"[T]his relationship is pathological, and a source of great irritation among other courtiers. It is Trump distilled to his essence..."

"... cult leader and his most rabid follower, narcissist and his most flattering mirror. The daughter of a devoutly Christian real estate broker who died by suicide during the pandemic, [Natalie] Harp idolizes Trump with a rare fervor.... ... Trump told his staff that Harp was the only one who loved him as much as his wife and kids did. 'She’ll never leave me,' he would tell other staffers.... It’s a perfect (taxpayer-funded) relationship. She thinks he’s amazing. And he agrees."

Writes Maureen Dowd, in "Natalie’s Magnificent Obsession" (NYT gift link).

"Obsession" is the title of a current movie that is, as Dowd tells us, "about a man who wishes for more adoration from a young woman, who falls under his spell and maniacally provides it." 

I haven't seen it. And I haven't seen "Magnificent Obsession," but I know it's a 1954 movie starring Ronald Reagan's first wife:

ADDED: After reading Dowd's column, I scribbled this at Grok, writing quickly, without the intention of sharing it, but I'm sharing it:

I'm interested in they way many women in the workplace are competitive with other women in a way that's actually sexist — judging that other women are getting more than they deserve because of their looks and/or imagining that sexual things are going on. They're actually impeding the progress of women... or are they trying to help some subset of women by pulling particular women down? (I'm thinking about the reaction to Natalie Harp.)

And then I connected the Natalie Harp foofaraw to this passage from "President Kennedy: Profile of Power" (commission earned) that my son Chris — reader of presidential biographies — had just texted to me last night. We join the Cuban Missile Crisis in progress.

"The writing is abysmal. None of the characters has convincing motivation for their actions or words. There are no sex scenes, and all the food looks horrible."

Writes Emily Wilson, quoted in "'I would be ashamed to have written any part of this’: Odyssey translator Emily Wilson attacks Nolan blockbuster/Wilson, whose work on Homer’s epic was praised by Nolan, said his film was grandiose and superficial with ‘nothing convincing to say'" (The Guardian).

People always say the movie lacks the depth and character development of the book, but complaining about food is funny.

As for the lack of sex... Maureen Dowd wrote about that in "Nolan’s Zero-Eros 'Odyssey'" (NYT gift link): "In keeping with Gen Z’s waning interest in sex, the poem’s famous sex scenes have been excised, sapping erotic power from the female characters.... Nolan did not want his Odysseus betraying Penelope and enjoying his sojourns with other women. The director completely cut out the young princess Nausicaa, whom Homer’s Odysseus has a flirtation with, and neuters the text’s sexual encounters with Circe and Calypso...."

ADDED: Here's the whole Wilson essay: "An Uncomplicated Man" (London Review of Books).

"Trump seemed very low-T in his East Room address."

Taunts Maureen Dowd, in "Low-T, High Chair" (NYT).

I’m surprised that Pete Hegseth, who says his “High-T Department of War” will start screening testosterone levels of “war fighters” age 30 and older, didn’t rush over to shoot up the flaccid 80-year-old commander in chief with the elixir of manhood needed, as he put it, to give America “the leading edge of lethality.”.... 

There was barely a peep from Republicans on Capitol Hill about the speech.... You could almost hear the fervent wish of Republican lawmakers watching the president: Please, Donald, move on! But he can’t. His father’s admonition that there are only "killers" and "losers" plays in a loop in his head, reducing him to jelly.... 

[H]e seemed impotent, raving about nonsense....

Tearing Trump down like that, Dowd adds to the mythology of male sexuality as the center of strength, courage, and reason. That's not feminism. 

"Arthur Miller described the voluptuous yet fragile woman he wed as 'a poet on a street corner trying to recite to a crowd pulling at her clothes.'"

"When Miller left out his journal open to a page saying that she had embarrassed him in front of his intellectual peers and Marilyn read it, she wrote, 'I guess I have always been deeply terrified to really be someone’s wife since I know from life one cannot love another, ever, really.' Like everyone else, Miller was mesmerized by his wife’s power of enchantment. 'Glamour is a bird that for dark and largely unknowable reasons decides to light on this branch rather than another,' he once wrote...."

From Maureen Dowd's new column, "Norma Jeane’s Still Got It!" (NYT).

You know what's embarrassing? 1. Writing down that your wife is embarrassing — can't you just remember it and squirm silently in your dark and unknowable mind? — and leaving your journal open to the page where she'll see it, 2. Writing "Glamour is a bird that for dark and largely unknowable reasons decides to light on this branch rather than another." Birds don't have dark reasons.

IN THE COMMENTS: Bob Boyd provides this:

"A friggin' bird will swoop down from a bough and peck your eyes out as you lie helpless and half frozen in the snow without ever having felt sorry for you." 

— Thought to be an early, rough draft of 'Self-Pity' scribbled in the margin of A Field Guide to the Dark Thoughts of North American Birds found in D.H. Lawrence's library after his death.

BY THE WAY: When I was writing this post, I wanted an illustration and asked Grok to give me an image of "a bird that for dark and largely unknowable reasons decides to light on this branch." I didn't say Arthur Miller wrote those words.

Grok gave me an image that was too dull to use, but it also added this ridiculous caption: "A solitary bird, wings half-folded in that decisive instant of landing, perches on a gnarled, ancient branch silhouetted against a brooding twilight sky. The air feels heavy with unspoken intent—shadows pool beneath the feathers like secrets, and the bird’s eye catches a glint of something ancient and unknowable. Dark pines loom in the distance, mist curls low, and the branch itself seems to have been waiting for this exact, inscrutable visitor."

So I was all: "Yeah it's purple prose isn't it? I got it from Arthur Miller."

"President Trump has been rampaging around the globe like Grendel at dinner time, a rapacious, feral creature. Who could stand up to him?"

"The soft-spoken, humble Leo, who strives to unify, squared off against the bombastic, solipsistic Trump, who strives to divide. And watching the saintly pope school the amoral president is a blessed sight...."

Writes Maureen Dowd, in "The Pope Bedevils Trump" (NYT).

That's a gift link, so you can explore the entire argument.

"He’s saying, ‘I can do whatever the hell I want and you can’t stop me!' In this case, it’s sundering history."

"If you worked in the White House, you have a reverence for every wall of that place. Tattered as it may have been, there was a dignity to it. It was a quietly stately citadel of power in America, not a palace for a mad king. Trump has a manic desire to tear down history and write his own.... He believes that the only thing you can do wrong is that which is not in your self-interest."

Said David Axelrod, quoted by Maureen Dowd, in "Burnin’ Down the House" (NYT).

Sundered. 

Dowd's own words: "The president has the kind of blot-out-the-sun narcissism that spurs him to do whatever it takes to keep all eyes on him. He ignores the law, procedures, consequences. It’s a slam-dance presidency that delights in transgressing and provoking.... Trump’s talent is finding wormholes in the system that he can exploit for his own satisfaction or financial gain — things that are not specifically outlawed because it never occurred to the founders or anyone else that a lowlife could rise so high."

They left wormholes because they didn't think there would be any worms? Stop underestimating the founders! 

"The problem with it is, if you make the whole world run by fakes and simulations, everybody becomes increasingly more dysfunctional."

"Everybody becomes alienated and nervous and unsure of their own value, and the whole thing falls apart, and at some point, it’s like civilizational and species collapse."

Said Jaron Lanier, "a top scientist at Microsoft," quoted in Maureen Dowd's new column, "When A.I. Came for Hollywood" (NYT).

Dowd is taking on the Tilly Norwood problem. Do I have to explain that? Why do I have the creepy feeling that Al Gore is going to sidle over and smirk: "What about the Tilly Norwood problem?"

Just kidding. That's Dingell Norwood.

Tilly Norwood is just an all-A.I. actress. People might prefer a completely fake human to a mixed-up, fake-and-real, on-screen human. Why wouldn't we?

Here, watch the new episode of The Tim Dillon Show. Dillon talks about Tilly Norwood:

Maureen Dowd's sister got her car stolen in Washington D.C.

"Two polite officers who responded to our call said they could do little, amid a rash of brazen car thefts by teenagers. One officer said that, even if they saw the perp driving in her car, they could not chase him, because of laws passed by the D.C. Council.... The next morning, though, an officer... banged on her door. Her car was found in a park, running, nearly out of gas. When she collected it, after paying a $215 towing charge, she found an odoriferous collection: half-eaten pizza, grape soda cans, fast-food wrappers, a used condom and a couple of debit cards.... [T]he police said to throw [the cards] away... Then... she got over $1,800 worth of speed-camera tickets that the car thieves had racked up going 70 in 25-mile-per-hour zones, and some for running red lights.... She had to go down to headquarters on Friday to get the police report so she could appeal the tickets...."

Writes Maureen Dowd, in "Criminal Fights Crime" (NYT).

The final line is: "Even if Trump is being diabolical, Democrats should not pretend everything is fine here. Because it’s not."

I like to think the Democrats need to offer solutions, not just admit that there are problems. Of course, it's awful to deny that the problems are really that bad or to say that we deserve the problems or that side effects of solving the problems are worse than the problems. But assuming Democrats admit there is a terrible problem — and Dowd is only denying that "everything is fine" — they seem to want to focus on how bad Trump's solutions are.

Maureen Dowd knows what guys want.

I'm reading Maureen Dowd's new column (NYT):

It was one of the most erotic things I ever heard. A man I know said he was reading all the novels of Jane Austen in one summer. 

At first, I figured he was pretending to like things that women like to seem simpatico, a feminist hustle. But no, this guy really wanted to read “Northanger Abbey.”

How does she know what this guy wants?! Maybe he's good at pretending. Maybe he wants it as a means to an end and it's the end that is really wanted. He wants you to think that he wants what you want him to want. 

One reason to say Trump didn't "obliterate" Iran's nuclear program is that the uranium is still there, even if under 200 meters of collapsed mountain.

They could mine that uranium. Is that what the "anti-obliterationists" might mean?

If that's their point, let them come out and say it clearly. Those arguing that "obliteration" did, indeed, occur would have to agree, right? Not that I think we might all just finally agree on the facts. People are so disagreeable these days.

I can't bring myself to read "Obfuscating on Obliterating" the new Maureen Dowd column, but I did search the page for the word "uranium." It wasn't there. Is she obfuscating? I'm willing to bet that the column is about somebody else obfuscating. 

I did my elaborate blog post on the word "obliterate" 3 days ago, and I'm not going to do that again. I did take the trouble to coin the word "anti-obliterationist" (The anti-obliterationists are annoying me).

And I considered doing a post about the word "obfuscate." I'm not going to do that, but looking for the word in my archive, I see that back in 2007, I wrote a post called  "Words that sound dirty but aren't": "Here's a list.... Here's an even longer list. 'Obfuscate.' Man, I say that in class all the time (when talking about the Supreme Court)...."

A bubble-wrapped President protected by a chimera in a mirage in an alternate universe.

I'm trying to read "The Tragedy of Joe Biden" by Maureen Dowd:

By the end, when he was bubble-wrapped in 2024, he trusted only his family and his closest aides. And they protected him with a damaging chimera. Sugarcoated interpretations of polls that were not reflected elsewhere. Extreme efforts to redesign the presidency to adapt to his ever more fragile state. Trashing Robert Hur for telling the truth. Refusing to do the cognitive testing that might have established a diagnosis....Tapper and Thompson show how Biden and his inner circle created an alternate universe that they tried to sell to the media and the public — the sort of corrosive mirage of unreality that Trump excels at building....

Trump! How did Trump get into that metaphorical mishmash?

I do like this part, which names names:

It was not just Joe and Jill who wanted to hang on to power, with all the perks and trips and, for Jill, glamorous Vogue covers. It was also their advisers, Mike Donilon, Steve Ricchetti, Anita Dunn, Anthony Bernal, Ron Klain and Annie Tomasini. The “palace guard,” as Chuck Schumer derisively dubbed top Biden advisers, slid from sycophancy to solipsism. The more Biden was out of it, the more his hours and responsibilities were curtailed, the more of a vacuum there was at the top, the more power the advisers had...

They bubble-wrapped the President, put him in a mirage in an alternate universe, and set up a chimera to do whatever it is chimeras do. So they fooled him and they also fooled us, they being Mike Donilon, Steve Ricchetti, Anita Dunn, Anthony Bernal, Ron Klain and Annie Tomasini... and who else? Where was Maureen Dowd and the rest of the press — among the foolers or the fooled? And she's saying Joe Biden is a tragedy? Too many fools. Too many villains. It's a comedy. 

Instead of "The Tragedy of Biden," write a column titled "The Comedy of Biden." Use Shakespeare as your model of tragedy and comedy and tell me why we, the audience — we the People — experience Trump as Falstaff and — for all his faults — love him.

"The threat to democracy — indeed, the existential threat to democracy — is the unelected bureaucracy of lifetime, tenured civil servants..."

"... who believe they answer to no one, who believe they can do whatever they want without consequence, who believe they can set their own agenda no matter what Americans vote for. So, Americans vote for radical FBI reform, and FBI agents say they don’t want to change. Or Americans vote for radical reform in our energy policies, but EPA bureaucrats say they don’t want to change. Or Americans vote to end DEI — racist DEI policies, and lawyers in the Department of Justice say they don’t want to change. What President Trump is doing is he is removing federal bureaucrats who are defying democracy by failing to implement his lawful orders, which are the will of the whole American people."

Said Stephen Miller, at yesterday's press briefing.

Want to see a murder?

Libs in the White House press corps screamed at Trump’s Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller that Elon Musk is “unelected!”

What happens next is a fatality.

I promise you - this is the single best video on the internet today:pic.twitter.com/Nxcw0qTtj1

— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) February 20, 2025

ADDED: In the same vein, here's Victor Davis Hanson:

 

8 things about this Maureen Dowd column, "Who Will Stand Up to Trump at High Noon?"

Here's the column.

Here are the 8 things I want to say about it:

1. The headline refers to a Western movie where "high noon" is the time for a shooting duel. To say "Who Will Stand Up to Trump at High Noon?" is to generate an image of shooting Trump. Even if Trump had not been shot (and targeted by a second assassination attempt), it is wrong to say something that either is or can be mistaken for an invitation to shoot the President!

2. Under the headline is a photograph from the movie "Shane," and Maureen Dowd discusses the movie "Shane," which she saw when she was quite young. She never mentions "High Noon." I guess Westerns are interchangeable to NYT headline writers. 

3. "High Noon" had a villain and a hero and so did "Shane." Good guys and bad guys. Binary. 

4. I remember when Democrats loved to talk about how nuanced they were in their sophisticated thinking,

"Trump is returning as a colossus."

Writes Maureen Dowd, in "Trump Brings a Chill to Washington" (NYT).

He has brought Washington — Democrats and Republicans — to heel, teamed up with Elon Musk and slapped a gold “Trump” sign on Silicon Valley. The lords of the cloud helped fund the coronation, and they are making a pilgrimage here to bow to their new overlord. (This includes the C.E.O. of TikTok, who is surely hoping that his company’s sponsoring of an inauguration party and his online flattery about Trump’s 60 billion TikTok views will lead the new president to save the social media platform.) But not everyone is looking forward to what’s in store. It will be hard to forget Trump’s day of infamy, Jan. 6, as he gets sworn in at the Capitol, which was smeared with blood and feces by rioters recast by Trump and his acolytes as “hostages,” “patriots,” “tourists” and “grandmothers.”...

As for Biden:  

[H]e will be merely a footnote in the vertiginous saga of how Trump won the White House again.... [T]he chip on Biden’s shoulder devoured his judgment about what was good for him, for his party and for the country. His narcissism trumped his patriotism.... Many noticed that Biden was in a fog, or “dans les vapes,” as an aide to President Emmanuel Macron of France called it....

"I must admit I had misgivings about Trump and his election denial after Jan. 6, but..."

"... Nancy Pelosi’s hijacking of the House’s special investigating committee shifted my perspective.... [W]hy did she have to overreach? It didn’t seem fair. And the ensuing lawfare waged against him only strengthened my support for him, and my feeling that there was nothing the opposition wouldn’t do to get him. The negativity spread to the mainstream media, where coverage of Trump was wildly slanted.... Seniors get their news from cable and young people get it from podcasts and social media. Trump’s freewheeling three-hour interview with Joe Rogan helped him capture that vote. Kamala Harris evaded the Rogan invitation. She was a terrible candidate, and the conga line of celebrities her campaign relied on couldn’t obscure that fact. Some of the same Democrats who tried to tell us Biden wasn’t in decline then tried to tell us Harris was an exciting, transformative force. Please.... No matter how maddening Trump can be, the country needs him. The wind is truly at his back. The election was decided not just by MAGA rallygoers but also by millions of voters who’d simply had enough...."

Writes Maureen Dowd's brother Kevin, in "My Brother Is Doing the Trump Dance" (NYT).

"I’m worried that if the Harris campaign wins on an abortion, abortion, abortion, presidential message, that the Democrats will take the lesson..."

"... that the way to win is to divide America along gender lines and convince young women that the essence of their political identity should be focused on making sure that they have the right to terminate their unborn children in the womb. That, I think, would be a very depressing future for American liberalism and would make me unhappy for my daughter’s future."

Said Ross Douthat, on November 1, in "This Election Is the Tiebreaker Over Trumpism/The hosts dig into what they got right, and what they got so wrong, about this campaign season," an episode of the NYT "Matter of Opinion" podcast.

The Democrats, most emphatically, did not win the election, and I wonder: Did they learn that it's not a winning strategy to divide us along gender lines?

Scanning the headlines of columns this morning, I get the impression that the response is to double down on gender division. I'll just link to Maureen Dowd's "It’s This Man’s, Man’s, Man’s World":

"She makes me happy. ... She'll probably lose, but she makes me happy. I like seeing her. It's the joy you have when your best friend, who doesn't have their homework, gets called on...."

"It is the face — your friend confides in you: They did nothing. They go, bro... I didn't open the book. 'Cause this was me in school. Like I didn't open a book. And then they'd call me, and they'd be like: Mr. Dillon, what do you think? And I'd go: I'm trying to create an opportunity economy. Like, I'd say shit kind of like her. She still won't study. Like, she's running for president. She's still won't really even — which is what I like about it! If she was like really trying, I'd find it disturbing. The fact that she's kind of half-assing it on the biggest stage — there is no bigger stage.... She's kind of half-assing it on the largest stage. And... I wanna hang out with her. I wanna have drinks with her. I think she'd be a fun person. 'Cause a few years from now, she's just gonna be somebody fun in California.... She's gonna be like: Remember what I was? They tried to make me President. And we're all gonna laugh about it.... There's so, so much hot-under-the-collar anger at her... but we can't forget that this is essentially just a person who had no idea any of this was going to happen.... She never thought that it was going to happen the way that it happened.... And, she refuses to study. She will not open the book."

Says Tim Dillon, in the new episode of his podcast (audio and transcript at Podscribe).

ADDED: I listened to that as I was out on a walk, but the post I had meant to write — just before I gave in to the whim to do a walk — was based on Maureen Dowd's new column, "Where Is the Fierce Urgency of Beating Trump?" (NYT). And now that I'm getting back to it, it feels like the same idea as Dillon's, just way more polite. Dowd says:

[Kamala Harris] needs to make the case for herself more assertively.It’s hard to understand why she didn’t sit down with a yellow pad or laptop long ago and decide why she wanted to be president, what her top priorities would be and how she would get that stuff done. The Vision Thing. Even when getting softballs from supportive TV hosts, Harris at times seemed unsure of how to answer.

ALSO: Here's the Tim Dillon monologue in video form: 

"Once I thought Trump would be an aberration for Republicans. But on Tuesday night, I saw the future of the party and it was lies piled on lies, and darkness swallowing darkness."

Maureen Dowd watched the VP debate and describes how she felt about it, in "JD Smirks His Way Into the Future" (NYT).

Vance seemed like a replicant. There was no sign of the smarmy right-wing troll who said Harris “can go to hell”....

When did Vance say Harris "can go to hell"? I don't remember, and we're not given a link. Earlier in the column Dowd goes on about a Trump ad and fails to give a link. I found that frustrating but I figured she (and the NYT) did not want to boost a Trump ad. But why can't we get the context for that "can go to hell"? It makes me assume that the context would make Vance look better. (I looked it up — here — and it does.)

Back to Dowd:

He has a bizarre, degrading view of the role of women in American society.

Again, no context. 

But on Tuesday night, he put on a mask of likability and empathy.

"Kamala can’t be thrilled that Obama, Pelosi and Schumer hesitated to endorse her because they wanted more moderate rivals to compete in an open mini-primary...."

"Biden still thinks he could have taken Trump, so how could he reconcile being shoved off the sled? On Wednesday, Ron Klain, Biden’s longtime adviser, expressed to Anderson Cooper Bidenworld’s feelings about the Jacquerie heard round the world. 'I think it was unfortunate because I think that the president had won the nomination fair and square,' Klain said. 'Fourteen million people had voted for him and the vice president as vice president.' He added: 'I do think, you know, the president was pushed by public calls from elected officials for him to drop out, from donors calling for him to drop out. And I think that was wrong.'"

Writes Maureen Dowd, in "After Biden Bloodletting, Dems Just Want to Have Fun!" (NYT).

1. "Shoved off the sled" — seems to refer to the notion that Biden was on a glide path to victory. There's no other mention of sledding.

2. "Jacquerie" — Wikipedia: "The Jacquerie was a popular revolt by peasants that took place in northern France in the early summer of 1358 during the Hundred Years' War.... This rebellion became known as 'the Jacquerie' because the nobles derided peasants as 'Jacques' or 'Jacques Bonhomme' for their padded surplice, called a 'jacque.'... The Jacquerie must be seen in the context of this period of internal instability. At a time of personal government, the absence of a charismatic king was detrimental to the still-feudal state."

3. "Bloodletting" — That word in the headline is supported by violent metaphor in the text of the essay: "It wasn’t exactly 'Julius Caesar' in Rehoboth Beach.... it was a jaw-dropping putsch.... [Pelosi] seemed sheepish about knifing her pal, and conflicted over whether to take credit. Et tu, Nancy? Biden must have thought."

ADDED: I wanted Grok to manufacture an image based on "seemed sheepish about knifing her pal" and asked for "Image of sheep stabbing a person with a knife."

Grok refused. It gave me a long answer, including: "Here's where I'd usually say, 'I could generate an image for you,' but considering the context and the nature of your request, let's not encourage the sheep to take up arms."

Defensively, I said "I find it distasteful too, but the image was created in words by Maureen Dowd in her New York Times column. She wrote that Nancy Pelosi 'seemed sheepish about knifing her pal.'"

I got some multi-faceted lecturing about metaphor, so here's what I asked and what Grok gave me:

UPDATE: The headline for the column has changed. We're no longer seeing the word "Bloodletting." It's "The Dems Are Delighted. But a Coup Is Still a Coup."

"Are we just alternating between weird and normal — perceptions of weird and normal? If so, then 2024 is Trump's turn again."

That's the last line of a post I wrote on May 23, 2023 — "DeSantis uses Warren G. Harding's word, 'normalcy': 'We must return normalcy to our communities.'"

That was back when DeSantis was endeavoring to replace Trump by being essentially Trump minus the weirdness. Yes, there was talk of weird-versus-normal just like there is today. I said:

I myself am hungry for normality, but I don't trust people who keep saying "normal." I always think of Peter Sellers as Clare Quilty in "Lolita" — "It's great to see a normal face, 'cause I'm a normal guy. Be great for two normal guys to get together and talk about world events, in a normal way...."