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.

Atlantic Magazine writer Tom Nichols – I know I quote him a lot but that’s because he’s so quotable – performed a valuable service a day or so agpo when all he did was quote Donald Trump.

Thus, my blog headline.

This was Nichols’ introduction:

“Trump, of course, tops the leaderboard for gobsmacking moments, and this week, his comments ran the gamut from vile to hilarious to head-scratching.  Even so, nothing could match his description of the January 6 insurrection — one of the darkest moments in American political history—as ‘a day of love.’

“This vertigo-inducing moment occurred during Trump’s Univision town hall two nights ago.  A Cuban American construction worker named Ramiro González said that he was ‘disturbed’ by Trump’s behavior on January 6, but wanted to give Trump a chance to win back his vote.

Trump’s answer was a slurry of sentence fragments and passive constructions, but its mendacity was unmistakable.

From Nichols, this quote from Trump: 

“Some of those people went down to the Capitol, I said, peacefully and patriotically, nothing done wrong at all. Nothing done wrong. And action was taken, strong action.  Ashli Babbitt was killed.  Nobody was killed. There were no guns down there.  We didn’t have guns.  The others had guns, but we didn’t have guns.

“And when I say ‘we,’ these are people that walk down, this was a tiny percentage of the overall, which nobody sees and nobody shows.”

There.  That’s Trump.

In general about Trump, Washington Post writer Jennifer Rubin quoted Kamala Harris:

“His staff won’t let him do a ‘60 Minutes’ interview.  Everyone has done it except Donald Trump.  He will not debate me again.  I put out my medical records.  He won’t put out his medical records.  

“And you have to ask:  Why is his staff doing that?  And it may be because they think he’s just not ready — and unfit and unstable and should not have that level of transparency for the American people.”

Rubin reports that Harris hit the same notes in a series of battleground rallies describing Trump as “unstable and unhinged.”  And at a rally, Harris even played clips of Trump labeling his political opponents as “the enemies from within … those people are more dangerous than Russia and China.”

More from Rubin:

“Trump, as even mainstream outlets acknowledge, is becoming angrier, more threatening, more explicit in his authoritarian vision — and more incoherent.  The uptick in unsteady, off-kilter performances has increased.  On Monday, he seemed to prove Harris’s point at a bizarre town hall at which he cut off questions and swayed to the music for nearly 40 minutes.  On Tuesday, he rambled, insulted the interviewer and American autoworkers, and then veered wildly off topic when asked a basic question about his economic plan.”

So, there is no way for any sane person to understand Trump, the incoherent one.