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.

I often have thought that this headline summarizes the way Donald Trump goes about the business of being president.

As I have watched other top-level officials, usually governors, they always test ideas before they implement them.

Trump? 

No.  He just flies by the seat of his pants.

Consider the war he started in Iran.  There has been no indication he consulted with key members of his staff or his Cabinet.  He did not deal with Congress.

And, as the commander-in-chief, he felt it was not his responsibility to explain to the American people why he was going to attack Iran, even if they would pay a price for the war in the form of inflation, not to mention shortages of oil.

The New York Times contributed solid perspectives on this point in an essay that appeared in the newspaper last weekend.  It was written by two accomplished writers, Jonathan Rauch and Peter Wehner.  [Rauch is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.  Wehner, a senior fellow at the Trinity Forum, regularly writes opinions for the Times.]

Here is how they started their essay:

“It has been clear for a long time that Trump is a person with a disorganized mind and a disordered personality.  What the past few months and especially the past few weeks have brought into focus is how his pathologies have cascaded downward and outward through his administration.

“They have become institutionalized.  The reason the administration so often does not act coherently is that it cannot.  The world faces something new and baffling and frightening in Trump’s second term:  A psychotic state.”

The authors acknowledge that “this does not mean that every individual in government is emotionally or psychologically unstable.  Nor is it a clinical diagnosis of the president.  The issue is that the administration lacks a consistent attachment to reality and the ability to organize its thinking coherently.  Trump’s grandiosity, impulsivity, inconsistency, and outright breaks with reality have become state policy.”

Trump’s second term is different from his first, the writers suggest.  In 2020, he maintained he won the election when he did not and babbled about treating Covid with injections of disinfectant when, of course, that didn’t work.  But, they add, he could not translate his fantasies into reality.

“In the second term, by contrast, institutional psychosis has been on display since Day 1.  It is the Iran war that has most vividly demonstrated the scope of the problem.  In this conflict, the most potent antagonist has been the administration’s own incoherence.

“Trump chose to wage a war without deciding on its aims, mapping out a strategy, planning for contingencies, or even being able to explain itself. The goal was regime change — until it wasn’t.  The demand was unconditional surrender — until it wasn’t.

“Deadlines were issued and then erased.  Threats of total destruction were made and then pulled back.  Iran’s nuclear program was pointed out as a threat in February, despite the fact that Americans were told by Trump that it was ‘obliterated’ last June.

“The president called for an international coalition to open the Strait of Hormuz, then said the United States could go it alone, then said the waterway would somehow ‘open itself.’  [Then he started a blockade.]  He claimed that the United States had already won the war, that the war would end soon and that the war would end when I feel it, feel it in my bones.’  As a headline in The Times put it, the president’s position on Iran ‘can change by the sentence.’”

Normal administrations set up processes that assemble evidence from varied sources, collate viewpoints and priorities across multiple agencies, and ensure rational deliberation before options reach the president.

Not for anything as large or significant as the federal government, I watched policy processes in Oregon over many years – emphasis on the word “process.”

For a governor, I was part of a team that he relied on to assess actions he wanted to take before he took them.  This governor — Vic Atiyeh, the last Republican governor in Oregon – wanted all viewpoints before he decided what actions to take.  Emphasis on “all” viewpoints – those that agreed with him and those that differed.

Then, at the Oregon Executive Department (and, again, I am not comparing this to the Office of the U.S. President), I was part of a team that advised the director who served as the COO of state government.  Before decisions, he wanted options on the budget, personnel, and media and legislative relations, the last from me.

Then, armed with all the information, including pros and cons, he acted.

More from the New York Times authors:

“The policy review process can be tortuous and sometimes mistaken.  It can’t substitute for wise presidential judgment.  But it is vital.  It asks hard questions and assesses competing arguments.  It ensures expert input in specific domains, anticipates how policies may ramify and prepares for contingencies.

“In all those ways, the systematic review of policy amounts to an institutional mind:  A cognitive process that organizes the government’s deliberations to keep them rational and anchored in reality. 

“In Trump’s second term, those functions still exist, but they can be disrupted, circumvented or just plain abandoned at any moment on the say-so of the president and his senior officials.  In that respect, the Trump administration is mindless.

“As the Trump era winds down, the country may re-learn something that never should have been forgotten.  Institutions need to be reformed, not destroyed.  Governing well requires skill and careful attention to detail rather than leaders acting on impulse and ignorance and character and mental stability matter perhaps most of all.”

Think of that last paragraph and then think about Trump.  Your mind will turn to mush as you ponder Trump’s various frailties, ones he doesn’t recognize, even as he goes about proclaiming he is a god.