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 (Les AuCoin), 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.  I could have called this blog “Middle Ground,” for that is what I long for in both politics and golf.  The middle ground is often where the best public policy decisions lie.  And it is where you want to be on a golf course.

In some ways, I hate to write about Donald Trump because we got rid of him in the last presidential election.

But, there are at least two reasons for still considering Trump.

• He may want to run for president again in 2024.

• He hopes his name will help those who fawn over him to win election races in the upcoming mid-terms.

Further, unless we remember the sordid history of Trump we may be doomed to repeat it.

Philip Bump, national correspondent for the Washington Post, performed a public service a couple days ago by writing about what I used for the headline in this blog – “we’re still learning about the depths of Trump’s dishonesty.”

Here are excerpts from Bump’s excellent reporting:

“Of all the things that might crystallize a sense of despair about the ruthless effectiveness of Donald Trump’s habitual dishonesty, I wouldn’t have expected it to be a legalistic six-page memo about the boundaries of the U.S. Constitution.

“This week, following reporting from the newly published book ‘Peril,’ by The Washington Post’s Bob Woodward and Robert Costa, we learned new details about the conversations that were unfolding in the White House in the days before the counting of electoral votes at the U.S. Capitol on January 6.

“We’ve learned the extent to which Trump’s insistences about the election having been stolen were predicated on information that his team and his allies knew were unfounded.  We’ve learned from the aforementioned memo that Trump seized upon a fringe opinion about constitutionality as a rationale to pressure his vice president into doing something that he couldn’t do and shouldn’t have done even if he could.

“We’ve learned more, in other words, about just how shoddy Trump’s claim to a second term was — a claim that has held a tight grip on his base well after it expended all of its usefulness for keeping him in office.”

While Bump says there is largely no point in trying rationally to rebut an irrational or emotional belief, he provides several reasons why Trump’s claims are false and were known to be false when he offered them.  So, credit to Bump for the following.

• We can begin with the fact that the former president is fundamentally not credible.  Given that most of his false claims were intertwined with his political rhetoric, it was clearly the case that he was more interested in the impression his words left than their accuracy.
• In the last two months of his presidency, the falsehoods that Trump offered most often were ones about the results of the election.  Hours after the polls closed, he began making false claims about the results, ones that carried over for months.
• We know now that even Trump allies asked for proof that his claims about fraud were warranted.  In their book, “Peril,” authors Bob Woodward and Robert Costa describe a meeting in the White House between Trump’s lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani and Senator Lindsey Graham, a former Trump foe who became one of the president’s most stalwart defenders.  Giuliani made sweeping claims about fraud, and Graham demanded he prove them.  Giuliani assured Graham he’d provide the direct evidence of specific fraudulent votes.

A few days later, Giuliani provided Graham a memo that the senator’s team began to review, the book reports.  The claims of dead people voting in Georgia were found to consist mostly or entirely of people who voted legally but died before the election itself.  Etc.

• The New York Times reported Tuesday that Trump’s campaign had prepared an internal memo in November undercutting various extreme claims about electronic voting in the election. Yet, Trump’s attorneys and the president himself were undeterred, nonetheless presenting wild assertions of an international conspiracy to throw the election as valid and credible.
• People still say that fraud occurred.  Most Republicans, in fact, say it did. Trump is still hammering on it, nailing new planks on his sunken ship.  Those looking for his endorsement in 2022 are amplifying such claims, jockeying to be the loudest voice to earn Trump’s approval.

The story of the Trump presidency, Bump writes, is a story still being fleshed out, featuring a cadre of yes-men facing off against realists.

“Then and now, Trump used the power of his large, loud and credulous base to tip the scales in his favor, forcing the Grahams, Pences (Vice President Mike Pence) and Cheneys (Representative Liz Cheney) to consider the costs of going not just against him but against all of those supporters as well.  Trump’s dishonesty helped create a political army that he used bluntly.”

And wants to use again.

To continue the military analogy, I refuse to join Trump’s army and I hope all other rational Americans, whether they agree or disagree with me on various political issues, will do the same. 

Don’t join.

Don’t abet Trump as he bids to return.

Instead, choose to save the country.