them a specially formulated package of multivitamins
• Trump Model Management, which reportedly had foreign models lie to customs officials and work in the U.S. illegally, and kept them in squalid conditions while they earned almost nothing for the work they did
• Trump’s employment of foreign guest workers at his resorts, which involves a claim that he can’t find Americans to do the work
• Trump’s use of hundreds of undocumented workers from Poland in the 1980s, who were paid a pittance for their illegal work
• Trump’s history of being charged with housing discrimination
• Trump’s connections to mafia figures involved in New York construction
• The time Trump paid the Federal Trade Commission $750,000 over charges that he violated anti-trust laws when trying to take over a rival casino company
• The fact that Trump is now being advised by Roger Ailes, who was forced out as Fox News chief when dozens of women came forward to charge him with sexual harassment. According to the allegations, Ailes’s behavior was positively monstrous; as just one indicator, his abusive and predatory actions toward women were so well-known and so loathsome that in 1968 the morally upstanding folks in the Nixon administration refused to allow him to work there despite his key role in getting Nixon elected.

For anyone else, this list, alone, would be enough to disqualify an aspirant from seeking the Presidency. For Trump, though, he glories in these mis-deeds, apparently believing they, not only qualify him to be President, but should be “Trump-eted.”