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 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.

Let me pose this basic question:  How can some of my friends continue to support a fraud for president even as they remain my friends.

The fraud is Donald Trump.  The friends somehow have bought into his lies.

But, even as Trump faces more trials in court, he continues to operate in the court of public opinion – and, often, he wins…or at least raises more political contribution money along the way.

In the New York Times, columnist Maureen Dowd put it this way:

“A man is running to run the government he tried to overthrow while he was running it, even as he is running to stay ahead of the law.

“That sounds loony, except in the topsy-turvy world of Donald Trump, where it has a grotesque logic.”

Trump is saying simply this, often in a voice that conveys his status as what he could call a victim:  I want to be president and, despite all of my so-called crimes, they don’t count – they are just the left going after me and you again. 

So, send me checks and vote for me.

Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin wrote about this:

“For years now, some Republicans — and, to a large extent, the mainstream media — have harbored the notion that the GOP eventually would come to its senses.  Surely, it would eventually dump the unhinged, disloyal, undemocratic, and unfit Donald Trump, right?

“But if Republicans did not wake from their slumber after the first impeachment or the second, after a jury decided he had lied about sexually assaulting E. Jean Carroll, after an indictment accusing him of obstruction and violating the Espionage Act (set out in shocking detail), and after replete evidence of his alleged role in an attempted coup, it is hard to imagine what would bring them to their senses.

“There is scant evidence that Trump would flee the race to focus on his legal defense; to the contrary, the worse his legal position, the more desperate he becomes to regain power.”

And he brings many with him.

Rubin says many elected Republicans and right-wing media figures have contributed to the predicament as they have minimized, rationalized, and denied jaw-dropping allegations against Trump.  

They have made it easy, she adds, for Republicans to cling to Trump.  “Listen, stealing and bandying about top-secret documents isn’t so bad, is it? And, after all, he didn’t do all that much on January 6, 2021, did he?

“Frankly, the mainstream media has made it that much easier for cowardly Republicans to stick with Trump.  Rather than challenge Republicans at every turn to defend their embrace of Trump or even to examine seriously the historical origins of toxic racist, xenophobic and delusional beliefs, the mainstream media largely sticks to horserace politics.”

Rubin writes that she – and we – cannot be sure that Trump’s many legal challenges will result in convictions before the presidential election.

The so-called E. Jean Carroll II trial is scheduled for January.  The Manhattan criminal trial is set for March, but even a conviction there might not move the GOP primary electorate.  The Mar-a-Lago documents case won’t begin before May.  And, all are subject to further delay.

Meanwhile, the GOP presidential primary will have gotten under way in January and will run through March.  Republicans might crown a presumptive winner by early May (as happened in 2016), even before the Mar-a-Lago trial concludes.

“The GOP,” Rubin continues, “could very well be saddled with a nominee who has been indicted multiple times and perhaps convicted more than once.  They would be betting that millions of voters who didn’t vote for him last time would vote for an indicted or possibly convicted nominee who spends most of his time railing about his plight.”

In keeping with one of my previous blogs, Democrat pollster Celinda Lake and documentary filmmaker Mac Heller recently wrote for The Post that “between Trump’s election in 2016 and the 2024 election, the number of Gen Z (born in the late 1990s and early 2010s) voters will have advanced by a net 52 million against older people.”

Put differently, the 2024 electorate will be younger and more Democrat — by a lot — than the electorate that chose Trump in 2016. Thus, the GOP will be pleading with a less Trump-friendly electorate to ignore his alleged crime spree and re-elect the January 6 instigator.

And, finally, this from Rubin:

“If it seems fantastical, even unimaginable, that a party would put itself in such a position, remember this is a party that obsesses over Hunter Biden, elevates to prominence Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, and still won’t admit that Joe Biden won the White House in 2020.  

“Maybe it’s time to acknowledge that, barring an epiphany, the GOP’s self-delusion is risking a political wipeout that will take out more than its disastrous nominee.  And it won’t be able to claim it wasn’t warned.”

Yes, but to repeat another my fond hopes, I wish both parties would find better candidates than Trump or Biden.

If that doesn’t happen, I’ll side with the latter even as I hope for others – or even a highly-qualified third-party candidate who could appeal to our better instincts of decency on the part of those who want to lead us.