‘Wuthering Heights,’ MAGA Style

Opinion Columnist, reporting from Washington

Eat your heart out, Emerald Fennell.

You may have the alluring stars Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi cavorting on the moors in your crimson adaptation of “Wuthering Heights.” But for radioactive romance, you can’t beat Washington.

Emily Brontë’s Cathy and Heathcliff are selfish, manipulative creatures, destroying each other and all around them as they indulge their passions and egos. But their damage was kept to one windswept village.

With MAGA’s version of “Wuthering Heights,” the far less alluring but equally intertwined Kristi Noem and Corey Lewandowski have been cavorting over the swamp, scandalizing the capital as they’ve spread their cruelty far and wide. (To Lewandowski’s credit, he didn’t try to kill a dog like Heathcliff did. That’s Noem’s department.)

Holiday Barbie, as Robbie’s Cathy has been dubbed for her ostentatious dresses and hairstyles, pales in comparison with the costumes and Rapunzel extensions of ICE Barbie. Imprisoned in her marriage to Edgar Linton, Robbie’s Cathy gleams in elaborate gowns and necklaces. But Noem topped that. When she went to see migrants in prison in El Salvador, she sported a baseball cap with an Immigration and Customs Enforcement logo — and a gold Rolex Cosmograph Daytona that’s worth $50,000.

Like Heathcliff, Lewandowski is known as a menacing presence who has been accused of having some dark physical exchanges with women. (Now there’s a dog Noem won’t put down.)

President Trump had rejected the plea of Lewandowski — who managed Trump’s 2016 campaign until he got fired after dust-ups with the Trump family and others — to be Noem’s chief of staff, because Trump was disturbed “by the optics of Lewandowski working as chief of staff to someone with whom he had reportedly been romantically involved,” as The Atlantic’s Ashley Parker and Michael Scherer put it. (Noem and Lewandowski, who are both married with children, have denied the affair.)

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Maureen Dowd is an Opinion columnist for The Times. She won the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for distinguished commentary. She is the author, most recently, of “Notorious.” @MaureenDowd • Facebook

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