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 (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 it what I long for in both politics and golf. The middle ground is often where the best public policy decisions like. And it is where you want to be on a golf course.

Is “one-upping” a word?

I don’t know, but it’s a word that, for me, even if I made it up, always comes to mind when I think about Donald Trump.

He does something stupid one day and you think he cannot do anything worse. Then, of course, he tops himself by doing something even more dishonest and egregious.

When will this end with Trump? Never.

If he loses the presidential election, who knows what he’ll do then? He might not even be willing to leave the White House. And, if he wins? Don’t think about such a result.

What happened with Trump last week?

Well, against all advice from health professionals, he went ahead with his first full-on, on-site, political rally to invigorate “his” troops who appear ready to support him no matter what he does or says.

The rally was typical Trump. Everyone was wrong except himself. The media was the enemy.

The crowd was smaller than expected, so much so that workers tore down an outside stage where Trump was due to address some of the crowd who could not get nto the pavilion in Tulsa. Media reports on the smaller size of the crowd irked Trump.

It seemed fitting that the empty seats in the arena were blue, which, of course, is the color associated with Democrats.

Here’s the way the Washington Post described the Trump event under the headline that said this:

“The campaign says news coverage and protests led to smaller-than-expected crowds in Tulsa.”

The story went on:

“President Trump’s campaign planned for a raucous show of force at a rally in Oklahoma, but has found itself in a back-and-forth with critics over crowd size Sunday, as the campaign looked ahead to an event in Arizona on Tuesday.

“Trump aides blamed the news media for the smaller-than-expected crowd because of coverage of protests and coronavirus infections leading up to Saturday’s rally in Tulsa, Okla. The campaign also said that protesters outside the arena blocked people from entering, though Wall Street Journal reporters at the event didn’t see that happen. Tulsa police said the protests outside the arena were largely peaceful.

“About 6,200 people attended the rally at the 19,000-seat BOK Center, Tulsa officials said Sunday. Trump and Vice President Mike Pence were also supposed to speak to an overflow group outside the arena, but that was canceled as the crowd dwindled.”

“’Leftists and online trolls doing a victory lap, thinking they somehow impacted rally attendance, don’t know what they’re talking about or how our rallies work,’ Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale said in a statement Sunday.’”

Ahead of the rally, the campaign said that six staffers had tested positive for coronavirus. They didn’t attend the rally, but the development generated news hours before Trump took the stage to deliver a 1-hour 41-minute speech that played heavily on a law-and-order message in contrast to another day of racism protests around the country.

Washington Post editorial writers prepared a cogent summary of the “one-upping himself” president:

“None of this (what he did in the Tulsa rally) is new or surprising coming from Trump. He promoted the ‘birther’ fiction about the country’s first black president, campaigned for the Oval Office on an agenda rooted in attacks on Mexican immigrants and Muslims, and has shaped a presidency geared toward inflaming racial and cultural divisions.

“Maybe it was naive to think he could change his tune, even temporarily, even to save himself as he plummets in the polls.

“In any event, his choice is both sad and clarifying. Sad, because his choice guarantees a long and ugly election season. Clarifying, because he makes more evident than ever the urgency of evicting him from the White House.”