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.

The world of politics sometimes gives us new words, which, by continued use, become part of our lexicon.

One of them, at least for me, is the word “gaslighting.”

I didn’t know what it meant, so, using Google, I opened the dictionary. Here’s the definition:

“Manipulate someone by psychological means into questioning their own sanity.”

This issue arose for me when I read a piece by Washington Post opinion writer Greg Sargent, which appeared under this headline:

TRUMP’S LATEST EFFORT TO GASLIGHT AMERICA IS FALLING APART

Sargent went on:

“The news that the novel coronavirus has invaded President Trump’s inner circle — and that the White House is implementing aggressive testing and tracing to combat it — is a devastating story on an obvious and immediate level, but also on a deeper and longer-lasting one.

“Most palpably, it has revealed the sort of glaring double standard that’s catnip to political media: The White House is taking extensive steps to protect Trump and his top advisers with resources that are largely unavailable to the rest of us, in part due to his own dereliction.”

So, Sargent asks how Trump will persuade the country to return to something approximating normal economic activity when his own advisers are panicked about their health.

According to CNN, Trump’s advisers grasp that this story has become a deadly problem for them. But note why they have concluded this:

“An official said there is extreme sensitivity inside the White House at the current state of affairs with officials recognizing the contradiction in telling states to reopen while the White House enhances protocols to prevent the spread of the coronavirus.”

This story reflects, Sargent writes, “a larger illusion Trump is trying to weave with his magical reality-bending powers — that the coronavirus has been so tamed by his stupendous leadership that it’s now safe to reopen the country, setting the stage for an equally spectacular Trump-marshaled comeback.”

Last weekend, Trump unleashed a frantic barrage of messaging – more than 100 tweets, if you can call tweets “messaging” — that everything is going spectacularly well. Trump claimed it’s “great to see our country starting to open again and hailed his own “great” handling of the pandemic (nearly 80,000 dead).

Trump’s stupidity is, Axios reports, “an epic gaslighting campaign.”

“The next step will be for Trump to begin questioning the death totals, something he’s already done privately and so, could become a “full death denier.”

Stories in this morning’s editions of the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post reported that new polls show that Trump’s re-election is anything but a foregone conclusion, if only because many Americans are coming to the conclusion that Trump has no idea what he’s doing as president, other than catering to his narcissism.

So, I say, don’t let Trump gaslighting succeed.