The New York Times Opinion writer Maureen Dowd has used her Sunday column to paint President Trump as a pirate, the “Orange Cyclone”. His latest offense against the civilized world is his Big Beautiful Ballroom. MoDo calls her column relating this crime “Burnin’ Down The House”. So typical.
And, in typical Maureen Dowd fashion, she begins by praising the “intellect” of former Vice President Al Gore:
Before the orange cyclone hit town, Washington was a far more staid place.
Al Gore loved to host small dinner parties focused on scholarly topics. One dinner was devoted to the meaning of metaphor. “I l-i-i-ke metaphors,” Gore drawled to The Washington Post when he was vice president. “The more complex and arcane the better.”
O-M-gravy, I just had to reboot my brain after that. It is “An Inconvenient Truth” that Al Gore is stoooopid. Can you imagine how tedious his dinner parties were?
The next spewage from MoDo:
What must Gore make of the unsanctioned, ahistoric, abominable destruction of the East Wing by Donald Trump? It’s the most remarkable metaphor we’ve ever seen in the nation’s capital. It’s not complex or arcane. It’s simple and visceral. It slams you in the face — metaphorically speaking.
“He’s saying, ‘I can do whatever the hell I want and you can’t stop me!’” said David Axelrod, who worked in the Obama White House. “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.”
Tattered? Are you bloody, freaking, kidding me? Maybe some people prefer to live amongst the mildew and crumbling facades, but the rest of us fix these things. Because we care about where we live and work.
Did you hear what Donald Trump did to Jackie Kennedy Onassis’ Rose Garden?
A Jackie Kennedy garden was plowed over by the bulldozers. The woman with the best taste in the history of the White House was rubbished by the man with the worst taste in the history of the White House.
The new Rose Garden looks beautiful. It’s not just beautiful but functional without chairs and heels sinking into the soggy grass.
The white stone matches the White House, and I love the Presidential Seal embedded into all the corners and the Stars and Stripes. Very classy, and… pic.twitter.com/ClUXrK1nmy
— Julieb (@iamjulieb_) September 7, 2025
I take issue with Maureen Dowd saying President Trump has the worst taste in the history of the White House. It may not be decaying ante-bellum, shabby chic but there are those of us who really love the gilt. We really think the
The new Rose Garden looks beautiful. It’s not just beautiful but functional without chairs and heels sinking into the soggy grass. The white stone matches the White House, and I love the Presidential Seal embedded into all the corners and the Stars and Stripes. Very classy, and… pic.twitter.com/ClUXrK1nmy — Julieb (@iamjulieb_) September 7, 2025 ” target=”_blank”> The Big, Beautiful Ballroom
When I visited the White House with my mom as a kid, we loved overhearing foreign tourists ooh and ahh about how relatively small and modest the house was. Its simplicity was part of its charm. We didn’t have the grand castles of the European nobility we were trying to shed. It was just a nice house with good curb appeal.
The good curb appeal has gotten better. We need more room, and we need certain spaces both inside and out.
I hate to harsh your brain on this late October Sunday, but Maureen Dowd reminds me of Blanche DuBois from A Streetcar Named Desire. Here is Maureen:
It’s a slam-dance presidency that delights in transgressing and provoking.
Build a $300 million, 90,000-square-foot gilt ballroom — which will overshadow the central edifice — while the government is shut and people have been thrown out of work; plaster tacky gold all over the Oval; sue everyone willy-nilly; put foes through legal torture; send troops to American cities; shrug off due process and blow alleged drug runners out of the water.
“I think we’re just going to kill people that are bringing drugs into our country, OK?” he said Thursday. “We’re going to kill them.”
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.
And here is Blanche DuBois (Vivien Leigh) describing Stanley Kowalski:
Donald Trump “subhuman” or maybe just a pirate.
“The Congress is adrift,” Senator Lisa Murkowski told The Times’s Carl Hulse, on overseeing Trump’s legally questionable military moves and vindictive tariffs. “It’s like we have given up. And that’s not a good signal to the American public.”
Congress is adrift. The White House is a shipwreck. Trump is marauding in the Caribbean. James Comey and Letitia James are being forced to walk the plank, and next up could be Jack Smith and Adam Schiff.
We are awash in nautical metaphors as the president plunders and pillages. He’s a pirate — and not the fun Halloween kind.
Arrrgh, matey. We need a pirate from time to time. Ahoy! The Orange Cyclone has raised his flag.
Featured Image: Grok/X/Public Domain
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