Friday, March 24, 2017

Mouth, Face and Mind: Maureen Dowd's words are boss in new Trump op-ed


Mouth, Face and Mind

In Maureen Dowd’s latest New York Times op-ed, she uses adjectives and nouns that evoke Donald Trump’s big mouth. It’s oral. She constantly uses the words consume, howling, spewing and devour. That’s the word devour as in “hungrily devour his own presidency.” She also mentioned a snake that “eats its own tail” and “octopuses” that “consume their own arms.”

Trump eating.


That’s quite violent, right? Dowd goes on to create imagery of mirrors and glass all in reference to Trump’s reflective psyche. The phrases “infinity mirror room of Trump’s mind” and “mirror rooms” obviously use the word “mirror,” but it’s a clever, subtle way to refer to vanity. Can’t you picture Trump looking at his himself in a hand mirror? He would hold it with a small hand adorned with Adele-worthy talons, just like the Evil Queen from “Snow White.”

Dowd’s intensely expressive language takes a violent turn when she continues the mirror/glass theme by creating this sentence: “so many shards of gossip swirl in his head.” The sentence conjures an image of broken glass from a mirror plastered with cracked images of famous faces.  The broken glass then slashes Trump’s brain like a kitchen knife to a slab of ground beef. At the end of the op-ed, Dowd describes Trump’s world as a “cracked-mirror world.”

The masterful alliteration in the op-ed is no surprise, since Maureen Dowd is the alliteration queen. She even gives Trump’s style of shaking hands a name called “surprise shoulder squeeze.”


One of my favorite moments in the article is when Dowd describes Trump's tweets as “transcendentally nutty.” It made me think of Shirley MacLaine singing “I’m Here” in the film Postcards from the Edge.

Maureen Dowd writes down her words

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