Perspective from the 19th 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.
I borrowed this headline from a column by Dana Milbank that appeared in the Washington Post.
I toyed with building off the column to write another personal blog. But the more I thought about it the more sense it made to reprint Milbank’s column intact. It is that good, for it chronicles the stupid errors made across the board by Donald Trump and his minions.
It could have fit under another blog headline by me a few weeks ago – this is an administration run by amateurs.
Here is Milbank’s column.
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It Nearly five months into Trump’s new reign of error, his administration’s mistakes are multiplying.
There is no sanctuary from Trump administration buffoonery.
On May 29, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem released a “comprehensive list of sanctuary jurisdictions.” She was “exposing these sanctuary politicians” because they are “endangering Americans and our law enforcement in order to protect violent criminal illegal aliens.”
But it immediately became clear that the list of more than 500 states, counties and cities was riddled with errors: misspellings, cities and counties mistaken for each other, and places that don’t exist. Cincinnati became “Cincinnatti,” Campbell County (Kentucky) became “Cambell” County, Greeley County (Nebraska) became “Greenley” County, Takoma Park (Maryland) became “Tacoma” Park, while “Martinsville County” (Virginia) was invented. And so on.
Worse, scores of the “sanctuary politicians” she called out turned out to be leaders of MAGA counties and towns with no sanctuary policies on their books. Complaints poured in from Trump allies across the country. “You don’t have that many mistakes on such an important federal document,” said Pat Burns, the Trump-backing mayor of the right-wing stronghold of Huntington Beach, California, mislabeled as a sanctuary city.
He told the Associated Press that “somebody’s got to answer” for this “negligent” behavior.
Good luck with that. The only answer was to disappear the list this week, leaving behind a “Page Not Found” error.
Such a massive screwup hadn’t happened since … well, the previous week, when Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. went to the White House and released his ballyhooed “Make America Healthy Again” report full of citations of studies that don’t exist, the product of AI hallucinations.
This, in turn, was reminiscent of President Donald Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariff rollout, which targeted an island full of penguins and other unpopulated or sparsely populated corners of the globe — and raised taxes on most of the world based on a math error.
And these, of course, were on top of the “mistakes” that led Trump officials to share war plans with a journalist, to deport people protected by court order, to launch a destructive fight with Harvard University, to fire and then attempt to rehire thousands of crucial federal workers, to cancel and then reinstate various vital government functions, and to misstate, often by orders of magnitude, the alleged savings from its cost-cutting attempts.
Trying to make sense of any of this? Page Not Found.
Nearly five months into this reign of error, the mistakes are multiplying. It becomes more obvious each week that Trump and his aides are just not good at this governing thing.
This week brought the spectacular crack-up of Trump’s relationship with Elon Musk — and with it the prospective implosion of the House-passed tax and spending bill, the centerpiece of Trump’s legislative agenda. Musk blasted the bill, which piles up another $2.4 trillion in federal deficits, as a “disgusting abomination” and launched a “KILL the BILL” campaign that escalated wildly Thursday into claims that Trump only won the election because of Musk, that Trump’s tariffs will cause a recession and that Trump “is in the Epstein files” — along with an endorsement of impeaching Trump.
A “very disappointed” Trump responded that Musk “just went CRAZY!” because Trump “asked him to leave” and “took away his EV Mandate” — and the president threatened to terminate Musk’s government contracts, causing Tesla to shed $152 billion in market value.
“It’s like mommy and daddy are fighting,” Representative Eric Burlison (R-Missouri) told reporters at the start of the spat. Now members of the House, including Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and various members of the far-right House Freedom Caucus, are rushing to condemn the bill they just voted for.
Republican lawmakers attacked each other as “pathetic.” Far-right senators such as Ron Johnson of Wisconsin joined in condemnation of the “immoral” and “grotesque” bill. The White House accused these allies of “not having their facts together.”
Then there were the quieter moments of incompetence.
Education Secretary Linda McMahon, in testimony on Capitol Hill, seemed not to know what the Tulsa race massacre was (“I’d like to look into it more and get back to you”), and she drew a blank on Ruby Bridges, the first Black child to integrate schools in the South (“I will look into it and get back to you”).
She also testified about savings of $1 trillion that would come from eliminating a program to help poor kids attend college (actual amount: $12 billion), and she flubbed a question about where American schoolchildren ranked on tests of math and reading.
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In the White House briefing room, press secretary Karoline Leavitt was asked if she had a reaction to the results of the South Korean election. “Yes, we do,” she said, looking through papers. “In fact, let me find it here for you.” (Pause.) “It should be somewhere in here.” (Pause.) “Thank you.” (Pause.) “Um, we do not. But I will get you one.”
But nobody has fumbled as frequently as Noem in recent days. Officially, she is in charge of protecting us from terrorists and planning for natural disasters. In practice, she has been on a months-long cosplay adventure: riding a camel and wearing a headscarf in the Middle East; posing in full tactical gear while pointing an M4 muzzle at the head of an Immigrations and Customs Enforcement agent; displaying her Rolex while standing in front of deported prisoners in El Salvador; joining an immigration raid in ICE hat and bulletproof vest; wearing firefighting gear and carrying a hose; donning an aviator jacket and sitting at the controls of a C-130; wearing a cowboy hat while on horseback at the border; and so on.
Last week, a day before she issued her error-plagued list of “sanctuary jurisdictions,” she made a startling announcement: “Thanks to our ICE officers,” she wrote, an “illegal alien who threatened to assassinate President Trump is behind bars.”
The statement included a photo of the alleged would-be assassin and one of the letters he was accused of writing, which said, “We are tired of this president messing with us Mexicans.” But it was all a ruse. Authorities said another man confessed to writing the letters in an attempt to frame the migrant Noem accused. Instead of correcting her error, Noem left the false accusation on social media and the DHS website.
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In another blunder, ICE agents forced their way into the district office of Representative Jerry Nadler (D-New York) and handcuffed one of his staffers who resisted. The agents claimed that Nadler’s office was “harboring rioters” — but they found no such people.
The administration, in a court filing last week, blamed “a confluence of administrative errors” by ICE for the deportation of a migrant whose removal had been blocked by a court order. This was at least the fourth time the administration had done such a thing, and not the first time it had claimed an “administrative error” was the reason.
On Monday, another part of DHS, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, picked up the blunder baton. Its director, David Richardson, left staff “baffled” at a briefing when he said “he had not been aware the country has a hurricane season.”
Richardson, who has no experience in emergency response, got the job when the previous director was fired a day after testifying to Congress that he didn’t think FEMA should be abolished.
The administration said Richardson’s surprise upon learning that there is such a thing as a hurricane season was a “joke.” No doubt there are gales of hilarity blowing through the Southeast right now.
Trump, at a town hall this spring, was asked what mistakes he had made in his first 100 days. He was silent for a moment, then said, “I’ll tell you, that’s the toughest question I can have because I don’t really believe I’ve made any mistakes.” The audience laughed.
Even by then, the administration had already racked up an impressive catalogue of maladministration. The administration accidentally canceled Ebola prevention efforts, rescinded jobs for the Veterans Crisis Line, and fired people working on bird flu and safeguarding nuclear weapons.
It claimed to have eliminated an $8 billion contract that was actually worth $8 million. Confusing Gaza Province in Mozambique with Gaza in the Middle East, it purported to have exposed a program that donated condoms to Hamas. It “mistakenly” gave Musk’s team the ability to alter a federal payments database.
It launched a civil rights probe of the “University of Tulsa School of Medicine,” which doesn’t exist. It inadvertently appointed the wrong person as acting director of the FBI. It “mistakenly removed” a web page honoring Jackie Robinson. It accidentally released Social Security numbers along with the JFK files and sent an unclassified email with the names of CIA hires.
The list went on — and it keeps getting longer. On Wednesday night, Trump released a video statement citing “the recent terror attack in Boulder, Colorado” to justify an expanded travel ban he was imposing on 19 countries, many in Africa. But the man charged with the antisemitic attack in Boulder was from Egypt — which isn’t on Trump’s list.
On government spending, Musk and his so-called Department of Government Efficiency had promised savings of as much as $2 trillion from their efforts. But now Musk is gone, and when the White House sent its first round of proposed cuts to Congress this week, it was for all of $9.4 billion, or about 0.01 percent of federal spending. “There are no DOGE cuts,” Trump ally Steve Bannon fumed on his podcast, blaming Musk for giving “false hope.”
DOGE, rather than making the government more efficient, created “layers of new red tape” and caused “significant lags in work in some agencies, notably Social Security.” Musk, for his part, found it necessary to assert that “I am NOT taking drugs!” after the New York Times reported that he took so much ketamine he had bladder problems.
On trade, Trump adviser Peter Navarro had said he wanted to secure “90 deals in 90 days.” But nearly 60 days later, Trump has secured only one — a vaguely phrased framework with Britain that still hasn’t been made public. Trump has reignited tensions with China and doubled steel and aluminum tariffs to 50 per cent.
U.S. automakers may be forced to shut some car production within weeks because they can’t get rare earth minerals from China. One closely watched payroll survey found that private-sector job creation came to a virtual halt in May. Yet Trump, in Pittsburgh last week, boasted that he “cut the trade deficit in half.” He neglected to mention that this was because he had doubled the trade deficit in the previous months.
In foreign affairs, the administration has proposed a nuclear deal that would allow Iran to continue in the short term to enrich low levels of uranium. The American offer “is similar in many key respects” to the Obama administration’s Iran deal — which Trump called “the worst deal ever.”
At the same time, the world is bracing for the major attack on Ukraine that Vladimir Putin is threatening in retaliation for drone strikes that hit Russian airfields. Trump now likens the war to “two young children fighting” and to a hockey game. But fear not: Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is on the case. He has ordered that the Navy remove the name of gay rights icon Harvey Milk from one of its ships, and he is considering doing the same for vessels honoring Thurgood Marshall and Harriet Tubman.
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Evidently frustrated by the lack of results, Trump and his aides are turning against natural allies. With its mass deportation effort stalled, the White House unloaded on top ICE officials. Trump aide Stephen Miller summoned 50 of them to Washington for an “emergency” meeting at which, the Washington Examiner reported, he “ripped into everybody.”
And with judges appointed by presidents of both parties continuing to block Trump’s executive orders, Trump lashed out at the conservative Federalist Society for supposedly duping him into naming insufficiently MAGA judges during his first term. He called the group’s co-chairman, Leonard Leo, a “sleazebag” and a “bad person who, in his own way, probably hates America.”
Of course, it’s easier for Trump to blame others than to accept that the failures are more likely attributable to his own bungling. Among this week’s errata: He withdrew his nominee to be NASA administrator on the eve of the confirmation hearing, even though the candidate had broad support. The head of the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, whom Trump claimed to have fired last week, was found still to be on the job this week.
The Post reported that subscriptions to the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts are down 36 per cent since Trump took over the organization with a promise to make it “GREAT AGAIN.” The administration threatened to revoke Columbia University’s accreditation — even though the Ivy League school had already acceded to Trump’s demands. And Trump needled the German chancellor in the Oval Office, telling him D-Day was “not a pleasant day for you.”
Trump has so little interest in the details of national security that he has received the President’s Daily Brief, a summation of the nation’s most sensitive intelligence, only 14 times so far (compared to 90 by Joe Biden at this point in his presidency). It’s so worrisome that, NBC News reports, intelligence officials are talking about reimagining the PDB so it looks more like a Fox News broadcast.
But Trump gets his intelligence from other sources. This week he reposted a message on Truth Social asserting that Biden was “executed in 2020” and replaced by “robotic engineered soulless mindless entities”; Trump later ordered an investigation into the “conspiracy” of Biden’s “cognitive decline.” He also shared a post about a House bill that would rename the D.C.-area transit system from WMATA to WMAGA and its Metrorail to the “Trump Train.”
It’s a great idea. Qatar will donate the subway cars, which will be powered by coal. Passengers will pay for fares with cryptocurrency after first showing proof of citizenship. And the trains will reverse themselves regularly and without warning — never quite reaching their original destination.
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Plus, this footnote:
Elon Musk and Donald Trump, who compete for having the largest egos in the world, are arguing aggressively with each other.
On social media:
- Musk now says he opposes “Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill,” and wants Trump to be impeached.
- Not to be out-done, Trump now says he will now take away all Musk’s federal contracts.
My view?
They deserve each other.
Perspective from the 19th Hole 