Dan Rodricks

If you want to be comforted in this terrible time in American life, I recommend watching 85-year-old Gina Petitti cook Italian comfort food on her Buon-A-Petitti YouTube channel. These 15- to 35-minute videos are well-produced, but without a lot of slick editing. They are shot almost in real-time, in Grandma Gina's home in New Jersey, … Continue reading Need comforting? Watch Grandma Gina cook Italian comfort food

Ever go up there? Ever go up past the bend in the river, up past the section you’ve fished many times before? You almost always catch fish within 200 yards of the parking lot, so why bother? Why go up there? No one else ever does. There are probably no trails; you'll get caught in … Continue reading On the river: Why go up there?

I don't usually pull columns from the old days, but this is the one I wrote on 9/11/2001 for the Baltimore Sun print edition of 9/12/2001, and it came to mind as the coronavirus pandemic became very real here in Maryland across the United States. I wrote the column at my desk in the Sun … Continue reading Remember that 9/11 feeling? Feeling something like that again?

Just as a followup to my March 3 column, about Trump's attacks on the "bad people" -- read that "disloyal people" -- he claims to have purged from the federal government, let me offer this: Trump brags about spending billions more on national defense and building a border wall, yet he shuttered a special unit … Continue reading Trump’s assault on good government, science and expertise

Trump’s smearing of career intelligence officials, FBI agents and federal prosecutors -- his hounding of the bloodhounds -- is repugnant, and it remains stunning to me that the Republican Party, once the law-and-order party, stands by and lets this happen. Trump's trashing of honorable federal employees inflicts profound damage -- and not just superficial wounds -- … Continue reading Damages: Trump’s costly smears of honorable public employees

Now that Bernie Sanders has come out on top in New Hampshire, after a strong showing in Iowa, Democrats are supposedly panic-stricken at the prospect of the senior senator from Vermont getting the party’s nomination. I’m not sure what it is -- that we are approaching the most important presidential election in American history? -- … Continue reading Stop with the panic talk, it’s primary season

It's official: Whatever light leash was on Trump is gone. The “grownups in the room,” the generals, John McCain and the Republicans McCain might have pushed toward the last line of moderation and bipartisanship in the Senate -- all gone. On Friday, Trump started a purge of witnesses who testified in the House impeachment hearings: … Continue reading Trump Unleashed

Headline in today’s New York Times: “Trump Claims End of ‘American Decline’” and isn’t that a lovely thought?  Among the many lies in Trump’s State of the Union speech, his assertion that the nation’s days of decline are over -- and all because of his presidency -- might be the mother of them all. We … Continue reading Under Trump, Senate Republicans hasten a country’s decline

For my Sun column today about Trump's impeachment, I went to former Rep. Wayne Gilchrest. He was a long-time Republican, a thoughtful moderate who served Maryland's 1st District for 18 years, and he was in Washington as the nation became increasingly polarized, bringing us on a 25-year journey to Trump, his corrupt presidency, and now … Continue reading Wayne Gilchrest leaves a party lacking in courage, integrity, morality and justice

A little pop psychology during a break in Trump's trial . . . . An essay in Psychology Today about the lizard brain in all of us got me thinking about the one inside Trump, how it gained him so many zealous followers, and why, as I lamented in my Baltimore Sun column, Republican senators … Continue reading Trump, the Lizard Brain and Survival of the Spineless