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.

After writing about Donald Trump yesterday, I couldn’t help doing so again, despite my post far away from the Washington, D.C. beltway.

I have come to a basic conclusion about Donald Trump, one that struck me first a few months ago and now has been confirmed by recent events.

It is this – and it won’t be surprising to many who follow national affairs of state.

Trump is an egotistical narcissist (perhaps a redundancy). He will do and say anything to aggrandize himself.

I was talking about this on the golf range the other day when a friend of mine raised the subject. He said he thought Trump was the victim of Democrats out to get him in much the same way Republicans were out to get Barack Obama when they said, “let’s make him a one-term president.”

Trump would be successful, this friend said, if only Democrats would leave him alone.

I responded that, no, Trump was his own worst enemy, jeopardizing his chances to succeed in such issues as growing the economy, reforming the tax system and making sense out of health care policy.

Then, one of my favorite columnists, Kathleen Parker, who writes for the Washington Post, came to another conclusion, one with which I disagree.

“One thing we’ve learned the past several weeks is to ignore the White House and wait for Donald Trump to spill the beans,” she wrote in the Post. “Invariably, the president contradicts statements from his communication team and other officials, and blurts the truth. As counterintuitive as it seems, Trump is a truth-teller among spinmeisters.”

For me, that is giving Trump far too much credit.

Truth is not a criterion for his behavior.

What explains him is his unbelievable desire to be the central figure in everything.

Call him a narcissist.

The dictionary defines the term this way:

“Inordinate fascination with oneself. Excessive self-love. Vanity. Gratification derived from administration of one’s own physical or mental attributes.”

Sound like Trump?

Imagine him in the Oval Office with the two recent Russian visitors. Rather than do what smart presidents would so, which is to guard sensitive intelligence material, Trump puts himself at the center of everything by trying to impress his visitors with his grasp of intelligence information.

As Kathleen Parker put it: “…his odd boast to the Russians that he ‘gets credit intel” – I have people brief me on great intel everyday’ – seemed more like showing off than a serious discussion of mutual security concerns.”

On another issue, his staff (by the way, no doubt one of the worst jobs in the history of political Washington, D.C.) provides a credible explanation for the decision to fire FBI Director James Comey. They said he relied on a well-written memorandum from the deputy director of the Department of Justice, Rod Rosenstein, which made a compelling case that Comey had violated a number of well-understood and venerable department protocols.

But, Trump could not stand it. Rather, he said HE had planned to fire Comey all along and had not relied on the Rosenstein memo.

Again, Trump had to be the pivot around which everything else spun.

Narcissism is, or at least could be, a very serious fault for any president, especially as this one heads overseas for his first international trip as president.

Not just on this trip, but, in general, with his finger on the nuclear trigger, it is easy, unfortunately, to imagine Trump doing the unthinkable, which is to plunge the United States into another war because someone has made the mistake of offending him, the egotistical narcissist.