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.
There is no agreed-upon answer to the question in this blog headline, but at least one thing is clear: Donald Trump is not done with his plan to change America. Often, I argue, for the worse.
All of us in America will have to tolerate – a better word might be, survive – two more years of Donald Trump in the Oval Office.
All this came to mind last week as I read an article by Jonathan Rauch and Peter Wehner that appeared in the New York Times under this headline: “Trump Has Finally Lost the Plot.”
Rauch, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and Wehner, a senior fellow at the Trinity Forum, always produce columns worth reading. Especially Wehner, one of my favorite writers.
But, this time, I disagree, at least a little, with their contention, which was outlined in the first two paragraphs of their piece:
“The frantic pace of the Trump presidency makes days seem like weeks and weeks like months — if not years. Finding rhyme or reason amid Trump’s erratic conduct is impossible. Even so, while 2026 has not brought calm, it has brought more clarity.
“Twenty months into his second term, Trump has re-made the presidency and changed what Americans will tolerate from their government and from one another. Yet that transformation, sweeping as it is, may prove less important than what Trump and his allies could not do. They failed at the most ambitious project that they brought to his second term: Using the state to re-make American society. That failure is a central fact of the past 20 months, and it is why the country is in a less dangerous place than it was a year ago.”
My view: While I hope Rauch and Wehner are right, all of us have two more years for Trump and cronies who will try to annihilate our future on their own terms, history and reality be damned.
Quotes from Rauch and Wehner appear below highlighted by bullet marks, followed by comments from me:
- “When Trump took office for the second time, he arrived with several overlapping but distinct agendas. The one he cared most about would convert the executive branch to a form of government that scholars call patrimonialism, in which the state is run as the leader’s personal property and family concern.
“In a patrimonialist system, expert bureaucracies and neutral rules are replaced by — or subordinated to — the head of state’s will. Where they can, patrimonialists personalize and weaponize law enforcement, pardons, programs and grants, appointments, promotions and all the other aspects of state power.”
COMMENT: Trump meets this definition. He has enriched himself and his family by several billion dollars — and, not to mention, his effort to extract almost $1.8 billion from taxpayers by means of a sham legal settlement.
- He uses his Justice Department to wage personal vendettas and his pardons to indemnify his cronies. He has staffed the department’s senior ranks with his own criminal defense attorneys, and the F.B.I. with a fierce political loyalist whose chief qualification was a career spent attacking the investigators who had scrutinized Trump. And he has purged the government’s internal checks on corruption, including by firing inspectors general, career prosecutors and F.B.I. agents whose offense was to follow the rules.
COMMENT: Trump pushes Congress aside, believing he is all powerful, Congress be damned. And Congress accents.
- The re-norming of political standards is another area in which Trump has made a lasting imprint. By “re-norming,” we mean the deliberate degradation of what is considered acceptable in American public life.
Examples are far too many to list, but recall just a few: Trump described his political opponents as “vermin” and said immigrants were “poisoning the blood of our country.” When Robert Mueller died in March, Trump posted that he was “glad he’s dead.” When Rob Reiner and his wife were murdered in their home, he blamed the killings on Reiner’s criticism of him. He courted and excused political violence — winking at threats against officials who crossed him, joking about the near-fatal attack on Nancy Pelosi’s husband, and praising and then pardoning January 6 rioters. He revels in bullying, cruelty and hate as no president ever has.
COMMENT: If you were to list crimes for which Trump has been found to be guilty or would be found to be guilty, the list would be long. By any normal standard, he should be in prison.
- “Many Americans are sick of wading through the sludge and understandably want to look away. That is what Trump is counting on. He wins not by persuading us that the conduct is acceptable, but by wearing us out until we no longer object. Each violation makes the next easier; each unpunished transgression resets the baseline.
COMMENT: Agreed.
- Every administration tries to shape the culture. What sets this one apart is not the ambition, but the means and the scale — not persuasion but coercion, and not on one front but everywhere all at once, in ways that were unprecedented and found by courts to be unlawful. Trump and his administration sought to bully and commandeer private institutions, to redirect the culture, and to remake society from above by force and fear.
History may one day judge that the tide turned in Minneapolis. In January of this year, Operation Metro Surge made mass arrests, invaded homes, fired pepper balls and shot dead two American citizens, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, without plausible cause — and then, after their deaths, defamed them.
The architect of the operation, Stephen Miller, one of the most powerful presidential aides in modern history, was explicit about the method. He ran Operation Metro Surge through daily calls with the leadership of the Department of Homeland Security, wielding the authority of the president — reportedly directing agents to “force confrontations” with protesters to win the “P.R. battle” and saying that if Minnesotans came to believe “their protesting is successful,” the administration’s interior operations would fail nationwide. Protesters, he reportedly said, “need to be vanquished by any force necessary.”
COMMENT: Rauch and Wehner report that the people of Minneapolis answered with disciplined, peaceful resistance: tens of thousands marching in Arctic cold, luminaria spelling “ICE Out 4 Good,” a statewide “economic blackout,” a state lawsuit in federal court, citizen networks that tracked ICE and documented its activities, and a population that refused every provocation.
They contend that opposition in Minneapolis was the start of Trump’s downfall. They contend very well for their perspective.
“Trump, with just under two-and-a-half years left in his second term, might emotionally and psychologically blow apart. But things are different than they were. The 80-year-old president is losing his grip on power and even his own base. The MAGA movement is fracturing. And the president no longer inspires the fear he once did. We know something today that wasn’t altogether clear a year ago: America’s civil society is harder to intimidate and rewire than MAGA’s cultural revolutionaries hoped.”
FINAL COMMENT: Here’s hoping that Rauch and Wehner are right. But I have my doubts, if only because Trump and sycophants always fight back because they want to win at any cost, even human costs.
Literally, our survival is at stake as we wonder what the next two years of Trump evil will hold.
