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.

Over the last few days, we have endured another batch of Trump’s “tweets” in which he skewers everyone but himself at this Christmas season, saying he is “alone in the White House,” though, to be fair, he jetted off to Iraq to visit troops just after Christmas, his first visit to a war zone as president.

Give credit for doing what presidents do at Christmas time, which is to visit either military troops in the field or in Walter Reed Hospital in Washington, D.C.

As for being alone, my reaction is, frankly, I don’t care?

It is Trump who has isolated himself through of series of “decisions” – if you can call what Trump makes “decisions” – that put the country at risk.

If you aren’t careful, Trump’s diatribes could make you sick at the Christmas season. And that’s not worth it.

All of this led me a couple days ago to read a dispatch from a Washington Post reporter, Phillip Bump, who performed a solid journalistic service by going deep on Trump’s proposals for “his wall.”

More journalism these days should follow this model. It’s not reporting on the never-ending “horse race” in politics or considering all of Trump’s “tweets” to be news. It is analyzing, based on facts, the notion from Trump that “his wall” would protect this country from folks he considers beneath him. Call them immigrants. Or, from drug dealers.

While I give Bump plaudits for his enterprise, here is a summary of what he wrote.

“For probably the first time in American history, part of the government is shut down for lack of funding because of a dispute over a construction project.

“President Trump, as you may have heard, promised during the 2016 presidential campaign that he would solve most of America’s immigration problems and many of its other issues by building a wall on the border between the United States and Mexico. This wall was going to be paid for by Mexico, he claimed, an assertion that was never believable. More believable: That the wall was going to be made of concrete slabs, a point he made in some detail on the trail.

“There was a problem, though, that also crept into his rhetoric. Trump warned drug dealers, stymied by the wall, would simply throw bags of drugs over the top of it, potentially killing anyone walking on the other side. So, he said, the wall needed windows or, somehow, to be transparent.

“Which brings us to Trump’s tweets about the barrier as the government was grinding to a halt. No longer would the wall be concrete planks, he said, but instead ‘artistically designed steel slats.’ There you are. An artistic steel-slat wall.”

Bump then does some math. The fence is a little taller than five stacked SUVs (an image of a car the Trump administration has used to indicate the size of the wall) — or, if we consider the spikes to be separate from the fence, the fence is a bit shorter than the five cars.

Now, it’s just simple algebra, Bump writes. The slats are slightly wider than the gaps in the image — meaning that they are in real-life, as well. By Bump’s calculations:

• The slats are about 10 inches wide.
• The gaps are nine inches.
• The fence is 341 inches tall — or about 28.4 feet — with 13-inch spikes on top.

The combined width of the slats and gaps is just over 19 inches. How many slats, therefore, would be needed, Bump asks?

He answers. The border is about 1,954 miles long. About 580 miles already have fence of some type. Assume that all the rest, regardless of terrain, would be getting the slat barrier.

There are about 1,374 miles to cover, but that excludes ports of entry. There are 48 on the border now. The largest is at San Ysidro, near San Diego.

Bump uses the Ysidro entry to estimate a maximum size of the gap needed to be left in the wall for ports of entry, which yields, he says, 7.2 miles of the border belonging to ports of entry, this leaving 1,366.8 miles for the rest of “Trump’s wall.”

The result? The U.S. would need about 4.6 million steel slats to cover that ground. At a height of 28.4 feet and a presumed thickness of one inch, each slat requires a bit less than 2 cubic feet of steel. For all of the slats, there would be a need for about 9 million cubic feet of steel.

Ironically, CNBC has reported that steel is a lot pricier than it was a year ago, thanks to the tariffs Trump imposed on foreign steel. At the beginning of 2018, this barrier would have cost 25 per cent less.

The crux of the question: Would the dimensions actually be something that would work to keep out people, as well as illegal drugs?

It clearly wouldn’t do much about the latter. Most drugs that cross that border illegally already come through ports of entry, smuggled in vehicles or on people crossing legally. What’s more, a barrier with nine-inch gaps seems like it might allow for pretty easy transfer of bulky packages, without having to throw them 28 feet in the air to clear the wall.

Also, a nine-inch gap wouldn’t necessarily keep people out.

It’s possible, I’ll admit, that Trump’s illustration (the one he is using to indicate what he hopes to build) isn’t meant to be a specific representation of the actual size of the barrier. But, as of writing, this is all moot anyway.

There’s no money to build the wall coming from either Mexico or the United States at this point, though, incredibly, Trump continues to contend that Mexico will pay for at least part “his wall.”

So, as much as Trump is hinging his presidency on getting “his wall,” it would not do much to stem the flow of either immigrants or drugs from Mexico to the U.S. Sure, he promised a wall, but, then as now, he didn’t know what he was talking about.

He was doing just what he always does, which is emote from the seat of his pants and hold everyone to the notion that he – and only he – knows the answer to every question. So, do what I want, Trump says, or go to hell.

Don’t call Trump a chief executive or president! Call him nuts!