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 have been trying for some time to come up with a short, apt description of President Donald Trump. Tough because there are so many options.

Some of them dominate the columns of commentators from the left and the right and in-between. For me, none of them do a perfect job of capturing the actions and vicissitudes of the most disagreeable president in U.S. history.

I even wonder if we will be able to survive his four-year term in office, must less a second term if he were to win one.

Thus, a story in the Wall Street Journal caught my attention this morning. It was about the life of mid-20th-century England’s most raffishly bohemian writer, Julian MacLaren-Ross.

His career in flummery and flimflam was launched when he left reform school at age 14 to work as a Coney Island pitchman, then joined Dr. W.H. Long’s Big Indian and Medicine Show.

“The bigger the lies he told, the more avidly people seemed to embrace them. Alas, such brazen trumpery succeeds even now.”

To me, that sounds a lot like Trump who functions with “flummery and flimflam” more like the host of a bogus reality TV show than a world leader.

After trying and failing for months to describe Trump, here is my one-sentence description:

Trump lives in a vacuous reality he creates for himself, regardless of facts or truth, thus believing that he himself is the master of all, and anyone who disagrees with him is a follower of fake news worthy of only disdain and criticism.

This sentence includes four key characteristics of Trump:

• He creates his own make-believe reality.
• He doesn’t care about facts or truth.
• He is the master of all, at the center of his own self-created universe.
• Anyone who disagrees with him is wrong and worthy of biting criticism.

Now, to all of this, some may want to add that the America’s economy is percolating along nicely under Trump. True – and that’s good news for all of us.

But the news pages of the Wall Street Journal put it this way this morning as reporters assessed coming elections:

“Republicans have gotten little political traction from their tax cuts, as other economic changes — rising gas prices and blowback from Trump’s tariffs — have offset any financial lift. Instead, as a three-month sprint to November begins, Republicans are focusing on the fear of ‘open borders,’ tax increases, the MS-13 gang, and Pelosi (former Democrat House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, from San Francisco, who continues to lead Democrats) back in charge, overseeing a liberal caucus.”

Expect more flummery and flimflam from Trump on the months ahead.