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.

As I have said before, every once in a while, a newspaper column is so good that I choose, with proper attribution, of course, to reprint it in full in my blog.

New York Times writer Frank Bruni performed that service this time as, using very unusual ad solid words, he skewered Donald Trump.  Which, I add, is fairly easy to do these days, given all the to’ing and fro’ing characteristic of Trump who doesn’t understand what it means to be a real president.

Bruni adds a lot of perspective to the point.

So, without further comment, here is what Bruni wrote.

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For Trump and many of his closest aides and allies, every day is a great day to beat up on Joe Biden.  They treat bashing the previous occupant of the White House as proper political hygiene, best repeated and ritualized, the autocrat’s equivalent of flossing your teeth.

Even so, Trump outdid himself last weekend.   Apparently unsated by his ludicrous insistence that Biden saddled him with a broken economy, bored with histrionic rants about “the Biden crime family” and convinced that “worst president in American history” doesn’t do justice to Biden’s wretchedness, Trump identified Biden’s frequent use of an automated writing instrument as some kind of smoking gun — or at least smoldering pen.

It proved Biden’s utter incapacitation.  It revealed him as a puppet of unelected operatives.  It was manipulation, deception and corruption all in a swirl of letters and a stream of ink.

Thank heavens for Trump.  He’s difficult but not drooling.

That’s the message.  The ploy.  Trump attends to nothing more energetically than creating comparisons, excuses and distractions that prevent voters who aren’t already done with him from straying.

The worse he makes Biden and Democrats look, the brighter he shines.  So what if they’re out of power and the election was more than four months ago?  They’re still useful scapegoats and flattering yardsticks. Best to keep them around.

Many wise economists, astute political analysts and all-around sages say that Trump’s policies and his tantrums (there’s enormous Venn-diagram overlap of the two) point toward failure.  But what if failure doesn’t matter anymore?  What if it can be cloaked, reclassified, contested, inverted?

Trump is hardly the first political leader invested in those questions, but he’s more relentless and shameless than most in pursuing answers to his liking.  While his health and human services secretary may be kooky about vaccines, Trump doggedly seeks inoculation from his own incompetence.

His legally questionable ejection of all those inspectors general speaks to that.  His ceaseless attempts to sideline and intimidate news organizations — through denied access, frivolous lawsuits and rococo aspersions — are about subtracting a whole source of criticism from the equation.  His attacks on scientists, researchers and higher education serve his culture war and his revenge tour, but they also aim to delegitimize the experts and the data that could refute his proclamations of success.

Overarching and connecting DOGE and Project 2025 is a grander, more diffuse mission:  To make the post-truth era the post-accountability age. (I’ve sounded an alarm about that danger before.) Biden as boogeyman plays a pivotal part in that scheme.

Trump’s fixation on him is so familiar by this point that it’s easy to forget how weird it is.  Other presidents — as a matter of etiquette or of pride or of not seeming too desperate to shift blame — kept something of a check on their public denunciations of predecessors.

Not Trump.  Ever infantile, he must always measure himself against others.  Ever insecure, he must always be best, biggest, most.  If the White House issued a Hot Presidents Calendar — which would be less odd (and significantly more benign) than much of Trump’s behavior since his inauguration — Trump would be 11 of the 12 months of the year.  He’d maybe allow John F. Kennedy to take February, which has too few days to be worthy of Trump.

Trump was maybe a minute into his remarks to Congress two weeks ago when the crowing commenced.  “We have accomplished more in 43 days than most administrations accomplished in four years,” he boasted.  Then: “The presidential election of November 5 was a mandate like has not been seen in many decades.”

But he was just warming up for a more extravagant claim minutes later — that it had “been stated by many” that his presidency’s first month was “the most successful in the history of our nation.”

“Do you know who No. 2 is?” he added, as if citing some official ranking. “George Washington.  How about that?”

Such effluvium is mostly about Trump making Trump feel good.  But the invocations of Biden have a much greater degree of strategy.  There were more than a dozen in his speech to Congress, so that Biden became a refrain and Trump’s acolytes in the audience learned to sing along.

Misleadingly ridiculing the government’s Social Security rolls, Trump said, “One person is listed at 360 years of age.”

“Biden!” shouted an audience member. The Republicans laughed and laughed.

The particular angles of Trump’s attacks on Biden are no accident, either.  Trump was indicted in four criminal cases, so he calls Biden not just a crank but a crook.  Trump is being accused of outsourcing his presidency to Elon Musk, so he insists that Biden was an empty vessel filled with the wants and the whims of the meddlers in his midst.  Criminality, pliability — those become stock accusations, white noise.

And Biden can’t merely have been a flawed president — he must have been a catastrophic one.  That way, anything still wrong under Trump simply reflects the difficulty of climbing out of a hole as deep as the one that the Biden administration dug.

“Look where Biden took us,” Trump told Congress that night.  “Very low. The lowest we’ve ever been.”

That’s bonkers. But we’re descending far and fast now.