‘The state of the union is upside down and inside out’: Maureen Dowd rips Trump and McConnell in the NYT

President Donald Trump and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) were labeled as the 'diabolical duo' in a scorching New York Times column by Maureen Dowd.

"During a meeting with Donald Trump at Trump Tower in June of 2016, with the opéra bouffe builder improbably heading toward the nomination despite a skeletal campaign crew on a floor below, I asked when he would pivot," she began. "He crossed his arms, pursed his lips and shook his head — a child refusing vegetables."

She gave her own view on where America stands as Trump prepares to deliver his State of the Union speech on Tuesday.

"The state of the union is upside down and inside out and sauerkraut. Trump has changed literally everything in the last three years, transforming and coarsening the game. On Friday night, he became, arguably, the most brutishly powerful Republican of all time. Never has a leader had such a stranglehold on his party, subsuming it with one gulp," she explained.

"As the Senate voted 51 to 49 to smother the impeachment inquiry, guided by the dark hand of Mitch McConnell, it felt like the world’s greatest deliberative body had been hollowed out, diminished," Dowd wrote. "The impeachment trial amounted to one side being earnest and one pretending to be."

One of Dowd's sources suggested the speech will be like a famous scene from the hit 1984 movie "Ghostbusters."

“Now the State of the Union is going to be the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man coming down the street and standing in the rubble of what’s left of the Congress,” her Democratic source told her. “The Republican Party has now lost whatever control they could exert over this president, any oversight they could have. It’s gone. The state of the union is there is no union. How can there be, when one side is petrified of their Godzilla?”

"I feel like I have spent my career watching the same depressing dynamic that unspooled Friday night: Democrats trying, sometimes ineptly, to play fair and Republicans ruthlessly trying to win," Dowd wrote. "I watched it with the Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas hearings. I watched it in the 2000 recount with Bush versus Gore. I watched it with the push by W., Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld to go to war in Iraq. I watched it with the pantomime of Merrick Garland."

"Democrats are warning Republicans that they will be judged harshly by history. But in the meantime, the triumphant Republicans get to make history. And a lot of the history that Republicans have made is frightening: the endless, futile wars, the obliviousness to climate change, the stamp on the judiciary," she explained. "As with so many other pivotal moments in modern history, Republicans wanted to win, not look for the truth. And history, God help us, is written by the winners."