Maureen Dowd got her start in journalism during the Nixon era. Over her decades in Washington, she’s developed a keen understanding of how presidents wield power to further their goals. In this episode of “The Opinions,” she joins the deputy Opinion editor, Patrick Healy, to examine the breathtaking speed with which President Trump is carrying out his agenda.
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Patrick Healy: This is “The First Hundred Days,” a weekly series examining President Trump’s use of power and his drive to change America.
This week, I want to dig into Trump’s unique approach to power, and especially to controlling people and events in his second term, compared to the chaos of his first. And there’s no better person to do that with than my colleague Maureen Dowd. She’s known Trump for decades. Maureen, thanks for being here.
Maureen Dowd: Thanks, Patrick.
Healy: I wanted to start off with your column about Trump’s inaugural speech last week, because I really think it defines this presidency so far. You wrote about how Trump was seen as a clown, as a dilemma by some in his first term, but now he’s a master and commander of the entire fleet. He’s really in control like we’ve never seen him before. Do you think this is real with Trump, or is it a performance in terms of this sense of absolute power, absolute control that he’s trying to project?
Dowd: I think when he was first president, he was trying to color within the lines a little bit in the sense that he was trying to play the Washington game. But now that’s all gone.
Healy: Nixon had his Saturday Night Massacre and the system reacted to that. And Trump fired all these inspectors general, and there’s this question, like, was it legal? Was it illegal? And we’re all kind of looking at each other, wondering, like, well, what was it?
Dowd: Part of it, I think, is after the assassination attempt, the language at the convention and in the inaugural speech was ratcheted up to be more like he’s a divine creature.
The one thing you really don’t want to do with extreme narcissists is give them everything they want, give them all the attention they want, because then you are inviting a narcissistic explosion of unparalleled force, which is what I think we’re heading for.
But also the visuals of the inaugural were very disturbing. A friend of mine who is a wealthy Hollywood type called me and said, “Oh, my God, now this country is all about money.” And this guy is a billionaire, but he’s worried about the visuals of what Biden warned was an oligarchy, but the tech guys. The inaugural speech was like Versailles with the — I’m not going to pronounce this right, despite my four years of Latin — puer aeternus. Do you know that expression? It means “eternal boys,” which is what the Silicon Valley guys are.
So at the convention, he had Dana White and Hulk Hogan. It was like the macho wrestling vibe. And then in the inaugural speech, he had a different kind of boys club — the Silicon Valley boys who play with their toys, and before, their toys were rockets and robots and self-driving cars, and they would compete with each other and have dinner in Palo Alto once a week to make sure somebody didn’t have one of these toys that they didn’t have. And then they were looking at Trump like, here’s our new toy. But Trump is looking at them like they are his new toys.
Healy: Absolutely.
Dowd: So I wouldn’t say he’s not aware of this.
Healy: And he loves it, Maureen.
Dowd: He loves it. Because he always wanted the love of the elites, and he still does. One of his top advisers told you and me during the convention that he was most thrilled after the assassination attempt that Mark Zuckerberg called him a badass and got in touch with him. And Zuckerberg ——
Healy: After so many years of giving him the cold shoulder.
Dowd: And the liberal-leaning Silicon Valley has now blossomed into Trump country. Zuckerberg was fed up — as a lot of the country was — with liberals lecturing him that 2016 was his fault. And as his friends in Silicon Valley said, he was just like, OK, that’s enough. I’m buying a yacht. I’m not fact-checking. And he kind of went full-blown Trumpy.
Healy: Trump’s hunger for being worshiped is so related to his conception of power. You and I both remember at that convention, how much people were treating him — you wrote about this — as, like, the resurrected Trump, like God saved him to do something for America. And for a little while I thought, oh, Trump is kind of in on the joke. He knows that people are believing this and it works for him. But at a certain point I started wondering: Does he believe this himself? He talked about that at the inauguration.
Dowd: Well, it suits him because he always ran Trump Tower in a monomaniacal way. One of his biographers said that what would happen to Trump eventually would be he would be distilled to his essence — a phrase that really scares me. But I think that’s what we’re seeing.
I think we forget that Trump didn’t have celebrities the first time around. They were repelled by him. He didn’t have any of this respect that he has now. It was a very kind of pariah first hundred days and there was a huge pink resistance. And now Democrats are just flatlining.
They still don’t know what hit them or how they’re going to get out of the wilderness, so Trump has a clear highway and he is speeding down it.
Healy: If Trump was distilled to his essence, what would that essence be?
Dowd: That’s what I think we’re going to see. I was interviewing Martin Short last night on a different topic, and he said something so funny. I said, “What do you think of Trump so far?” And he goes, “It’s like the second act of ‘Cabaret.’”
Healy: Oh, no.
Dowd: I knew you would love that, Pat.
Healy: You thought the first act was dark. The second act is really dark. That’s perfect.
Dowd: Also, “Saturday Night Live” — I was there Saturday night again, working on a story in the studio. And it’s very interesting to see how they portray Trump because it’s a little bit like how they [Will Ferrell] portrayed George W. Bush, which they think helped W. Bush to win.
It’s critical, in a way. It shows him as a blowhard, but in a way he comes across kind of cool.
Will Ferrell has a lot of tormented feelings about that.
Healy: I was a theater reporter back then. I interviewed Will Ferrell when he brought the George W. Bush show to Broadway, and he really had torn feelings about that. You know, how “S.N.L.” makes these really problematic figures in our politics and our culture into just more likable people.
Dowd: Lorne Michaels’ [the creator and producer of “S.N.L.”] theory is that even the biggest villains have to have a drop of humanity. Also, he doesn’t believe in bringing your biases in, but then, most of the cast members are very liberal, and they do believe in that. So there’s always that tension.
There was a great story in New York magazine by Brock Colyar. They went around to young Republicans’ parties in Washington, and there’s this unbelievable picture with it of all these glamorous, young, white —
Healy: They were very white, Maureen.
Dowd: Very white. And they say that conservatives now are urban and online.
I did the first story on how young men in college were deciding Reagan was cool. That was a shock to the democratic system when that happened.
Healy: Reagan was such a cultural force for the Republican Party. He was going to take on the evil empire. He was going to stare them down. He was that golden figure from California who was going to make America proud again.
How do you see Trump as a cultural figure right now?
Dowd: With Reagan, when I interviewed young college kids, they loved that he was a great paternal figure. And now with Trump, there’s much more of a threat.
Mel Gibson on Fox News the other night said:
Audio clip of Mel Gibson: Daddy’s arrived and he’s taking his belt off.
And I don’t know if your parents were like that, but my dad actually did take his belt off.
Healy: Oh, yeah.
Dowd: He never did anything about it.
Patrick: No, but the threat was there. The fear was the point.
Maureen, I thought what “S.N.L.” got right about Trump and culture and power last weekend was a scene with the founding fathers.
Audio clip from “S.N.L.”: And we will have leaders, but know one thing: In America, we will never have a king!
Healy: And in strides Trump.
Clip from “S.N.L.”: Never say never. Kidding, of course. Though in many ways I’m not.
Healy: This sort of colossus, godlike figure out of time, who’s making it ultimately all about him.
I thought your take on the inaugural speech really got at this. You really identified these three words that struck you, when Trump said, “Here I am. Here I am.” And that totally took me back — you and I both went to Catholic school — and it took me back to learning about Yahweh presenting himself to the Israelites. It all had a real Old Testament vibe to it.
But does Trump know what he’s doing? Does this come out of some desire of his to play God with America? Or do you think he’s still just kind of making it up as he goes along?
Dowd: The “Here I am” was like a promise and a threat that he is now fulfilling.
I thought on “S.N.L.,” what they understood about him, which the Democrats never did, was that he is not seen as so threatening or scary because he jokes around a lot. That makes the threat less potent. I think that the “S.N.L.” caricature gets at the fact that he’s doing things that are very authoritarian, and that eventually, the public may turn on, but because he has this jokey manner, the people who support him don’t think it’s that scary.
Healy: It’s one of the strangest things, Maureen, about the Democrats with Trump for the last 10 years. They don’t understand that Trump is a very American type. He’s someone who’s never taken things too seriously. It’s like wearing life as like a loose garment, so to speak.
He loves nothing more than to drive Democrats crazy with his sense of humor. I’m not saying that people should not be worried about Trump at all, but Democrats have always missed that that is part of his appeal to a lot of regular Americans.
Dowd: Right. He’s played into a beloved American archetype, the con man. We saw it in “Huckleberry Finn” and “The Music Man,” but we’ve never had the con man as president.
That’s what’s so jarring.
Healy: Yeah.
Dowd: The con man has always been a great side character in the American narrative, but not as president.
And again with Trump, I think the fact that he has this jokey, goofy affect makes a lot of people think he’s not really going to do stuff, but he’s already scaling back on abortion rights and reversing some protections Biden had put in place.
And I’ve interviewed him for a long time, and I asked him once, I said, “You were a big playboy in New York. Did you ever have to pay for an abortion for one of your girlfriends?” And there was this long pause and then he just went, “Maureen, you’re funny.” He never answered the question, but he was pro-choice, and his abortion position is just something he’s doing in a Faustian deal with evangelical Christians.
Healy: A lot of Americans adored Reagan and Obama like a god, and Dick Cheney liked to play god with the world. As Trump returns to D.C. as this colossus you’ve written about, does he remind you of anyone? Is there anything from history and your time covering different presidents that’s useful to keep in mind about these kinds of moments?
Dowd: You know, I got my degree in English literature, my master’s degree from Columbia, a couple of years ago. And I took a course in Greek mythology, which I love, and the White House now is reminding me of the Greek gods because they were so cruel and capricious. Often what they did made no sense, and it was all totally narcissistic and selfish, and I think that’s the kind of administration we’re watching.
Healy: Trump makes these declarations about what gender is. He talks about the dishonor of trans people in the military. And certainly what we’re seeing about immigration, it does feel like the cruelty is the point with a lot of this.
Dowd: It’s funny, I was talking to someone we know, a Brit, about this, and I mentioned that what surprises me about Trump is that Americans are willing to accept his cruelty, and that I don’t think that’s in the American nature. And he goes, “Have you ever read about the 18th century? [Laughs.] You know, Americans were rapacious and cruel.”
So that was the British point of view.
But I think that Trump has the runway he has because Democrats got on the side of a lot of issues that, and it’s just incomprehensible looking back, as James Carville said, “defund the police” are the three stupidest words in the English language.
You know, a lot of things that, as Trump calls it, “common sense,” but they were common sense things.
I just think that Democrats lost sight of where most Americans are.
Healy: It was one of the most stunning things about Biden and Harris in that first term, just talking to voters who come to our Times Opinion focus groups and just being out with you in Iowa and New Hampshire. People would ask, why can’t Democrats just say what’s real?
Dowd: Yeah, but also there was a backlash to #MeToo, which blended into it. I was struck by your recent focus group on Trump, because, you know, they think he’s masculine, and I remember talking to Nate Cohn back in 2015, and I asked him, what is the main thing people are saying about Trump? And he said that he has balls.
So this is something that matters to voters, and obviously men had felt displaced in society, and like they couldn’t say anything or do anything right.
Democrats have to really think about what they did to make this happen.
Healy: Do you see anyone on the D.C. landscape or the political landscape willing to stand up to Trump? The Democrats don’t seem to be all on the same page about how to even deal with Trump. Are you seeing anything at this point in terms of anyone standing up to Trump?
Dowd: The Democrats, to me, just seem like they’re flatlining. A friend of mine in Hollywood just said our whole mantra now is “delete, delete, delete.” They don’t want to hear about politics. They don’t want to form a resistance. They don’t want to know. They’re just ostriches.
There doesn’t seem to be any plan of how to move forward, and in a way it’s sad because they’re still reacting to Trump. That’s how they lost in 2016, and they are still doing everything in reaction to him, rather than coming up with their own vision.
Democrats just lost all the fun and all the inspirational mojo that they’ve had over the years.
Healy: Trump has played so effectively on the fear that people have, people’s fears in America, on the economy, immigration. But now he has to govern. Can Trump govern just on fear, on keeping people afraid, on making people bend the knee? Or at some point does he have to do something beyond emotion?
Dowd: I don’t know, I remember once writing a line about Bill Clinton saying his personality had been raised to a management style, because he would have all-night bull sessions and order pizza when they were trying to pass a bill. And all presidents do that to a certain extent, but basically, Trump has subsumed the idea of governing with his personality.
It’s just about him and his id. That’s it. It’s not going to be governing in the way that we know it. I mean, [the White House chief of staff,] Susie Wiles, I guess, has imposed some discipline, but I don’t think anyone can impose discipline on Trump. He always manages to elude them [laughs] and get back to his narcissistic explosion.
Healy: He totally does. Maureen, thanks so much for joining me.
Dowd: Thank you, Patrick.
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