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.

This blog headline is one that appeared over a column a day or two ago by Frank Bruni whose work appears in the New York Times.

Every once in a while, a column is so good that I use it for my blog.  This is one of those times and I give full credit to Bruni for analyzing whether and, if so how, Donald Trump will deliver on all the promises he made along the campaign trail.

Bruni’s consensus:  Trump won’t.

Here is the column.

*********

Now, supposedly, Donald Trump must deliver.

The easy promises of the campaign trail yield to the arduous chore of governing, and either he comes through with lower prices, faster growth and order on the border, or he and his Republican allies confront an erosion of support and a reckoning at the polls.

I keep reading and hearing that. It’s the obvious analysis, the default prognostication, and it’s the refuge of Democrats desperate for a way back: The leader will be judged by how effectively he leads.

But that musty truism may not apply anymore, not to the extent it used to, not when truth itself is up for grabs. If ever someone were poised to govern under circumstances in which results are only marginally relevant and accountability is a quaint relic — the manual typewriter of American politics — it’s Trump.

That’s a function of both the age and the man. No president in my lifetime has been elected in such a corrupted information environment, and no president has so shamelessly participated in its corruption.

If Trump fails by established metrics, he’ll declare those metrics bogus and delegitimize the experts and agencies that calculate them. And there’ll be no shortage of partisan players in the Babel of news media and social media to support him in that scheme. We saw that when they indulged his lies after the 2020 election. They’ve grown only more submissive since.

If Americans under Trump are demonstrably and undeniably hurting as much as they were under President Biden, he’ll weave stories and hurl accusations that absolve him of responsibility and assign it to his political foes.

And he’ll find many more takers than he would have before we could all customize the reports we receive so that our designated heroes remain unblemished, our appointed villains irredeemable, our biases affirmed.

And before our entrenchments in such cinched corridors of pseudo-reality zapped our powers of discernment. “We’re living in a world where facts instantly perish upon contact with human minds,” George Packer wrote in The Atlantic this month.

“Local news is disappearing, and a much-depleted national press can barely compete with the media platforms of billionaires who control users algorithmically, with an endless stream of conspiracy theories and deepfakes. The internet, which promised to give everyone information and a voice, has consolidated in just a few hands the power to destroy the very notion of objective truth.”

Elon Musk, anyone? He’s a fixture at Mar-a-Lago. That’s no accident and no small thing. Trump will bromance whom he must and do whatever’s necessary to twist the narrative in his favor. No scruple impedes him. No concern for precedent or propriety complicates his resolve.

That’s the scary moral of the past week, when he spent several minutes of his first big news conference since Nov. 5 putting journalists on notice: I will take you to court. You will cry uncle or else. He then made that clear by filing a lawsuit against the pollster J. Ann Selzer, her polling firm and The Des Moines Register for producing a public opinion survey shortly before the election that augured a big victory by Kamala Harris. Flawed soothsaying is hardly libel — and so Trump’s lawyers instead claimed consumer fraud.

Trump wants the FBI to be run by a provocateur, Kash Patel, who has vowed to throw mouthy journalists in jail.

The peerlessly bombastic Trump booster Steve Bannon used a speech at the New York Young Republican Club gala on Sunday night to raise that same specter. According to an article by Hugo Lowell in The Guardian, Bannon said:  “I need investigations, trials and then incarceration. And I’m just talking about the media.”

He wondered if the media should be “included in the vast criminal conspiracy against President Trump.” He mentioned the MSNBC legal analyst Andrew Weissmann and the MSNBC anchor Rachel Maddow by name.

This is about intimidation. It’s about creating a climate in which The Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos prevented his news organization from endorsing Kamala Harris and in which, just this week, ABC News settled a defamation suit that Trump had filed against it by agreeing to pay $15 million to his future presidential foundation and museum, all because of an imprecise choice of words by George Stephanopoulos that, in the view of some legal scholars, fell far short of the “malice” necessary for ABC News to be found liable.

“Compared to the mainstream American press of a decade ago, today’s press is far less financially robust, far more politically threatened, and exponentially less confident that a given jury will value press freedom, rather than embrace a vilification of it,” RonNell Andersen Jones, a professor of law at the University of Utah, said in an article in The Times by Michael M. Grynbaum and Alan Feuer.

Ever the predator, Trump smells that fear. And he’s pouncing.

We in the news media could and should be more careful in some of our reporting, less blinkered in many of our assessments. But Trump isn’t trying to make us better or get a fair shake. He wants plaudits only and he wants us on our knees, our ability to criticize him inferior to his ability to deify himself, our lances too blunt to pierce the cocoon of flattery in which he has tucked himself.

The next best thing to results is illusions. And a record of accomplishments isn’t necessary in a hall of mirrors, not if it’s big and blinding enough.