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 to 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 press secretary in Washington, D.C. for a Democrat Congressman from Oregon, as an Oregon state government manager in Salem and Portland, as press secretary for Oregon’s last Republican governor (Vic Atiyeh), and as 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.

Daniel Drezner, professor of international politics at Tufts University, contends, in the Wall Street Journal today, that the current Trump scandal is different from all previous Trump scandals.

No way to know, at this moment, whether Drezner is right or not. And Trump will continue his routine tactic, which is, via various over-the-top tweets, to accuse everyone else of wrong-doing in an attempt to absolve himself.

Drezner posits that there are five reasons why Ukraine is far worse than previous probes of Trump, including the one that involved Special Counsel Robert Mueller.

Here are the reasons, according to Drezner:

1) This is a presidential scandal. Trump’s treatment of women, his tax fraud, even the Mueller investigation primarily concerned Trump’s activities before becoming president. The Ukraine business is entirely about his alleged abuse of presidential power for personal gain. This is not about his staff or subordinates; it’s about him.

2) Trump’s staffers are making everything worse and not better. As the Mueller report concluded, “The president’s efforts to influence the investigation were mostly unsuccessful, but that is largely because the people who surrounded the president declined to carry out orders or accede to his requests.” It is a credit to those staffers that ,in refusing Trump’s orders, they helped stop him from committing crimes.

Now, the staff response to the Ukraine call was to try to cover up its contents, thus successfully adding a cover-up to the original scandal.

3) Trump is making everything worse. Maybe Trump believed that ,after the Mueller investigation, he was bulletproof. This time around, however, every Trump response has been a disaster. If he thought the release of his conversation with Zelensky would put this all to rest, he was mistaken. His Twitter attacks on the whistleblower and on Representative Adam Schiff have only added another possible article of impeachment to the list. [I add that Schiff, the leader of the impeachment process in the House at the direction of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, needs to be more careful than he has been about maintaining a commitment to the process, not arguing with Trump.]

4) The White House’s talking points stink. The reasons for this are unsurprising, as White House talking points cannot obscure Trump’s apparent abuse of power. Efforts to muddy the waters have not succeeded.

5) Previous Democrat reticence gives this more meaning. No one can say that Pelosi wanted to take this path. She had been the primary brake on impeachment since January. Now she is saying that pursuing impeachment would be worth losing the House in 2020. GOP partisans will dismiss her previous reluctance, but for everyone else, that switch in her rhetoric is a powerful signal.

Good points from Drezner who says he is only a politics professor from a small university in a small town. He sells himself short.

Meanwhile, as always, Trump doesn’t sell himself short.

In his effort to attack the whistleblower and Democrats’ impeachment push, Trump has grasped at the tools he knows: Communication and storytelling, according to Meena Bose, executive dean at Hofstra University’s Peter S. Kalikow School of Government, Public Policy and International Affairs.

“President Trump understands public communications, and this is an effort to gain the upper hand publicly, to control the narrative,” Bose said.

She doesn’t think he is serious about trying to have Schiff arrested, but “he’s speaking to his most loyal supporters” when he suggests that his — and their — political enemies should be strung up, Bose said.

There is little doubt but that Trump will continue lofting broadsides against anyone who he feels doesn’t concur that he is the smartest person in the room and, as president, can do what he wants without reproach.

I always have thought that an impeachment process, if undertaken in the U.S. House, could work to Trump’s favor, energizing his base to support him in 2020 no matter what. That might still be the case.

But, recent public opinion polling suggests that support for voting for impeachment articles is growing and, in terms of politics, could force Senate Republicans to take a difficult position if articles from the House head over to the Senate.

With new evidence about Trump’s behavior and conduct, the Senate Rs would have to decide whether to support him. Could be a tough vote.

The point is this: The more we know about Trump’s behavior and conduct (through the impeachment process) the more any reasonable person might support his exit, by whatever means – conviction through impeachment or losing at the polls.