JULY 2026 - Two-time Rosebud winner Maureen Dowd is a DC native, and sometimes those roots show up in her copy. Like her piece Saturday - the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence - she reflects on visiting Mount Vernon as a child. Then she employs her column to compare Trump with George Washington - a comparison somewhat predictably absurd, but entertaining nonetheless. George Washington was a founder of our country, based on an idea that's encouraged and realized unprecedented human progress. Trump, on the other hand, has committed more crimes and flouted the nation's laws more times than all the previous presidents combined. Adding a certain authority to her piece is her brief interview with the historian Ron Chernow.. As Chernow put it: “I just can’t imagine two human beings who are more dissimilar than George Washington and Donald Trump,” Ron Chernow, the Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer of our first president, told me, on the occasion of the 250th birthday party for America that Trump has hijacked. “Washington was discreet, reserved, courteous — he avoided any kind of show or ostentation or...

JULY 2026 - This piece is still being promoted - seven months later - by The Washington Post, and it still echoes of many of the themes that pundit Washington recognizes in Trump's second term. The key message? The assault on expertise - in government, in policymaking, and in competent project management - is eroding both the US and Washington's authority. It's a column first published in December 2025 - and it's similar to a David Ignatius column from June 2025 that makes many of the same points (and also won a Rosebud). The 62-year-old Zakaria, laden with credentials from Harvard and Yale and Berkeley, began his journalism career at Newsweek in the early 90s, and he's been a reliable contributor to the DC commentariat since then. His work is always well researched, never terribly original yet still carrying a gentle, nonincendiary tone of modesty and dignity - not unlike David Brooks's work.  In many ways, the Mumbai-born Zakaria speaks to a global audience more effectively than his peers, including Brooks. Zakaria's writing is also generally clean and polished - he edits well or he has a good editor - so he's been able to...