Maureen Dowd

The capital has too many squirrels, he says, not to mention a squirrelly president.

In his exit interviews, the departing French ambassador blithely blasted Donald Trump as a whimsical, unpredictable, uninformed Sun King. He also blasted politicians and the media for hyperventilating about Trump.

“You have a city that feels frightened and personally attacked by Trump,” he told me. “At every dinner, you have anecdotes about Donald Trump. And you leave Washington, D.C., and you can spend two days in Seattle and Chicago and nobody says the word ‘Trump.’”

I had several long talks with the charming and bracingly blunt Araud as he packed his belongings, including his cherished Tintin collection. At 66, he is starting fresh in Manhattan. He’s writing a memoir and may be joining Attias, a communications firm.

The diplomat, whose career spanned Reagan to Trump, played de Tocqueville for me, analyzing our Trump hysteria: “I’m using the Chinese saying, ‘When the finger is showing the moon, the fool is looking at the finger and the wise man at the moon.’ In a sense, Trump is the finger. I do think Washington, D.C., is much too obsessed by the finger and should look at the crisis” revealed by the 2016 election.

He said that he pointed out to Democrats in the whiny wake of that election that their own statistics should have shown them that many Americans felt economically shaky.

“I do think the genius — and I’m using the word genius — of Donald Trump is to have felt the crisis,” he said.

Araud noted that Republicans are now “Trumpified.”

“You had a Republican Party that was really free trade, interventionist in foreign policy, connected to budgetary restraint,” he said. “And suddenly you have a Republican Party that is shifting to protectionism, nationalism, defense of the identity. Exactly the same thing is happening to conservative parties across the Western democracies. Social democracy is in a coma in Europe, so I do think the elections in 2020 will be totally fascinating in America because the Democratic Party will be obliged to answer the question, ‘What does it mean to be on the left in America?’”

Like Democrats in 2016, Emmanuel Macron underestimated the resentment bubbling under the surface, he said: “He has been largely elected by the included against the excluded. And he has not been able to widen his appeal beyond basically the people who feel comfortable in a global world.”

He sees similarities between Macron and Barack Obama. “I think they are hyper-rational and it can be seen as patronizing by a lot of people,” he said. “In a sense, even, they despise passions.” Smiling, he said both men are “too slim” and “too elegant” to relate to the man on the street.

I talked to Araud about the awful sight of Notre Dame on fire. “Frankly, if you had asked me before the event, what was Notre Dame for me, I wouldn’t have had a particular answer,” he said. “It’s a nice cathedral but not the most beautiful cathedral in France. But after five minutes of seeing the flames, I was crying, suddenly realizing that it could vanish.”

He said he was “overwhelmed” by the piles of flowers at his embassy in Washington and the ambassador’s residence.

Araud calls Trump “a big mouth,” but, as he once told me about himself, “I have a sort of big mouth, I guess.” He had to delete his tweet on election night, keening, “A world is collapsing before our eyes. Vertigo.” And yet, as the first ambassador in D.C. to make waves with Twitter diplomacy, he empathizes with Trump’s itchy Twitter finger.

“The press, to be frank, is so anti-Trump that I do understand that the natural reaction of Trump is to go over the head of the press,” he said.

It was during an interview with an American reporter when he first arrived in Washington that Araud suddenly outed himself, emboldened by his disgust at the backlash to marriage equality in France. Before Mayor Pete normalized being gay on the presidential trail, Araud normalized the idea of a gay French ambassador living openly with a partner.

“In my country, it’s don’t ask, don’t tell,” he said. “In France, private life is private. So I was not hiding, but I did not speak about it.”

In an era when the president scorns parties and dinners around town, Araud played the host, with his love, Pascal Blondeau, a photographer, designing the set. They had a masquerade ball and glamorous Christmas parties featuring a tree hanging upside down one year and a tree festooned with plush polar bears and pearls another. Last Christmas, Blondeau, dressed as an elfin lumberjack, reclined on a tree placed on its side.

Steven Mnuchin and Louise Linton came to parties, along with Wilbur and Hilary Geary Ross and, in what may be their last joint appearance, Kellyanne and George Conway. Araud even wooed immigration tyrant Stephen Miller to the chateau with good French wine.

“I asked about the chaos of the administration, and his answer was interesting because he said it is, in a sense, desirable,” Araud said. “Because the president is not a traditional conservative. So if you want to govern another way in this city, you are obliged to break china.

“The deep state is real, not in the sense of plotting. But when Trump arrived here, basically without a team, without experience, people were convinced that they would manipulate him. But no, you can’t manipulate him.”

Araud also goes against the grain on Jared Kushner, calling him “a smart guy, really.”

He is excited to leave the city of provincial early-bird dinners, “sad” baggy suits and awful jeans. He and Blondeau, toting his plush tiger, giraffe and polar bears, have rented a place on East 73rd Street. It is a neighborhood, Araud says with a grin, “where I feel young.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/26/opinion/au-revoir-trump-and-washington-dc.html" id="efd351c1-f08a-3ecc-ac72-2de053b64d84">The New York Times</a>.

Washington will miss Gérard Araud, but Gérard Araud will not miss Washington.

Au Revoir, Trump and D.C.

First there was Ivana. Then there was Marla. Now comes trouble in paradise with Kim.

Last fall, Trump cooed that the North Korean dictator wrote him “beautiful letters” and “we fell in love,” but then the president canceled their lunch date following their disappointing rendezvous in Hanoi.

Yet all the crazy tabloid splits and international spats seem pallid in comparison to the pathetic spectacle in Congress on Wednesday: a heartbroken ex publicly and bitterly processing his relationship with Trump.

This time, it wasn’t just lust, betrayal and secrets splayed across Page Six. This time, it was in Congress, part of an investigation that could lead to legal jeopardy for the Trumps or impeachment for the president.

In his testimony, Michael Cohen called himself a “fool” when it came to Trump. “I ignored my conscience and acted loyal to a man when I should not have,” Cohen said. A fool for love, held in thrall by Trump. How could anyone be held in thrall by such a sleazy goofball, much less offer to take a bullet for him or make 500 threats on his behalf?

“It seems unbelievable that I was so mesmerized by Donald Trump that I was willing to do things for him that I knew were absolutely wrong,” said Cohen in his “Goodfellas” accent, adding that being around the “icon” was “intoxicating.”

“Mr. Trump is an enigma,” Cohen said. “He is complicated, as am I.”

Actually, Trump is simple, grasping for money, attention and fame. The enigma about Trump is why he cut off his lap dog so brutally that Cohen fell into the embrace of Robert Mueller and New York federal prosecutors. Trump is often compared to a mob boss, but Michael Corleone would never turn on a loyal capo, only on one who had crossed him.

The portrait Cohen drew of Trump was not surprising. It has been apparent for some time that the president is a con man, racist, cheat and liar. (See: Jared Kushner security clearance.)

What was most compelling about the congressional hearing was the portrait of the sadistic relationship between the sycophant and the sociopath.

Cohen told the House Oversight Committee that working for Trump had made him feel that he was “involved in something greater than yourself — that you were somehow changing the world.”

Threatening to sue people and take away their livelihoods or ruin their reputations isn’t exactly Greenpeace or Doctors Without Borders. But Cohen was chugging Trump Kool-Aid. He saw himself as Trump’s protector, the thug’s thug.

In late 2017, he appeared to get misty while talking to Vanity Fair’s Emily Jane Fox about Trump: “One man who wants to do so much good with so many detractors against him needs support.” He vowed he would never walk away from Trump, no matter what. A year ago, he even shopped around a book that was meant to be a rebuttal to Michael Wolff’s “Fire and Fury,” pitched as the “family fix-it guy” and titled “Trump Revolution: From the Tower to the White House, Understanding Donald J. Trump.”

A stung Trump went on a tweet storm Friday morning, bringing up that book proposal, calling it a “'love letter to Trump’ manuscript,” and noting: “Written and submitted long after Charlottesville and Helsinki, his phony reasons for going rogue. Book is exact opposite of his fake testimony, which now is a lie!”

Unlike many Republican TV commentators who can wash away past sins about Sarah Palin and the Iraq War — and get a big payday and liberal love — by trashing Trump, Cohen is not destined for reputation rehab.

The problem in a nutshell, as Trump biographer Timothy O’Brien once told The Times, was that Michael Cohen wasn’t Roy Cohn. The latter Trump lawyer was the one who helped shape Trump’s character or lack thereof, drumming in the win-at-all-costs mentality Donald had learned at his father’s knee.

Trump, who once bleated “Where’s my Roy Cohn?” in his anger about Jeff Sessions recusing himself, wanted a lawyer who was whip-smart, amoral, ruthless and predatory. Cohen was merely Renfield to Trump’s Dracula, gratefully eating insects and doing the fiend’s bidding.

Trump used Cohen for dirty deeds done dirt cheap, as AC/DC sang.

The Wall Street Journal reported that Trump showed up late to Cohen’s son’s bar mitzvah and then made a belittling speech about how he had come only because Cohen had begged him and everyone around him. The Times revealed last April that Trump had regularly threatened to fire Cohen and quoted Roger Stone saying that Trump mocked Cohen for overpaying for Trump real estate.

With a few exceptions in his inner circle and with family, Trump doesn’t give loyalty or deserve it. That’s why Republicans on the Hill who so obsequiously stand by him will eventually learn it wasn’t worth it, just as Cohen warned them.

Loyalty is a rare commodity in Washington. And Cohen is not the most wretched sycophant in political history. That honor goes to Andrew Young, a slavishly devoted aide to John Edwards during the 2008 campaign who served as a driver, personal shopper, handyman and butler to the North Carolina senator.

When Edwards had an affair with campaign videographer Rielle Hunter and a pregnancy ensued, he persuaded Young to say that he was the father. Edwards also got Young to go on the lam with his wife, who was a nurse, and Hunter and the baby, hiding out in fancy hotels and a posh home near Santa Barbara — an odyssey financed by Young and Bunny Mellon. As Young wrote in “The Politician,” inside the campaign there was “a cult-like atmosphere” that encouraged extreme sycophancy.

When Trump gave me a tour of his campaign headquarters in Trump Tower in the summer of 2016, he introduced Cohen as “my lawyer.” Cohen looked furtive, standing around with Trump favorites Corey Lewandowski and Hope Hicks and a few young guys at a desk and a whole bunch of Trump portraits and cutouts and a wall with pictures of Trump’s vanquished primary rivals.

It was the least presidential campaign headquarters ever, with the drywall still unfinished in some places. As The Times reported, Cohen, who had been pushing for years for Trump to be president, was jealous of the attention Trump gave Lewandowski.

When Trump somehow stumbled into the presidency, he and his family did not think Cohen was up to snuff to come to Washington, much less get some high-level job like chief of staff that he dreamed of. The Journal reported that Cohen and his guests did not even get priority access to the inaugural fetes.

“He was central casting for Trump Tower but not for 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue,” Trump biographer Michael D’Antonio told me. “The problem is, of course, that much of what burdens Cohen is exactly what Trump liked about him in the past. He was willing to be awful on command and had done so countless times making countless enemies. As someone who was the target of this behavior, I can tell you it was so cartoonish as to be ridiculous.”

Everyone is disposable in Trumpworld. They sidelined the fixer. By the time federal prosecutors were investigating Cohen’s hush payments to Trump inamoratas, an adult-film actress and a former Playboy model, Trump was barely speaking to Cohen.

“Boss, I miss you so much,” he said in a rare phone call with Trump, The Journal reported. “I wish I was down there with you. It’s really hard for me to be here.”

The yearning was even more palpable than texts from Jeff Bezos to Lauren Sanchez.

The self-styled protector was in purdah and he resented it.

“If Trump was more sophisticated and had the ability to think long term, he would have anticipated that Cohen might have become a problem if he didn’t hold him close,” O’Brien told me. But Trump isn’t a long-term thinker.

“He’s never had to deal with the people he has face-planted coming back to haunt him — ever. He’s been doing this to people for decades,” O’Brien said. The difference now? “He never had law enforcement turning people on him and essentially weaponizing them against him.”

D’Antonio agreed that “the president made the mistake of disrespecting Cohen because he believed he had purchased Michael and that he would stay bought. When the underdog turns and bites hard, the overdog is always surprised.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/01/opinion/sunday/the-sycophant-and-the-sociopath.html" id="0a826f09-3f40-31f6-aa2b-86a4c6675fb8">The New York Times</a>.

WASHINGTON — Donald Trump specializes in spectacular breakups.

The Sycophant and the Sociopath

But with Joe Biden, his family history is so tragic and so fraught, calculations about how a presidential run would affect his wounded clan are not code for some other problem.

Biden’s appeal for 2020 is that he comes across as a warm, blue-collar, touchy-feely paternal figure, sometimes talking too much, sometimes saying the wrong thing, like calling parts of Asia “the Orient.” At 76, he’s been through it all, and then some.

But as he prepares to present himself as a seasoned patriarch who can lead the country in a smooth, classy way, unlike the current occupant of the Oval, he must grapple with the painful reality of his life as the head of a family that has messily spilled into the tabloids, a brood that is still brooding and suffering the reverberations of 46-year-old Beau Biden’s death from brain cancer in 2015.

The last time Biden thought about running, in 2016, he was in a miasma of grief about Beau, his oldest son — the former Delaware attorney general whom Joe Biden fervently hoped might be president some day.

Grief aside, Barack Obama and his coterie of top aides did not think the vice president was the right person to protect and extend the Obama legacy.

But there was a school of thought that, given the monumental effort it took to dismantle the Clinton machine, it would be better to move on from Hillary. Some Biden allies felt that his powerful story of rising above personal loss — his first wife and infant daughter died in a car crash just before Christmas in 1972 — could be a superpower to connect with suffering Americans and that such a raw quest would be good therapy for him.

But Obama felt differently. He could make it up to Hillary and feminist activists for hopscotching over the New York senator who might have blown out the glass ceiling in 2008.

Also, Obama and his strategists thought Biden had hit his ceiling, had his day, had too many gaffes. Hillary, Obama thought, was an impressive and loyal Cabinet member who was great in meetings.

It escaped the attention of Professor Obama that a populist rage was rising, and that a multimillionaire taking a fortune from Goldman Sachs on the eve of her campaign might not suit the moment. Uncle Joe may be the epitome of the establishment, but at least the teetotaler knows how to talk to Joe Sixpack.

The president told his faithful vice president that it was Hillary’s turn and Biden tried to accept it. Biden had known for years that the party would want to follow the first African-American president with the first woman president.

As they pushed him aside, giving him the Medal of Freedom to assuage the dis, the Obama team told reporters that Biden was too emotionally fragile to compete. As one former Obama strategist recently reiterated to me, “You’ve got to be able to make it to the end of a sentence without crying to run for president.”

Hunter Biden and the ailing Beau had wanted their father to run. They did not want a Clinton restoration. Biden succumbed to pressure and gave way to Hillary. And the rest is sordid history. Members of Obama’s inner circle say the former president realizes now he should not have christened Hillary the successor, that he should have let Bernie, Joe and Hillary fight it out.

As Donald Trump’s reality-TV family took over the White House, Biden had to deal with his own family’s scandalous headlines.

“Beau Biden’s Widow Having Affair With His Married Brother,” blared Page Six. “Hunter Biden’s Estranged Wife Claims He Spent ‘Extravagantly’ on Drugs, Alcohol, Prostitutes and Strip Clubs,” blasted People. “Kathleen Biden Sobs in Court as She Details the Collapse of Her Marriage to Hunter But He’s No-Show,” screeched The Daily Mail.

Joe and Jill Biden gave a statement to Page Six’s Emily Smith about the Hamlet-like union of Beau’s widow, Hallie, and Beau’s brother, Hunter (which now seems to have dimmed): “We are lucky that Hunter and Hallie found each other as they were putting their lives together again after such sadness. They have mine and Jill’s full and complete support and we are happy for them.”

It was understandable that, having lost so many close to him, Biden would hold the troubled Hunter tight. And he was doubtless upset about the public nature of the divorce.

Still, his statement upset Kathleen’s friends and became a running topic at Washington dinner parties, where guests worried about Kathleen being frozen out; though Joe is close to her three daughters, the new family dynamic led to awkward moments at soccer games and family holidays. (While covering the Obama White House, I got to know Hunter as well as Kathleen, who became good friends and Soul Cycle mates with Michelle Obama.)

Kathleen Buhle Biden, as she is now known, has not spoken publicly about this; she passionately pushed her father-in-law’s candidacies over the years, including the last time, when others were trying to push him out, and does not want this drama to interfere in any way.

In a statement to Vanity Fair, Hunter Biden also said his travails should not deter his father from running: “We don’t pretend that we are different from families all over America that have to face the loss of loved ones, or have to deal with the fallout of divorces.”

But not all families have to stomach Donald Trump’s low blows, as Biden will if he runs. And Biden will have to temper that Irish temper of his.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/22/opinion/sunday/joe-biden-family-candidate.html" id="05613500-0c85-3e37-add3-694a826dedfb">The New York Times</a>.

WASHINGTON — It’s a truism in Washington that when politicians say they’re not running so they can spend more time with their families, something else, possibly something salacious, is afoot.

Uncle Joe's Family Web

So it was apt that he was charged with skulduggery in part for threatening to kidnap a therapy dog — a fluffy, sweet-faced Coton de Tuléar, belonging to Randy Credico, a New York radio host.

Robert Mueller believes that Credico, a pal of Julian Assange, served as an intermediary with WikiLeaks for Stone. Mueller’s indictment charges that Stone called Credico “a rat” and “a stoolie” because he believed that the radio host was not going to back up what the special counsel says is Stone’s false story about contacts with WikiLeaks, which disseminated Russia’s hacked emails from the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman.

Stone emailed Credico that he would “take that dog away from you,” the indictment says, later adding: “I am so ready. Let’s get it on. Prepare to die (expletive).”

As the owner of two Yorkies, Stone clearly knows how scary it is when a beloved dog is in harm’s way. When he emerged from court on Friday, he immediately complained that FBI agents had “terrorized” his dogs when they came to arrest him at dawn at his home in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

The last thing Stone posted on Instagram before his arrest was a video of a terrier, with a high-pitched voice-over, protesting, “Roger Stone did nothing wrong.”

Always bespoke and natty, living by the mantra that it’s better to be infamous than never famous, Stone looked strangely unadorned as he came out of court to meet the press in a navy polo shirt and bluejeans.

As the master of darkness who had been captured in darkness stepped into the bright light of Fort Lauderdale, he was his usual flamboyant, unapologetically meretricious self. He proclaimed his innocence, flashed the Nixon victory sign and reiterated the old saw from his mentor, Roy Cohn, that any attention is good attention.

But it fell flat. Being Roger Stone had finally caught up with him.

He has always said Florida suited him because “it was a sunny place for shady people,” borrowing a Somerset Maugham line. But now the cat’s cradle of lies and dirty tricks had tripped up the putative dognapper. And it went down on the very same day that Paul Manafort — his former associate in a seamy lobbying firm with rancid dictators as clients, and then later his pal in the seamy campaign of Donald Trump — was also in federal court on charges related to the Mueller probe. Manafort’s hair is now almost completely white.

One of Stone’s rules — along with soaking his martini olives in vermouth and never wearing a double-breasted suit with a button-down collar — is “Deny, deny, deny.” But his arrest for lying, obstructing and witness tampering raised the inevitable question about his on-and-off friend in the White House, the man who is the last jigsaw-puzzle piece in the investigation of Trumpworld’s alleged coordination with Russia: Is being Donald Trump finally about to catch up with Donald Trump?

Stone, who famously has Nixon’s face tattooed on his back, is the agent provocateur who is the through line from Nixon, and his impeachment, to Trump, and his possible impeachment.

As Manafort said in the 2017 documentary “Get Me Roger Stone,” Trump and Stone “see the world in a very similar way.” And that way is theatrical and cynical. Do whatever you have to do to get what you want; playing by the rules is for suckers.

In 1999, when I went on a trip to Miami to watch Trump test the presidential waters, Stone orchestrated Trump’s Castro-bashing speech to Cuban-Americans. The bodybuilding, swinging strategist, christened “the state-of-the-art sleazeball” by The New Republic in the ‘80s, said he was “a jockey looking for a horse.”

Stone, who was mixed up in Watergate at the tender age of 19, “made the transition from the Stone Age of dirty tricks to today,” as David Axelrod puts it.

He watched Nixon rally the silent majority with a law-and-order message and racial dog whistling. He helped Ronald Reagan create Reagan Democrats.

For decades, believing “past is prologue,” Stone urged Trump to be the successor to those pols, revving up angry, white working-class voters who felt belittled or scared of “the other.” It would be so easy to divide and stoke resentment, as Stone and Trump proved when they inflamed the birther controversy against Barack Obama.

“Hate is a stronger motivator than love,” Stone told the documentarians. “Human nature has never changed.”

The tribal tensions in America made Stone’s favorite tricks easier than ever; he didn’t have to operate in the shadows. He wore a T-shirt with Bill Clinton and the word “Rape” at 2016 campaign rallies. As Stone boasted in the documentary, his “slash-and-burn” tactics “are now in vogue.”

Trump has had periods of estrangement with Stone. In 2008, in an interview with The New Yorker, he called the strategist “a stone-cold loser,” a state Trump himself has been relegated to this past week, courtesy of Nancy Pelosi.

Stone will not go gently. When he is asked about the tattoo of Nixon, he says he got it to remind himself, “A man is not finished when he is defeated; he is only finished when he quits.”

At the moment, though — dogged by Mueller — Stone and Manafort are the dog’s breakfast. The pair has given practicing the dark arts a bad name.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/25/opinion/sunday/stone-cold-loser.html" id="368978df-5416-37c6-ab24-a5651cf7c23d">The New York Times</a>.

WASHINGTON — Roger Stone has always lived in a dog-eat-dog world.

Stone-Cold Loser

But here’s the difference: Big Tommy D’Alesandro Jr. taught little Nancy how to count. Fred Trump taught Donald, from the time he was a baby, that he didn’t have to count — or be accountable; Daddy’s money made him and buoyed him.

Fred, a dictatorial builder in Brooklyn and Queens from German stock, and Big Tommy, a charming Maryland congressman and mayor of Baltimore from Italian stock, are long gone. But their roles in shaping Donald and Nancy remain vivid, bleeding into our punishing, pressing national debate over immigration, a government shutdown and that inescapable and vexing Wall.

At this fraught moment when the pain of the shutdown is kicking in, President Donald Trump and Speaker Nancy Pelosi offer very different visions — shaped by their parents — of what it means to be an American.

When Trump gave his Oval Office address, the framed photo of his dad was peering over his shoulder. In her House speaker’s office in the Capitol, Pelosi prominently displays a photo of herself at 7, holding the Bible as her father is sworn in as Baltimore mayor in 1947.

D’Alesandro was a loyal New Deal Democrat, just as Pelosi — the first daughter to follow her father into Congress — is a resolute liberal. She grew up in a house with portraits of FDR and Truman.

Donald Trump spent most of his life as a political opportunist, learning from his dad that real estate developers must lubricate both sides of the aisle. Trump was once friendly with Pelosi, sending her a note in 2007 when she won the speaker job the first time — with a boost from his $20,000 donation to the party — calling her “the best.” (Unlike with “Cryin’ Chuck,” Trump has not gone for the jugular with a nasty nickname for Pelosi.)

In her memoir, Pelosi recalled that her Catholic parents “raised me to be holy.” She told me, “My mother and my father instilled in us, public service is a noble calling” and “never measure a person by how much money they had.”

A constant stream of strangers lined up at their house in Baltimore’s Little Italy, seeking food and help. One of Pelosi’s most arresting memories, she told CNN’s Dana Bash, was giving immigrants who came to the door advice on how to get into the projects or to the hospital.

Alexandra, Pelosi’s documentarian daughter, recounts this anecdote: Her son, Thomas — who was named after Big Tommy and who stood at the speaker’s side as she reclaimed her gavel — wanted an Xbox in 2017, so he set up a lemonade stand in Manhattan and raked in $1,000.

His grandmother sat him down and asked, “That’s going to the victims of Hurricane Harvey, right?”

He set up the stand again the next year and was once more schooled by his grandmother asking, “That’s going to the victims of the California wildfires, right?”

Contrast that with Don Jr.'s uncharitable message on Instagram on Tuesday: “You know why you can enjoy a day at the zoo? Because walls work.”

Where the D’Alesandros saw the downtrodden and immigrants as people to weave into the American dream, the Trumps saw suckers to squeeze.

According to The Times’ blockbuster tax investigation, Fred lavished Donald with three trust funds and $10,000 Christmas checks. When Donald was 8, he was already a millionaire, thanks to his tax-scamming father. Fred Trump was hauled before a congressional panel investigating whether he had looted government money through fraud. (One congressman said the patriarch’s chicanery made him “nauseous.”)

By the time Donald was 27, he had fully absorbed Trump family values, a callous inversion of noblesse oblige: He and his father were getting sued by the Justice Department for refusing to rent to blacks. As Woody Guthrie, who lived in a Fred Trump complex near Coney Island, wrote in a song, “I suppose/Old Man Trump knows/just how much/racial hate/he stirred up/in the bloodpot of human hearts.” Not quite the same as “This Land Is Your Land.”

Fred’s favorite parlor trick was calculating big numbers in his head. But when Howard Stern had Donald, Ivanka and Don Jr. on his show in 2006 and asked them a multiplication question, they were all stumped.

Over the years, Fred funneled tens of millions of dollars to clean up Donald’s messes. The father even gave the son $3.5 million in chips to save an Atlantic City casino. By the time he was in his 40s, Donnie’s allowance was more than $5 million annually. No wonder he’s still an infant.

When Trump said he could “relate” to federal workers who are now going without pay, it may have been the most audacious lie he told all week. He may know what it’s like to go from bankruptcy to bankruptcy — though always with a paternal safety net — but he has no idea of what it’s like to live paycheck to paycheck, much less none at all.

As Pelosi told reporters: “He thinks maybe they could just ask their father for more money. But they can’t.” She also leveled the barb on Trump in person.

Pelosi is using what she calls her “mother of five” voice on our tantrum-prone president, perhaps in an effort to reparent him. But how do you discipline the world’s brattiest 72-year-old?

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/11/opinion/sunday/nancy-spanks-first-brat.html" id="65c3e95a-829d-3300-a6d4-5313cc2138bc">The New York Times</a>.

WASHINGTON — Two men, sons of immigrants, rising to be the head of their own empires, powerful forces in their ethnic communities. Both dapper and mustachioed with commanding personalities. And both wielding a potent influence on the children who learned at their knees and followed them into the family businesses.

Nancy Spanks First Brat

Republicans — and some Democrats — would certainly make like Mr. Vernon, the “Breakfast Club” disciplinarian, and lock down the irrepressible Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. She’s only been in town a moment and has already, in this city of acronyms, become famous enough to supersede the shorthand for the Architect of the Capitol.

AOC now simply signifies the congresswoman from the Bronx and Queens.

No longer content with Nancy Pelosi, the right craves a new she-devil. Republicans have mocked Ocasio-Cortez’s hardscrabble story, howled at her proposal to soak the rich with a 70 percent tax, scrutinized her clothes and booed her at Pelosi’s swearing-in. AOC saucily tweeted back, “Don’t hate me cause you ain’t me, fellas.”

The frenzy reached new absurdity when a tweet popped up with a video of her with friends at Boston University doing a dance from “The Breakfast Club,” with this slam: “Here is America’s favorite commie know-it-all acting like the clueless nitwit she is.” Holy Footloose.

“It is unsurprising to me that Republicans would think having fun should be disqualifying or illegal,” she told The Hill.

Like many other attempts to ding AOC, this one boomeranged. The clip was the coolest thing in politics since Barack Obama tangoed in Argentina.

“That’s it, Alexandria you’re in the club,” tweeted Molly Ringwald, one of the actresses from the 1985 movie.

When Obama got to the White House, Republicans trembled at his midichlorian count, but their fear faded as he grew more professorial and remote. AOC, despite some stumbles and lacunae in political knowledge, is more adept at using the force, especially on social media.

She claimed the mantle of dancing queen, tweeting out a new boogie in front of her congressional office to Edwin Starr’s anti-war anthem “War,” and taunting: “I hear the GOP thinks women dancing are scandalous. Wait till they find out Congresswomen dance too!”

The tableau at the Capitol on Thursday, as Nancy Pelosi reclaimed the gavel, was redolent of that iconic “Breakfast Club” scene, with all its rebellious energy and zeal to fight The Man.

When Ocasio-Cortez, a leader of the brat pack that has put the old guard on notice, voted for Pelosi, it was an electric visual: two fierce women, a controlled 78-year-old capping her career and an uncontrollable 29-year-old starting hers, joining forces to fight the 72-year-old Neanderthal in the Oval Office.

I loved seeing the splotches of bright colors, from Pelosi’s hot pink dress to AOC’s gleaming white suffragette-inspired suit, in a chamber that was once a monochromatic sea of men in gray pinstripes. When I covered an earlier “Year of the Woman,” after disgust over the Hill-Thomas hearings swept a group of women into Congress, it was startling to see the first dapples of gold and pink and red lighting up the House floor in 1993.

Cynthia McKinney, a young black freshman wearing gold sneakers, slacks, braided hair and a Mickey Mouse watch, stepped into an elevator in the Capitol and was rebuffed by the elevator operator, who icily repeated three times, “This elevator is for members only” before finally noticing McKinney’s congressional pin.

On Thursday, 102 women, nearly all Democrats, were sworn in as House members. This influx produced a gratifying inconvenience, reported by The Washington Post: a line for the first time to get into the ladies room off the floor of the House.

Pelosi is the ultimate rebuttal to the 1992 Barbie doll who chirped “Math class is tough.” The new speaker can count, legislate, horse-trade and stroke. But she’s also unapologetically tough. “She’ll cut your head off and you won’t even know you’re bleeding,” Alexandra Pelosi said of her mother the other day.

But Madam Speaker will need a few fancy dance steps of her own to keep her exuberant freshmen and her socialist wing in line, so that the centrist Democrats in the country’s middle are not alienated and President Donald Trump does not become, of all things, a sympathetic figure.

Hours after Rashida Tlaib became one of the first two Muslim women in Congress, Tlaib told a cheering crowd that “we’re going to go in there and impeach” Trump, referring to him with a raunchy word that made many Democrats cringe.

Put on the spot to comment, Pelosi handled it deftly, saying that, being from an older generation, she did not like the coarse language but that she’s “not in the censorship business” and that it wasn’t worse than what Trump has said.

Indeed, Trump used the word publicly a number of times, including at a 2015 rally, and Kanye West spewed it over the Resolute desk recently while Trump laughed.

Liz Cheney, part of the Republican House leadership, complained about “foul language,” ignoring the fact that her father used an epithet during an argument about Halliburton and Iraq on the Senate floor. Trump huffily called Tlaib’s vulgarism “disgraceful” and “highly disrespectful to the United States of America.”

The spectacle of Republicans as snowflakes is rich. But while the fiery spirit among the new Democrats is refreshing and members of Congress are entitled to say what they want, the brat pack may want to avoid getting too far over their skis while their learning curve is steep.

They should focus on the big picture: Trump is doing such an amazing job as a vulgarian and villain, it would be a shame to get in the way.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/04/opinion/sunday/boogie-down-bronx-girl.html" id="9ea73b08-5411-3042-aefb-bdc714c2cfa7">The New York Times</a>.

WASHINGTON — Lucky there’s no Saturday detention at the Capitol.

Boogie Down, Bronx Girl

The One that’s going to finally bring Donald Trump down.

As soon as the news broke Wednesday night in The Washington Post that a whistleblower had accused the president of making some sort of nefarious “promise” during a call to a foreign leader, the hive erupted.

Democrats haven’t been able to get Trump on paying off a porn star to protect his campaign. They haven’t been able to get him on being a Russian agent. They haven’t been able to get him on obstruction of justice.

But maybe this time. Maybe this was the One where all would decide that they wanted impeachment, that the president’s behavior was so outrageous that they couldn’t imagine this sleazy business guy sitting in the Oval Office playing a tinpot dictator in a tinfoil hat for another second.

Maybe this was the One that would finally move Republicans to turn on the Grendel who is terrorizing the village and gulping down their party.

Certainly, Trump himself didn’t think so. As the capital was going into overdrive-freak-out mode Friday night trying to flesh out the whistleblower story, the president was busy tweeting about a children’s book by a Fox News host: “Buy this Book — great for the kids!”

If House Democrats can ever get their paws on the whistleblower, maybe they can make up for the Judiciary Committee’s performance with Corey Lewandowski this past week, which left many wondering if these hearings designed to pry Trump out of office are just making Democrats look foolish. They certainly provide an ample platform for Trump loyalists to rail against their favorite deep state foils.

When failed presidential candidate Eric Swalwell tried to get Lewandowski to read a message Trump had dictated to him, the witness nastily referred to the Democrat as “President Swalwell” and told him to read the message himself.

The internecine strains between the impeach-now Nadler crowd and the get-him-out-in-2020 Pelosi crew grew more bitter. Politico reported that in a closed-door meeting, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi shocked lawmakers and aides by harshly criticizing the House Judiciary Committee staffers for propelling the impeachment effort far beyond where the Democratic caucus stands.

“And you can feel free to leak this,” Pelosi said acidly.

In an interview with NPR, she said she hadn’t changed her mind on impeachment, but she does think Congress should pass new laws so future presidents can be indicted. She said everyone had now seen what the founding fathers could not imagine: a president blatantly abusing the Constitution he has sworn to protect.

Trump has certainly been working hard to prove Pelosi right that presidents should not ever be above the law.

By Friday night, while Trump was readying for a state dinner with his ultraconservative pal from down under, Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison, The Wall Street Journal and the Times were reporting that the secret whistleblower complaint involved this: Trump repeatedly pressured President Volodymyr Zelenskiy of Ukraine — about eight times, the Journal said — to work with Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s loony personal lawyer, to investigate Joe and Hunter Biden.

Giuliani has been pushing a story about the former vice president and his son, who had ties to a Ukrainian oligarch.

After a fair bit of babbling on Chris Cuomo’s CNN show, Giuliani spit out some truth, that he asked Ukrainians to look into the Bidens. Later he tweeted: “A President telling a Pres-elect of a well known corrupt country he better investigate corruption that affects US is doing his job.”

Crooked Donald thinks he can create a Crooked Joe narrative just like he created a Crooked Hillary one. Which is it, Donald: Crooked or Sleepy?

So just consider this: Around the same time that Trump escaped the noose after Robert Mueller’s tepid testimony, sliding away from charges that he colluded with a foreign country to interfere in our election, he began arm-twisting another foreign country to interfere in our election.

“Questions have emerged,” the Times said, “about whether Mr. Trump’s push for an inquiry into the Bidens was behind a weekslong White House hold on military aid for Ukraine. The United States suspended the military aid to Ukraine in early July, according to a former American official.”

So the president is under suspicion of making like Nixon and abusing power to go after his enemies, saying it would be a shame if anything happened to that military aid that you want because you don’t dig up some dirt on the son of my political rival.

The administration kept the whistleblower’s complaint from Congress, even though Congress has the legal authority to know what this urgent complaint is about.

Pelosi issued an acerbic statement Friday, noting that Joseph Maguire, acting director of national intelligence, was violating the law by refusing to disclose the complaint to Congress.

“If the president has done what has been alleged, then he is stepping into a dangerous minefield with serious repercussions for his administration and our democracy,” she said.

Trump is literally acting like an international mobster. Roy Cohn would be so proud.

So is this the Big One? We don’t know because so much has come before. But if it is? Now that would be big.

This article originally appeared in

WASHINGTON — Everyone here is keyed up for the Big One.

Trump Walks a Crooked Mile

The time is out of joint, as Hamlet said. And it is too discombobulating to spend precious hours with Honest Abe in the specious era of Dishonest Don.

How do you commune with a Republican president known for his spiritual stability in a constitutional crisis when a mere mile away sits a Republican president known for his amoral instability in a constitutional crisis?

How do you commune with the man who sacrificed his life to bring the races together when nearby dwells the man who is soiling his life — and ours — driving the races apart?

I love all the luminous white marble monuments and the landmarks in my hometown, the permanent Oz within our transient capital. I still shiver when I think that the 9/11 terrorists might have destroyed any one of them.

But my favorite has always been the Lincoln Memorial, because on its north chamber is engraved the brief, inexpressibly beautiful Second Inaugural Address — the most poetic expression of what the American soul should be.

Lincoln tried to knit his unraveled country, knowing his side was right, yet accepting those on the other side as God’s children: “With malice toward none; with charity for all.”

“Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other,” Lincoln said. “It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged.”

It is a travesty that Donald Trump, 154 years after Lincoln tried to bind the wounds of the nation on race to keep the dream of America viable, is pouring salt into those wounds to keep himself viable.

Lincoln tried to wrestle down a clash of civilizations. Trump is ginning one up to get reelected.

He doesn’t worry about inciting violence against those he slimes. When I asked him about that in 2016, he said that he thought the rabid mood and physical altercations at his rallies added an air of excitement, and that his political journey into the heart of darkness is what got him to No. 1, so why wouldn’t he continue on it?

The president who hates flies is like flypaper. No matter how you come at him, buzzing past his outrages and lies like the Republicans or landing hard on them like the Democrats, you get stuck.

Both parties end up caught and struggling in the sticky mess.

Nancy Pelosi was trying to keep the Democrats in the center-left lane, where their best chance of beating Trump lies. But with his vile “go back” rant against four American Democratic congresswomen, the president — at least for now — achieved his stated aim of “marrying” the speaker to the far-left squad.

Given some of the hyper-liberal ideas tossed out by the Democrats in the first round of debates, Pelosi will have to work harder than ever to keep her party’s image where it needs to be with the real base, as opposed to the Twitter base.

The Republicans typically prefer a more subtle racism to rev up the base. In the past, they have handed the racist ploys off to hidden allies, then denied knowledge of Willie Hortonesque efforts to rouse hate. It’s ugly and disorienting — even to many Republicans — to see the toads jumping directly from the mouth of a president.

But as the boorish Trump has told reporters, “I don’t really care about offending people.”

Maureen Dowd

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