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.

The question in the headline can keep you up at night if you let it.

Trump is the most unusual president in recent memory if not in history of the presidency, though, to verify that statement, you would have had to live through all the others — obviously impossible.

Still, what makes Trump tick?

In the Washington Post a few days ago, an editor, Mark Fisher, contributed several salient thoughts. He was one of a series of editors or reporters at the Post who are asked, from time to time, to leave their normal gigs and think, not to mention write, about the big picture.

Fisher, has been the Post’s enterprise editor, local columnist and Berlin bureau chief, and he has covered politics, education, pop culture and much else in three decades on the Metro, Style, National and Foreign desks.

This time, he wrote:

“For a president who often sees himself as standing tall against powerful forces that only want him to fail, things were looking up (Fisher wrote last week). The tax cuts were selling well, he had gotten credit for a pretty good State of the Union address, employment numbers were good, and his approval rating was improving.

“Any other president would have seen this as a week to claim some credit (Congress passed a spending bill, with bipartisan support), do some presidential reassuring (the markets sure could have used some calming words), maybe take the high road and wave the flag (the Olympics are a fine opportunity for that).

“But, in case anyone hadn’t noticed, this is not your standard presidency, and that made a whack-a-mole day such as Friday (last Friday) nearly inevitable. President Trump’s week ended with the sudden departure of a speechwriter who had been accused of brutally attacking his wife, the president’s defense of another staffer who allegedly assaulted two ex-wives, the chief of staff’s inartful attempts to recast his own handling of that episode, and the revelation that the president doesn’t read his full intelligence briefings.”

The conclusion Fisher reaches:

“No one would argue that Friday’s tumult was planned or desirable. By most historical standards, it was monumentally embarrassing. But the way Trump operates, such days can be downright beneficial. The president learned at a very early age that what humiliates, damages, even destroys others can actually strengthen his image and therefore his bottom line.”

To Fisher, Trump always follows two precepts:

• Always double down on your position – or your opposition.

Fisher contends that, through the most trying moments of the past two years, Trump has regularly argued in favor of men on his side who have been accused of bad behavior against women, whether that was Senate candidate Roy Moore of Alabama; Fox News figures Roger Ailes and Bill O’Reilly; last week’s case du jour, Rob Porter; or Trump himself.

He weathered the “Access Hollywood” tape that many of his aides thought would sink his campaign, and he successfully batted away allegations from more than a dozen women that he was guilty of sexual misconduct toward them.

Last Saturday morning, the president tripled down. “People’s lives are being shattered and destroyed by a mere allegation,” he tweeted. “There is no recovery for someone falsely accused — life and career are gone. Is there no such thing any longer as Due Process?”

• Always be the focus of attention. Aides who get too big for their britches won’t be around for long.

On the left and the right alike, last week was perceived as a disaster for Trump. “A PR nightmare for the White House,” said the conservative Weekly Standard. “A mess from start to finish.”

Even inside the White House, the events seemed to call for a mea culpa. “We all could have done better over the last few days,” deputy press secretary Raj Shah said Thursday. From South Korea, Vice President Pence made the same point.

But Fisher says that’s not how Trump responds to pressure or error. He learned in the 1970s, from one of his mentors, Roy Cohn, that, when you face criticism, justified or not, “you tell them to go to hell and fight the thing.”

In 2016, at the Republican convention, after Hillary Clinton ran a TV ad in which wide-eyed young children watched broadcasts of Trump’s coarsest insults and most vulgar language, some advisers wanted Trump to ease off. He’d already won the nomination and things were going well. Why not tap the brakes and glide along the high road, they argued.

Trump instead leaned hard on the accelerator, ratcheting up his rhetoric, pressing for a convention lineup that doubled down on appealing to his base — Willie Robertson of “Duck Dynasty,” the chief of Ultimate Fighting Championship, music by Southern, white classic rock acts.

He’s done this all his adult life. In the 1980s, Trump didn’t push back when tabloid newspapers turned the collapse of his first marriage into a daily soap opera. He actively participated in the scripting of the drama, calling gossip writers, dishing out salacious morsels almost by the hour.

Trump recognized the almost unbounded power of being that model, and he recognized that bad behavior and the notoriety it generated didn’t undermine that image. For many people, it actually enhanced it.

Inside that logic, it makes sense to look away from a stock market swinging like a bungee cord and instead lash out at Democrats as “treasonous” or announce that the president would “love to see a shutdown” of the government.

Trump simply does what he’s always done — whatever it takes to claim center stage.

Many of us – me included – have a tendency to view Trump as we would view others in high-profile political positions. Not right!

Best to view Trump through special lenses — as a person unto himself –- as one who “doubles down” on bad news, then tries to come across the only one who can take “center stage.”

My question is this: Can we survive another three years of this three-ring circus with a master like Trump?

 

 

And as a footnote, Hill.com just published a list of 36 Democrats who could be in a position to take on Trump in 2020 if he decides to run for re-election. Missing from the list? Oregon Senator Jeff Merkley who appears to fancy himself as a presidential candidate, a point I have had difficulty believing based on many years of lobbying Merkley when he was in Salem. No doubt he’ll be irritated at Hill.com’s omission.