New York Times Op-Ed columnist Maureen Dowd penned a letter to Donald Trump in the Times’ Sunday review.
Those who like Maureen Dowd and hate Donald Trump, will love it.
Those who love Donald Trump, regardless of how they feel about Dowd, will hate it.
Those who dislike Dowd, love Hillary and hate Trump, will be in somewhat of a pickle. Perhaps this reader’s comment may speak for them:
Not by me. I am not letting her off the hook for all the lies she told about the Clintons. She is part of this mess we are now in. Does she really think Hillary’s loss was a Great Win for America?
Those who like Dowd, Clinton and Trump…well, they may find a place in Ripley’s Believe It or Not!
Anyway, regardless of how one feels about any of them, the letter can be read here.
Dowd starts her “Donald, This I Will Tell You” letter as follows:
“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.”
Rather, Dowd says, “…you, Donald, are getting a reputation as a sucker. And worse, a sucker who is a tool of the D.C. establishment.”
She mentions Trump’s “jawing about how Americans had turned into losers, with our bad deals and open borders and the Obamacare ‘disaster’” and how Trump was “going to fly in on [his] gilded plane and fix all that in a snap.”
Reflecting on Trump’s “role model,” President Reagan, Dowd points out, “Reagan had one key quality that you don’t have: He knew what he didn’t know” and “Reagan was confident enough to accept that he needed experts below, deftly maneuvering the strings.”
In contrast, she tells Trump:
You’re just careering around on your own, crashing into buildings and losing altitude, growling at the cameras and spewing nasty conspiracy theories, instead of offering a sunny smile, bipartisanship, optimism and professionalism.
On Trump’s campaign promise to get “the best of the best” in the White House:
Instead, you dragged that motley skeleton crew into the White House and let them create a feuding, leaking, belligerent, conspiratorial, sycophantic atmosphere. Instead of a smooth, classy operator like James Baker, you have a Manichaean anarchist in Steve Bannon.
Dowd lasers in on Trump’s biggest failure so far, his incompetence “to replace Obamacare with ‘something terrific’ because you wanted everyone to be covered.”
Instead, you sold the D.O.A. bill the Irish undertaker gave you as though it were a luxury condo, ignoring the fact that it was a cruel flimflam, a huge tax cut for the rich disguised as a health care bill. You were so concerned with the “win” that you forgot your “forgotten” Americans, the older, poorer people in rural areas who would be hurt by the bill.
On Trump’s finger-pointing for his own colossal failure, “…it doesn’t work that way. You own it now.”
Dowd continues:
You’re all about flashy marketing so you didn’t notice that the bill was junk, so lame that even Republicans skittered away.
You were humiliated right out of the chute by the establishment guys who hooked you into their agenda — a massive transfer of wealth to rich people — and drew you away from your own.
You sold yourself as the businessman who could shake things up and make Washington work again. Instead, you got worked over by the Republican leadership and the business community, who set you up to do their bidding.
Emphasizing how Trump “got played” by the Republican leadership and the business community, Dowd tells Trump, they “are putting up with all your craziness about Russia and wiretapping and unending lies and rattling our allies,” because they are “counting on you being a delusional dupe who didn’t even know what was in the bill because you’re sitting around in a bathrobe getting your information from wackadoodles on Fox News and then, as The Post reported, peppering aides with the query, ‘Is this really a good bill?’”
Dowd concludes with a stinging reference to Trump’s recent jaw-dropping interview with TIME Magazine:
“And I can say you’re doing badly, because I’m a columnist, and you’re not. Say hello to everybody, O.K.?
Sincerely, Maureen”
Lead image: Courtesy donkeyhotey.com
