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 goes, with almost predictable, head-shaking dismay, with an attempt to compare Trump with George Washington. Adding a certain authority to her piece is her brief interview with 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 self-promotion,” Chernow said. “With Donald Trump, it’s nonstop bragging and boasting and self-promotion that would have been, I think, completely alien to George Washington, and very much counter to his idea of the way that a public servant should behave.”
It’s another case of a columnist adding substantial oomph to their work by simply picking up the phone – and interviewing a towering voice. And it’s especially satisfying to see when a veteran NYT pundit still does it.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/04/opinion/founding-father-vs-foundering-toddler.html