Cheap shots: We know where you work, Maureen. No, wait, we don't.

One of the special tics that make Maureen Dowd so unique as a bad writer is the way she sprinkles her prose with hints of her savviness, rich with things that are too scandalous and privileged to tell us about so she just alludes to them. It's that the purpose of the column isn't to argue an opinion, or inform readers on some issue of public significance, or even make the reader laugh, but just to clue the reader in, with subtle indirection, into what an extraordinarily sly and with-it person she is. But these random allusions keep raising questions that are so much more interesting than anything she intends to write, and then her failure to answer or even address them leaves you just puzzled and annoyed.

For example today, in yet another Trump interview, where her main anxiety is to slip the "little hands" allegation past his attention, she drops a remarkably strange assertion about the place she's working in:

All over town, even in the building where I’m writing this column, freaked-out Republicans are plotting how to rip the nomination from Trump’s hot little hands.

But doesn't follow it up.

Jesus, Maureen, I know you'll just tell me it's irrelevant, but what building are you talking about?

Photo by Declan McCullach of the New York Times Washington bureau, February 2003. Do you suppose freaked-out Ross Douthat and the Brooks Brothers, David and Arthur (no relation), took advantage of the intense privacy for a secret confabulation coordinating their #NeverTrump efforts and by pure bad luck Maureen happened to be there churning out a column at the same time?

Speaking of freak-outs, could it be the Denver Four Seasons? And you just figure there's an anti-Trump conspiracy in the building because, well, you do get paranoid sometimes, face it. Billboard by the Marijuana Policy Project with an actor's reenactment of the celebrated incident, via Rolling Stone.

Trump Tower, mid-August 2015, where Dowd worked all day directing this photo shoot and interviewing its subject over "spaghetti and meatballs, with a side of pulled pork" and he told her he wasn't a bully: "'Oh, no, the opposite,' he said. 'In fact, I’ll go a step further. The way to do best with me is to be really nice to me.'" Which really proves it since no bully would ever tell you this secret method of keeping him from turning violent. She's done 12 or 13 interviews with Donald Trump, I believe, since she first wrote, "I've been hesitant to start writing about Donald Trump," in her column of August 9. Photo by Jessica Lehrman. I can't imagine a better building to start looking for out-freaking Republicans who hate Trump than right here at home, among the Republicans who know him best.