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Dear Donald, We’ve known each other a long time, so I think I can be blunt. You know how you said at campaign rallies that you did not like being identified as a politician? Don’t worry. No one will ever mistake you for a politician. After this past week, they won’t even mistake you for a top-notch negotiator. I was born here. The first image in my memory bank is the Capitol, all lit up at night. And my primary observation about Washington is this: Unless you’re careful, you end up turning into what you started out scorning. And you,...

WASHINGTON — Now, stacked on the Trump tower of petrifying things we have to worry about — war with Iran, war with China, war with Mexico, war with Islam, war with koala bears — there is yet another looming disaster. The East Wing is perilously behind in planning for the Easter Egg Roll. Is the White House dropping the ball — or rather, the ovoid? As our omnipresent new president hijacked our reality, the first lady vanished, sparking headlines for nary a glimpse in D.C. since the inaugural. Just as there is a gush of leaks from the resistance in...

President Donald J. Trump will walk into the Oval Office and be stunned. First, it will be a shock to work in an office decorated with images of men other than himself. Second, he is bound to be suffused with awe as he looks around at the Remington bronze bronco, the Rockwell “Statue of Liberty,” the portraits of Washington and Lincoln, the Swedish ivy on the mantel that has eavesdropped — and leavesdropped — on so much history. The new president will suddenly realize that Joe Biden is right. He needs to grow up. Chuck Schumer is right. He has...

In a wide-ranging interview with the New York Times’ Maureen Dowd on Wednesday, billionaire tech giant Peter Thiel defended his support of President-Elect Donald Trump and offered some characteristically esoteric opinions on everything from Meryl Streep to “Star Wars.” To a question noting that “President Obama had eight years without any ethical shadiness,” Thiel replied, “But there’s a point where no corruption can be a bad thing. It can mean that things are too boring.”

The latest media person to fail to think and count to ten before hitting the "Tweet" button is Matthew Dowd. Once a Democrat, Dowd came over to the Republican Party in 1999, and was George W. Bush's chief campaign strategist during the 2004 campaign. He became an independent in 2008 and is currently a Chief Political Analyst at ABC News. He also claims to be Catholic, but clearly has a politically twisted understanding of the first Christmas.

Donald Trump pulled off one of the greatest political feats in modern history by defeating Hillary Clinton and the vaunted Clinton machine. The election was a complete repudiation of Barack Obama: his fantasy world of political correctness, the politicization of the Justice Department and the I.R.S., an out-of-control E.P.A., his neutering of the military, his nonsupport of the police and his fixation on things like transgender bathrooms. Since he became president, his party has lost 63 House seats, 10 Senate seats and 14 governorships. The country had signaled strongly in the last two midterms that they were not happy. The...

I sat watching in astonishment. The one who couldn’t bear to show up to concede was not, as expected, Donald Trump, but Hillary Clinton... When the Apocalypse came at midnight and the TV analysts — even on Fox — were scrambling to reverse their analyses and justify their bad polling data; and the stock exchanges had to temporarily halt the futures market because it was falling too fast, and the world was spinning off its axis, I called my conservative brother to see what the heck was going on. Advertisement Continue reading the main story “As flawed a candidate as...

Donald Trump took to Twitter on Saturday to blast New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, calling her “a neurotic dope." “Wacky @NYTimesDowd, who hardly knows me, makes up things that I never said for her boring interviews and column. A neurotic dope!” Trump tweeted.

BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH damn that Catherine Zeta Jones

(NBC) - Donald Trump says he regrets retweeting an unflattering photo of the wife of rival Ted Cruz, a rare move for the Republican front-runner more known for his boasts than backtracking. "Yeah, it was a mistake," Trump told New York Times. "If I had to do it again, I wouldn't have sent it." The retweet set off a war of words between the two candidates, and gave fresh fuel to Democratic candidates and other critics who marveled at a Republican presidential race that had descended into a fight over the candidates' wives. Trump retweeted the photo compilation showing an...

Donald Trump admitted to The New York Times on Saturday that retweeting an unflattering photo of Heidi Cruz was a mistake and that he would not do it again if given the opportunity. "Yeah, it was a mistake," he told columnist Maureen Dowd. "If I had to do it again, I wouldn't have sent it." Dowd was asking about an incident last month in which Trump retweeted a picture of Cruz, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz's wife, during a spat involving a nude photo of Trump's wife, Melania, that was circulated by an anti-Trump super PAC.

After running as a man last time around, Hillary Clinton is now running as a woman. Matthew Dowd, the former W. strategist who became an independent, says Hillary got it backward: She should have run as a woman in 2008, when she was beating back a feminized antiwar candidate. And she should have run as a man this time, when Americans feel beleaguered and scared and yearn for something "big and masculine and strong," as Dowd put it. Despite the deafening dearth of excitement among younger women, Hillary has cast herself as Groundbreaking Granny.

I’m trying to tell the freshly minted pol that Megyn Kelly had the right to ask him a question in the debate on how he talks about women, and that she should be tough on the front-runner. He’s not buying it. In fact, in his stubborn “I win, you lose” way, he has an assistant come over to hand me a printout of Gabriel Sherman’s New York magazine piece headlined “How Roger Ailes Picked Trump, and Fox News’ Audience, Over Megyn Kelly.” But the 69-year-old is trying hard not to bare his claws at any women right now. His wife,...

WASHINGTON — SOMEWHERE in Smithsonian storage sits a portrait of Bill Clinton with two odd features: He is standing next to a shadow meant to conjure Monica Lewinsky’s blue dress, and he is not wearing his gold wedding ring.

When David Axelrod published his memoir he hoped it would be seen as a respectable political memoir. Naturally, everyone just wants the bitchiest dish.President Obama despises Maureen Dowd—absolutely loathes the Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times columnist. He’s annoyed by Mitt Romney. And the president’s messaging guru and top gun, David Axelrod, has little regard for Mark Penn, Hillary Clinton’s erstwhile chief strategist. Those are a few of the gossipy take-aways from Believer: My Forty Years in Politics, Axelrod’s hotly-anticipated (by political junkies) memoir that goes on sale today. Yet those anecdotes represent just the sort of slicing and dicing of...

THIS was a bomb that had been ticking for a while. NBC executives were warned a year ago that Brian Williams was constantly inflating his biography. They were flummoxed over why the leading network anchor felt that he needed Hemingwayesque, bullets-whizzing-by flourishes to puff himself up, sometimes to the point where it was a joke in the news division. But the caustic media big shots who once roamed the land were gone, and “there was no one around to pull his chain when he got too over-the-top,” as one NBC News reporter put it.

I WENT Friday morning to see “Selma” and found myself watching it in a theater full of black teenagers.Thanks to donations, D.C. public school kids got free tickets to the first Hollywood movie about the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on his birthday weekend — an effort that was duplicated for students around the country. The kids did plenty of talking and texting, and plenty of fighting over whether there was too much talking and texting. Slowly but surely, though, the crowd was drawn in by the Scheherazade skills of the “Selma” director, Ava DuVernay. The horrific scene...

The White House likes to use a phrase of tingling adventure to describe the president's recent penchant for wandering the country talking to people: "The bear is loose." There are three problems with this unbearable metaphor: Barack Obama is not in captivity, he's not a bear and he's not loose. As Voltaire said of the Holy Roman Empire, it was "neither Holy, nor Roman, nor an empire." When our whippetlike president travels on Air Force One from staged photo-op to staged photo-op and then to coinciding fundraiser to coinciding fundraiser, encased by the White House travel behemoth and press centipede,...

Maureen Dowd, author of “Bushworld: Enter at Your Own Risk”, speaks during a panel discussion during a luncheon at the Book Expo America convention, Saturday, June 5, 2004, in Chicago. (AP Photo/Brian Kersey) I never smoked marijuana before, and Maureen Dowd‘s haphazard experience with a weed-laced candy bar in her Denver hotel room certainly isn’t motivating me to book a plane ticket to what is soon to be dubbed the “Mile High State.” The New York Times columnist was in Colorado reporting on the state’s first months of legalized marijuana use when she decided to take what she later learned...