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 headline is mine, though some of the words also appeared over a column essayist Thomas B. Edsall wrote for the New York Times.

Excerpts from the essay are worth reading because they point out the damage Trump is doing to our country.

So, read on and keep the barf bucket handy.

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• The damage President Trump has inflicted to the United States and the world is so enormous and wide-ranging that it is hard to grasp.  It runs the gamut from public and private institutions to core democratic customs and traditions, from the legal system to universities, from innocent targets of fraud to those duped into believing vaccines do more harm than good.
• Projections suggest there will be millions of dead men, women and children as a result of his budget cuts, which were made without direct Congressional approval.  A study published in The Lancet, the London-based medical journal, found that Trump administration cuts in U.S.A.I.D. funding “would result in approximately 1,776,539 all-age deaths and 689,900 deaths in children younger than 5 years” in 2025 alone.

“Over the remainder of the period,” the study continues, “the complete defunding of U.S.A.I.D. would cause an estimated 2,450,000 all-age deaths annually, leading to a total of 14,051,750 excess all-age deaths and 4,537,157 excess under-5 deaths by 2030.”

• There are the fraud victims who will never get court-ordered restitution because Trump pardoned the guilty.  In a June 2025 report, Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee found that “Trump’s pardons cheat victims out of an astounding $1.3 billion in restitution and fines, allowing fraudsters, tax evaders, drug traffickers to keep ill-gotten gains.”
• It doesn’t stop there.  America can thank the president for environmental deregulation that could sicken and kill people by the tens or even hundreds of thousands.  If successful, the E.P.A. would gut pollution rules that were estimated, according to The Associated Press, to save “more than 30,000 lives annually.”
• At the same time, the administration has been canceling funding for lifesaving scientific and medical research.   In November, JAMA Internal Medicine published “Clinical Trials Affected by Research Grant Terminations at the National Institutes of Health.”  It said that “in the first half of 2025, the N.I.H. terminated grants supporting 383 unique clinical trials, affecting 74,311 individuals.”
• Trump’s threats to pull out of NATO, his tariffs, not to mention his endless carping against and routine faulting of European leaders, have alienated allies who have stood with us for more than seven decades.  Over the Trump years, European views of America have nose-dived.
• Trump has assaulted the integrity of the presidency, turning the White House into a corrupt enterprise, pardoning donors as his family’s companies receive millions through cryptocurrency purchases from foreign companies and crypto operators subject to U.S. regulation.
• He’s fundamentally undermined the idea of an annual budget process and the concept of a balanced federal budget. These ideas were teetering before his presidency, but the Trump administration gave up on any pretense of seeking balance or an annual spending plan.

Michael Bailey, a political scientist at Georgetown, prefaced his assessment of Trump’s consequentiality by pointedly noting that he would rank Trump “as easily the worst president in U.S. history. The corruption and damage to long-term U.S. institutions and reputation are far beyond anything we’ve seen before,” including Andrew Johnson, James Buchanan and Rutherford Hayes.

So, the foregoing indicates that many American voters have elected a terrible president who operates the Oval Office as if it is a fiefdom.  Trump is corrupt and narcissistic. 

I only hope that we have enough fortitude to last the next two years.