PERSPECTIVE FROM THE 19^TH HOLE: This 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 of my professional positions, including as press secretary in Washington, D.C. for a Democrat Congressman from Oregon, 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.

Washington Post writer Jennifer Rubin captured Donald Trump perfectly yesterday in what she wrote under this headline:

‘Stable genius’ or dangerous ignoramus?

To prompt the ignoramus label, here is what Trump said:

“And then I see the disinfectant, where it knocks it out, in a minute. Is there a way we can do something like that? By injection, inside, or almost a cleaning, because you see it gets in the lungs and it does a tremendous number on the lungs. So it would be interesting to check that. You’re going to have to use medical doctors, right? But it sounds interesting to me.”

Rubin labeled it correctly as “Trump’s contribution to the portfolio of misinformation, quackery and jaw-dropping ignorance he has shared with the American people during the coronavirus pandemic.”

Trump, of course, didn’t stop there with that inanity.

“I would like you to speak to the medical doctors to see if there’s any way you can apply light and heat to cure. You know? If you could,” Trump said to Deborah Birx, the White House coronavirus task force coordinator. “And maybe you can, maybe you can’t . . . I’m not a doctor.”

Rubin continued: “Birx, blinking so nervously one would have thought she was transmitting Morse code (“Get me out of here!”), looked like she wanted to disappear into the folds of her silk scarf. She managed to say with a straight face that, no, that would not be a treatment.”

Medical doctors were compelled to warn people not to ingest poisonous chemicals and the makers of Lysol felt obliged to say “under no circumstance should our disinfectant products be administered into the human body (through injection, ingestion or any other route).”

We can laugh about Trump’s ignorance and inanity, but like his hawking of hydroxychloroquine — which induced hoarding of medication needed by patients with other diseases (and perhaps others to harm themselves) — but Rubin says this is one more instance in which concern for public safety should spur news networks to discontinue live coverage of the daily briefings.

“Like a con man peddling patent medicine, Trump dispenses false hope and crackpot remedies, thereby promoting disdain for scientific inquiry and valid research. Once more, one is compelled not only to shudder that such an intellectually unfit man could be president, but that legions of right-wing hucksters and sycophants could regularly contort themselves not merely to defend his blabbering but also to lionize him.”

If there is just a bit good news here, it is that a new Associated Press poll shows that only 23 per cent of Americans have a high level of trust in what Trump says.

I find it disturbing that the trust number is as high as 23 per cent. Zero is more accurate.

And, I hope the lack of Trust gives Joe Biden and his running mate, whomever that turns out to be, an opportunity to restore the ethics and credibility of the Presidency – which could mean that the win country’s top political job.