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 thought about this question in the headline for some time as I have watched President Donald Trump veer from issue to issue, from tweet to tweet, for months.

There is no semblance of order to what he does or says and that, for the president of this country, ought to be a source of concern for every citizen.

In my career in the public relations and lobbying business, we always advised clients to proceed with a plan when it came to the business of trying to create a solid – and accurate – image for themselves. We also emphasized deciding on a strategy, not just a set of tactics.

We employed the same kind of advice during my 25-year career as a lobbying – strategy, then tactics.

Which, among other things, led to the name of our firm, CFM Strategic Communications.

But imagine trying to do this kind of work with Trump, the president. Won’t work.

He appears, at best, to fly by the seat of his pants, saying the first thing – often in a critical and sanctimonious way – of slamming someone else, even his own staff and executives because, as always, he is the smartest person in the room.

All of this came to mind as I read a piece by Jill Abramson, former executive editor of the New York Times, now a columnist for the Guardian and a senior lecturer in Harvard’s English department.

“It’s hard,” she wrote, “to imagine a more disturbing portrait of a president than the one Bob Woodward painted of Richard Nixon in his final days: Paranoid, poisoned by power, pounding the carpet and talking to the portraits on the walls. But the early days of Donald Trump’s presidency, as recounted by Woodward in his new book, ‘Fear” are strikingly similar and in some ways even more gut-wrenching. Then, as now, the country faced a crisis of leadership caused by a president’s fatal flaws and inability to function in the job.”

Here are other excerpts of a column by Abramson that appeared in this weekend’s Washington Post.

• “In both ‘Fear’ and ‘The Final Days’, which Woodward co-authored with Carl Bernstein, Woodward shows how a federal criminal investigation clouds and then comes to obsess a president and paralyze the operations of the White House. At a moment when feverish talk of presidential impeachment dominates the political discourse, ‘Fear’ is full of Nixonian echoes, including Trump’s childishly short attention span and refusal to read briefing papers. Nixon’s aides were instructed not to give him anything more complicated than a Reader’s Digest article.”
• “At a moment when social media and cable television are filled with journalists spouting invective about the White House and Trump blasts the press as ‘the enemy of the people,’ Woodward has clung to old-fashioned notions of journalistic objectivity. ‘My job is not to take sides,’ he told a Vox interviewer in March. ‘I think our job is not to love or loathe people we’re trying to explain and understand. It is to tell exactly what people have done, what it might mean, what drives them, and who they are.”
• “From the very first pages of the gripping prologue it is a shocking view. Woodward opens the book with a killer anecdote about how two of the president’s closest advisers purposely thwarted his directives. In one instance, Trump had ordered up a letter announcing the U.S. withdrawal from a trade agreement with South Korea. His then-chief economic adviser, Gary Cohn, and then-staff secretary, Rob Porter, who are both obviously major sources for the book, recognize the letter for the disaster it is, so Cohn filches it off the president’s desk. With Trump’s fitful attention span, out of sight is out of mind. The ploy buys time and short-circuits an impulsive presidential decision that had gone through none of the proper vetting channels.”
• “As a profile of Trump, the book is devastating. Even the most jaded readers will be struck by numerous examples of his childishness and cruelty. He denounces his generals in such harsh language that his secretary of state cringes. He derides the suit McMaster dons for an interview as something a beer salesman would wear. He greets his national security adviser, whose briefings he finds tedious, by saying, “You again?” He imitates Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ Southern accent and calls him ‘mentally retarded.’ He tells his 79-year-old commerce secretary, Wilbur Ross, that he has ‘lost it’ and not to do any more negotiating.”
• “Woodward describes an elaborate attempt to school Trump on world affairs inside the Pentagon’s famous and secure Tank, which, unsurprisingly and somewhat hilariously, ends in abject failure. Predictably, Trump is impressed by the gold carpets and curtains.”
• “‘Fear’ ends on a cliffhanger, with Dowd’s resignation. But in the man and his presidency Dowd had seen the tragic flaw. In the political back-and-forth, the evasions, the denials, the tweeting, the obscuring, crying ‘Fake News,’ the indignation, Trump had one overriding problem that Dowd knew but could not bring himself to say to the president: ‘You’re a fucking liar. ”

Abramson ends with an insightful line that may predict the future for one Donald Trump.

“Lying, as it happens,” she says was Nixon’s undoing.” Perhaps lying will catch Trump, too.

Finally, back to the headline is this blog. If I had the job of being Trump’s public relations or government relations counsel, I’d quit! I am surprised press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders can tolerate the incredible lack of discipline.