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.

Regarding this blog headline, I have thought the same thing for years as I struggled to find words to describe a narcissist who wants to be president, Donald Trump.

At one point, I tried to make a list of names that fit the perversity of Trump.  It was long.

Now New York Times writer Frank Bruni has produced a column on this subject.  So, rather than provide excerpts of it, I reprint the entire column because it is so worthy of being read.  So, attribution to Bruni.

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Everywhere I turn, people are rightly laboring to sound the alarm about Donald Trump’s spectacularly reckless, deeply evil expectorations — like his remark that if a NATO ally weren’t pulling its financial weight, he might encourage Russia to invade it.

The problem is that we’ve run out of sirens.

And that’s not principally because we used them too often in the past — though we’re somewhat guilty of that. It’s because the examples of Trump’s moral perversity are pretty much infinite. How can we not exhaust our storehouse of warnings and our vocabulary of censure when someone suggests suspending the Constitution, muses about executing a military general who’s not lap-dog enough, mocks Paul Pelosi’s head injuries from a hammer-wielding assailant, exhorts and then idolizes insurrectionists, weaves ludicrous lies to reject election results and undermine democracy, and sends political Valentines to despots the world over?

We do our best, but finding words for worse than worst, a marker that Trump passed long ago, stumps us.  And there’s no adequate showcase for them.  Our society needs front pages beyond the usual front pages, superlatives beyond our superlatives, a thesaurus to supplement our thesaurus. Trump tests more than our sanity and surviving optimism.  He tests the very limits of language.

Demagogue, autocrat, dictator, tyrant — so many of us have used and reused those terms, with good reason, to describe what he is or wants to be.  So, when his malevolence metastasizes (see how hard a writer must strain), what’s left to say?  That hasn’t been said before?  When you’ve been dwelling at Defcon 1, there’s no new emergency declaration for Americans deaf to Trump’s con.

The usual pejoratives don’t cut it.  Take “hypocrite.”   shortchanges the magnitude of Trump’s double standards and disingenuousness.  He hectored those NATO countries about not paying their bills, but he’s infamous for not paying his own.  He chided Nikki Haley for casting her defeat in the New Hampshire primary as a kind of victory, but he cast his defeat in the presidential election as both a victory and a conspiracy.

He faulted Haley’s husband, who’s doing military service, for his absence on the campaign trail, but his own spouse, who’s doing nothing of the kind, is scarcer than the yeti.  Michael Haley is in fatigues; Melania Trump is merely fatigued.  Doesn’t deter Donald.  Can a hypocrite attain frequent-flier status, like Diamond on Delta?  Trump earned it long ago.

I’ve always maintained that his superpower is his shamelessness:  It means that he’ll go places competitors wouldn’t dare to — they’re restrained by this musty and quaint quality known as decency.  But it also means that his taunts, tirades, insults, and inanities are so legion that they blur together.   No one of them stands out properly or sticks around.  Each has too much competition, too much company.

We in the world outside of MAGA aren’t so much culpable of crying wolf as we are foiled, at this point, by the challenge of capturing the wolf’s madness and appetite.  President Biden struggled with that on Tuesday.  Responding to Trump’s NATO nuttiness, he noted that “no other president in our history has ever bowed down to a Russian dictator.”

“For God’s sake,” he added, “it’s dumb, it’s shameful, it’s dangerous, it’s un-American.”

That’s a stern condemnation — but is there an adjective or idea in it that hasn’t been thrown at Trump before?  I bet that Biden’s lament washed over many Americans, some of whom will later wonder why he isn’t more forcefully denouncing Trump.

We’re all muddling through this together.

Well, not all of us:  Trump is conducting an experiment in unbound narcissism with no room for anybody else.  It’s bonkers, it’s unscrupulous, it’s terrifying.  Pick your put-down.  It won’t be sufficiently heard because it won’t be remotely fresh.

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And this footnote:  Trump got his financial hat handed to him by a New York court, fining him $355 million that, with interest, will grow to $450 million.  Plus, the court barred Trump and his sons from doing business in New York.

A good result.

But there is little doubt but that Trump will try to delay the effect, if only to give himself time if he becomes president – perish the thought – to pardon himself.