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.

Washington Post writer James Hohmann has an excellent column this week outlining failures of the Trump Administration. He points to six important deficits, which helps to get past the daily dose of Trump tweets and end up with a bigger-picture list of troubles.

Without appropriate attribution, I repeat Hohmann’s list here.

In summary, Hohmann says “Trump is either woefully uninformed or intentionally misleading the American people” about his Administration. As an example, Hohmann points to Trump’s conduct on the DACA issue.

With a trio of temperamental tweets on Easter Sunday and three follow-ups on the next day, Trump announced there will be no deal to save the 700,000 “dreamers” whose futures he put in peril by ending the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program.

Trump also called on Republicans to change the rules of the Senate to pass anti-immigration legislation with a simple majority and threatened to kill the North American Free Trade Agreement if Mexico does not step up border security.

The president then falsely claimed that there are “big flows of people” who are sneaking into the United States “because they want to take advantage of DACA.”

In truth, to be eligible for the program created by former president Barack Obama, immigrants must have lived in the United States since 2007, have arrived in the country before they turned 16 and have been younger than 31 on June 15, 2012. Anyone who came after does not qualify.

That leads Hohmann to his summary of huge problems with the Trump presidency.

• This is the improvisational presidency. There is no strategy. There is no message discipline. There is no process. Every modern White House plans out policies it wants to roll out months in advance. There is no calendar now.
• Trump does not understand how Congress works. He’s demanding that Senate Republicans use the “Nuclear Option” to pass his preferred immigration legislation with 51 votes, instead of 60. In February, though, only 36 of the 51 GOP members voted for the bill that reflected his demands.

Anyone with a sense of history who has thought through the institutional dynamics at play recognizes that ending the filibuster would, over the long-term, benefit liberals dramatically more than conservatives. The left wants bigger government and further-reaching laws than the right, and making it easier to pass new laws would enable that.

If only 51 votes are needed to pass bills, Democrats could raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour, ban assault weapons and create single-payer health care next time they get the majority. Mitch McConnell, who got elected to the Senate in 1984, understands this. Trump does not.

• The president does not think through the second- and third-order consequences of his decisions. He’s undeniably motivated by a desire for instant gratification. Trump often appears to be thinking more about the next move than the end game. He also seems, especially on Twitter, more focused on scoring short-term political points than worrying about possible costs down the road.

Just like he does not care that ending the filibuster would hurt his adopted party when Republicans inevitably lose control of the Senate in the future, his provocations toward Mexico are generating ripple effects that could eventually make America less safe.

• Proximity is power in Trump’s White House. Most aides spent Easter with their families, including White House Chief of Staff John Kelly. But Trump was accompanied for the past four days at Mar-a-Lago by senior policy adviser Stephen Miller.

The former spokesman for Jeff Sessions in the Senate is the leading advocate for nativist policies in the president’s orbit. More than anyone else, he’s torpedoed the prospect of a bi-partisan breakthrough on immigration by encouraging Trump’s base instincts.

Because Trump lacks many core convictions, he’s often swayed by the last person he speaks with before making decisions. That’s one reason staffers are even more eager to travel with him and be around the Oval Office than during a more traditional presidency.

• He’s heavily influenced by cable news punditry. Trump’s tweets refer to a so-called “caravan” of immigrants who are heading to the United States. He appears to have gotten this formulation from a segment that aired on “Fox & Friends” early Sunday morning, which was based on a BuzzFeed story from Friday about more than a thousand Central Americans – primarily from Honduras – who are on a month-long trip toward the U.S. border.
• Trump is not a reliable negotiating partner because he moves the goal posts. Democrats and Republicans on Capitol Hill find the president difficult to work with because he’s inconsistent about what he wants. He threatened to veto the omnibus spending bill the week before last, after saying he supported it, because there was not enough money for a border wall.

Then he signed it anyway. Trump promised to show “great heart” for the dreamers. At one point, he said he’d protect the DACA kids in exchange for wall money. Democrats reluctantly agreed. Then he changed his demands, insisting that they also go along with massive reductions in levels of legal immigration. Now he tweets: “NO MORE DACA DEAL.”

“Time and time again, the president has walked away from bi-partisan proposals that are exactly what he asked for,” complained Nancy Pelosi spokesman Drew Hammill.

For my part, I think Trump wins support in some quarters for exactly reasons such as those listed above. He doesn’t come across as a political figure who understands how to get things done in a complicated organization – the U.S. government. Rather, he succeeds in the minds of supporters, at least some of the time, exactly because he doesn’t understand government.

He thinks that just because he says it, it is true – and his views should drive the decisions without anyone else’s perspective.

That, of course, is stupid. No one wants a political figure without an agenda, someone who caters to every whim and caprice. But, what we do need is a leader with a sense of ethics, someone who acts with the interests of America in view rather just his own selfish, ill-informed ideas.