Perspective from the 19^th Hole 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.

Two columnists tried valiantly this week to answer what for me is an unanswerable question:  Why supposedly rational people vote for Donald Trump who wants to be a dictator in America.

This question has irked me for months.

In Trump, we have:

• A convicted felon.

• A rapist who views women as nothing more than objects.

• A person who vilifies the military he wants to lead as commander in chief, including by calling the late Senator John McCain – who was a genuine military hero – a failure because he got captured in Viet Nam.  Trump, of course, never served.

• A person who wants to deport millions of immigrants, though he, himself, is part of a family of immigrants.

• And, speaking of immigrants, a person who says immigrants commit more crimes than others as they enter the country, but, of course, the facts say otherwise.  Those already here commit more crimes.

• A person who values dictators like Vladimir Putin from Russia and Kim Jong Un from North Korea, and says he wants to be like them.

• A person who values Adolph Hitler, one of the worst criminals – if not, THE worse – in history.

• A person who views himself as being the only person of value.

That’s Trump.

And it is possible he could win the election.

Before moving on to the views of the two columnists, the Washington Post showed up with solid information on the speaking style of Donald Trump, which it labeled crazy under this headline:  “Abrupt shifts, profane insults, confusing sentences” – and this, too, adds to not understanding people can vote for him when he doesn’t say anything understandable.

“Trump’s recent public appearances have been strikingly erratic, coarse and often confusing, even for a politician with a history of ad-libbing in three consecutive presidential runs, a Washington Post review of dozens of speeches, interviews and other public appearances shows.

“His speeches have gotten longer and more repetitive compared with those of past campaigns.  He promotes falsehoods and theories that are so far removed from reality or appear wholly made up that they are often baffling to anyone not steeped in MAGA media or internet memes.

“Trump’s unusual delivery has inspired comedy routines and armchair diagnoses for years.  Long, meandering stemwinders, provocations, brazen falsehoods and blunt language, jokes and insults have distinguished his speeches since he launched his candidacy in 2015 calling Mexican immigrants ‘rapists.’”

Now, for the analysis by the columnists – Philip Bump from the Washington Post and Tom Nichols from The Atlantic Magazine.

From Bump:  “A secretary of defense, chief of staff and joint chiefs chairman who served under Trump offered warnings about the former president that his base is primed to ignore.

“One of Donald Trump’s most effective and most useful tactics in rebuffing criticism has been to insist that any critic is operating in bad faith. There are no valid complaints about Trump, he insists, and there are no reliable complainers.  Saying something critical of the former president means that you are not loyal to the former president and, therefore, that your criticism is tainted by your anti-Trump bias.  Question-begging as political defense.

“It works. People who are supportive of Trump are almost definitionally inclined to grant him the benefit of the doubt, meaning that they are predisposed to assume that he’s the one approaching a point of debate from a more defensible position.

“Put those things together and we get where we are today.  A phalanx of former Trump advisers and appointees has delineated the ways in which he embraces fascism, hopes to implement authoritarianism, disparaged the military and offered praise for Adolf Hitler — and the most likely reaction from Trump’s supporters will be that they are just anti-Trump haters.”

Bump adds that “the insistence on personal loyalty that Kelly describes as Trump’s primary motivation means that his supporters will dismiss concerns out of hand

From Nichols:  “Donald Trump’s opponents are continually stunned by the disconnect between his ghastly behavior and his polling numbers.  But millions of voters support Trump because of his offensiveness, not in spite of it.

“The belief that at some point Trump voters will have finally had enough is an ordinary human response to seeing people you care about — in this case fellow citizens — associate with someone you know to be awful.  Much like watching a friend in an unhealthy relationship, you think that each new outrage is going to be the one that provokes the final split, and yet it never does:  Your friend, instead of breaking off the relationship, makes excuses. He didn’t mean it. You don’t understand him like I do.

“But this analogy is wrong, because it’s based on the faulty assumption that one of the people in the relationship is unhappy.  Maybe the better analogy is the friend you didn’t know very well in high school, someone who perhaps was quiet and not very popular, who shows up at your 20th reunion on the arm of a loudmouthed boor, who tells offensive stories and racist jokes.  She thinks he’s wonderful and laughs at everything he says.

“For millions of the GOP faithful, however, Trump’s daily attempts to breach new frontiers of hideousness are not offensive but reassuring.  They want Trump to be awful — precisely because the people they view as their political foes will be so appalled if he wins.  If Trump’s campaign was focused on handing out tax breaks and lowering gas prices, he’d be losing, because for his base, none of that yawn-inducing policy stuff is transgressive enough to be exciting.

“Some Trump voters may believe his lies.  But plenty more want Trump to be terrifying and stomach-turning so that re-electing him will be a fully realized act of social revenge.  

“Exactly why so many Americans feel this way is a complicated story, but a toxic combination of social resentment, entitlement, and racial insecurity drives many Trump voters to believe not only that other Americans are looking down on them, but that they are doing so while living an undeservedly good life.  These others must be punished or at least brought down to a common level of misery to balance the scales, and Trump is the guy to do it.”

Nichols adds that “unfocused rage is an addiction fed by Trump and conservative media, and the MAGA base wants it stoked continuously.  If Trump were suddenly to become a sensible person who started talking coherently about trade policy and defense budgets, they would feel betrayed, like hard drinkers in a tavern who suspect that the bartender is watering down the high-proof stuff.”

There you have it.  A little about “why” some voters go with Trump.  They want revenge and they feel good about getting it with an egotist.

*********

As a footnote, NY Times writer Nicholas Kristof, a columnist with connections to Oregon where he drew up, shows up today with this trenchant analysis:

“What should we think as Donald Trump urges people to vote in January, confuses places and names, fumbles for words, simplifies his speech patterns, describes recent experiences that did not happen and in public seems increasingly vulgar, menacing and unfiltered?

“It’s unarguable that Trump is acting even more erratically than he has in the past.  It’s also indisputable that Trump is at an age when many people see a physical or mental decline over the following four years.”

So, in conclusion, I say let Trump live out his remaining days in private, not in the presidency.