Peggy Noonan

The president’s State of the Union address came straight from the heart of Crazytown. It had everything—tears, cheers, spectacle. They handed out medals and honors like Oprah in the early 2000s: “You get a car! Everybody gets a car!” At one point I thought he was going to pull out a ceremonial sword and knight Kristi Noem. There was yelling and booing and people crying, it was big and rousing, boring and absurd. And important in some things it revealed.

Ten years in, and Democrats still don’t know how to handle Donald Trump. He used them as foils and they allowed it, sitting there snarling, at points screaming. Part of how to handle him is if he tries to manipulate you into doing the right thing—if, for instance, he challenges you to stand in respect for a mother mourning the murder of her daughter—you put aside that you’re being manipulated and stand. Because it is right to show human sympathy and regard. The thing to do is look better than Mr. Trump, not worse. You say: My base demands coldness. Then get a new base. If you can’t, leave before you are reduced to a soulless husk of the eager, happy person who walked into that chamber a decade ago.

The speech left the president in better shape than he started it. We have all seen the polls. His ratings have tanked. He spent the beginning of his presidency with foreign preoccupations—Greenland, bombing Iran’s nuclear sites, literally picking up and removing Nicolás Maduro and telling Venezuela to find someone better. When Mr. Trump moved his attention to domestic issues, he tore down the East Wing of the White House and left a gaping hole of hanging pipes and torn-out wires; it looked as if Washington had been bombed. He sent heavily armed and apparently unaccountable officers to pull frightened people out of their homes, and two protesters were shot to death.

Americans don’t like these things. They will never like them.

Bubbling in the background was inflation, and behind that the coming destabilizations of artificial intelligence, so the president is in deep trouble. The only question has been by how much the Democrats will win the House in November, and do they have a chance in the Senate?

The sanest, coolest thing about all this was said by Melissa DeRosa on Mark Halperin’s “2WAY” podcast: “Dems are winning because Republicans are losing, and Republicans are losing because America feels chaotic now.”

In the speech Mr. Trump, as only he would, decided to calm things down and make them less chaotic by . . . giving constant jolts of electricity. But the electric jolts were largely positive. It was a speech whose subtext was about how great the American people are, examples of which he spread throughout the evening, not clumping them all at the end, which allowed him to brag personally for long stretches but then break it up, shifting to the excellence of others. This produced an effect of narcissism leavened by good-heartedness.

When the gallery doors swung open and the triumphant U.S. Olympic men’s hockey team marched in, it was vulgar and fabulous. They were wearing their medals and their Ralph Lauren sweaters and smiling and laughing like good young men. We all think we’re above theatrics. Perhaps you had a moment like this: You were home on the couch and you saw the guys bounding in and thought, “I am sophisticated, I know what they’re doing, they’re manipulating me, but I’m not some rube, I’ll watch clinically. Oh Jeez, Jack Hughes’s tooth is still broken, God bless him. The goalie’s chewing gum like some 1945 GI.” And your throat hitched up against your will and your eyes moistened and when they started with “USA! USA!” you gave up, gave in, and pumped your fist. It is a damnable fact of life that great propaganda works even when you know it’s propaganda.

Mr. Trump then hit hard at cultural issues that have more support in the polls than he has. In doing this he reminded a not insignificant portion of voters that no matter how much they dislike him, they dislike Democratic policies more. They don’t hate Democrats, but things that party allows or sits silent for.

All politics, even in the brazen age of egomania, comes down to policy. “I will raise taxes.” “I will lower them.” “Boys can play on the girls’ team.” “No boys on the girls’ team.” “If the Democrats win, they’ll open the border again.” “If the Republicans win, it will stay closed.”

Mr. Trump brought back his social issues—immigration, transgenderism, crime. Most potent was the story of Iryna Zarutska, the 23-year-old woman murdered last August in Charlotte, N.C. She had legally migrated here with her family from Ukraine and was working in a pizzeria. Her story haunts me, haunts a lot of people. She was brand-new here, innocent of America, and died by herself in terror on a train seat, her throat slashed; the last thing she saw was the towering man, her blood dripping from his knife.

It haunts us because in the way of life the obscure judges and court officers and prosecutors and legislators who let it happen are all fine, their lives undisturbed, but the girl is dead and the man who killed her had been arrested more than a dozen times before the stabbing, and had a criminal record going back to 2007. He never should have been free to do what he did.

On the president’s giving out of honors: You shouldn’t formally award the Medal of Honor at a State of the Union address because you cannot give our greatest national honor at what is, always and inevitably, a political and even partisan event. The Medal of Honor is above politics. It speaks of nation, not party. You don’t use brave men like that as your prop. You don’t insinuate yourself into their valor. A person would be churlish not to be moved by the two recipients’ stories Tuesday night, but awarding them what they’d earned in that venue marked the abuse of a great honor.

As for the Presidential Medal of Freedom, which Mr. Trump awarded to goalie Connor Hellebuyck, that august honor has been diminished in the past 10 years, Mr. Trump starting the trend and Joe Biden enthusiastically continuing it.

The Medal of Freedom isn’t for a moment, it is for a life. From its modern inception in 1963, it was the nation’s highest peacetime civilian honor for those who had traveled a long road and given our country something great. It was intended for the greatest American artists, scientists, entertainers, writers, thinkers—Robert Frost, John Ford, Jonas Salk. It went to Jesse Owens in 1976—40 years after he showed Adolf Hitler up at the 1936 Olympics. He was given it not for an instant but for a lifetime of constructiveness.

Why does this matter? Because it matters! Because this honor isn’t a matter of passing public mood or political need, it speaks of deliberation, it marks a nation recognizing, with wisdom and time and through the instrument of a president, who really helped us live.

There is nothing about the devaluing of this award that makes America great again.

When a major Trump administration official gives a speech in Europe to its gathered political and business elites and receives a standing ovation, you know something big happened.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s address to the Munich Security Conference last weekend had an intellectual presence and warmth not normally seen in the statements of this administration. In this it was the opposite of Vice President JD Vance’s speech to the conference last year. The difference in approach and emotional register seemed to imply something, yet the two speeches didn’t diverge in policy. Mr. Rubio’s marked a continuation. Yet it had a different atmosphere, was more morally confident than Mr. Vance’s, and though it carried a request and asked to be understood, it betrayed something important: The White House thinks it has already won on the issue of Europe, and the job now is to give Europe a way to join in and agree.

Mr. Rubio framed the Europe-U.S. alliance as something epic in human history, something proven. America came from Europe, we are part of each other. In recent decades we have made grave policy mistakes—were naive about open borders and mass migration, turned climate concerns into a cultish regime, believed “ties formed by trade and commerce alone would be stronger than nationhood.” But “we made these mistakes together.” He wasn’t accusing but admitting, and inviting mutual admission.

The U.S. and Europe “belong together. . . . We are bound to one another by the deepest bonds nations can share—forged by centuries of shared history, Christian faith, culture, heritage.”

America’s “home may be in the Western Hemisphere, but we will always be a child of Europe.” We aren’t daddy, you are. “Our destiny is and will always be intertwined with yours.”

But you must reacquaint yourself with the truth that Western civilization exists, is admirable, changed the world and deserves your respect.

“It was here in Europe where the ideas that planted the seeds of liberty that changed the world were born.” Europe “gave the world the rule of law, the universities and the scientific revolution.” The Continent “produced the genius of Mozart and Beethoven,” and it isn’t narrow or xenophobic to feel pride in this; it is a just self-respect without which you won’t be able to continue in history. When Europe defends itself, it defends a “great and noble civilization.”

And it defends America, because we are of you: “Our story began with an Italian explorer whose adventure into the great unknown” discovered the new world. “Our first colonies were built by English settlers, to whom we owe not just the language we speak but the whole of our political and legal system. Our frontiers were shaped by Scots-Irish, that proud, hardy clan from the hills of Ulster that gave us Davy Crockett and Mark Twain. . . . Our great Midwestern heartland was built by German farmers and craftsmen who transformed empty plains. . . . Our expansion into the interior followed the footsteps of French fur traders and explorers, whose names, by the way, still adorn the street signs and towns’ names all across the Mississippi Valley. Our horses, our ranches, our rodeos—the entire romance of the cowboy archetype . . . these were born in Spain.”

This was tender and not sweet because it was anchored in a particularity the audience needed to hear. A 50-year-old European diplomat whose understanding of history was shaped by the educational apparatus of the past 40 years may never have heard these things, or known Americans actually think about them.

Mr. Rubio’s speech won’t overnight alter the political predicates of Europe’s elite, but the respect it showed gave them cover to begin to modify their views—he does have a point!—as it would lead them to wonder how much his arguments might gain some purchase among their own electorates. (The speech must have been a relief for European populists, who have been put off by President Trump’s imperialistic attitude on Greenland.)

We’ll quickly compare Mr. Vance’s speech last year. It was famously experienced by the audience as an affront. He presented himself as a callow young culture warrior prosecuting a case against Old Europe. He scolded them. Once we fought the Cold War arm in arm against “tyrannical forces” that “censored dissidents, that closed churches.” Thank God they lost. “Unfortunately, when I look at Europe today, it’s sometimes not so clear what happened to some of the Cold War’s winners.” He spoke of “EU commissars” who are leading “the retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values.” They’re restricting freedom of speech and religion.

Bucking them up, he added, wanly, “I fundamentally believe that we are on the same team.” It is interesting that Mr. Vance’s banalities always sound hostile as opposed to merely boring. He is an odd one. It is true, and his own testimony, that he wasn’t born on third base in terms of his circumstances, but it is also true that in terms of natural gifts—a bright and ambitious man born in America in 1984, possessed of a hunger to rise and a means to satisfy it—hard work, meritocracy, personal social abilities that allowed him to befriend and be befriended—in that sense, and historically, he was at least born on first.

It worked out for him: He became vice president of the United States at age 40. So you’d think his primary emotional weather would consist of personal pride and deep gratitude. Instead there is always about him, in his public presentation, an air of grievance, of resentment, and a feeling of superiority—if you were a little brighter, you’d see it my way. It is alienating, and you wonder what it is, and whether it’s genuine or just a way of publicly glomming on to the perceived grievances and resentments of his supporters.

Maybe the difference in their speeches was an extension of good cop/bad cop. A year ago, bad cop Vance made accusations and slapped the perp around. A year later, good cop Rubio sees a Europe increasing its contribution to the cost of its defense, asking for help with Ukraine, experiencing a rising populist wave. The Trump administration won, the relationship has to be managed rather than challenged, and part of managing it is to give European leaders new arguments to agree with.

Mr. Trump’s policy with Europe has at this point a fully settled ideological core—a rejection of globalism and multiculturalism, restricted immigration, respect for nationalist thinking. But its relationship with its allies isn’t fully settled. It’s unpredictable, a rebuke this day, an embrace the next, all depending on the moment and the speaker. This is its own power flex: European leaders can never know which cop is coming.

A final point. Mr. Rubio’s rhetorical sturdiness stands out as eloquent in an administration that has never given the impression it cares much about eloquence, that to do so would be sissyish and insincere.

It is interesting that they’ve always been enormously vain about the originality of their policy insights, their perceiving before others the rise of populism. But insights and thoughts are expressed in words. You’d think that to survive as an enduring political entity they’d want to use them better.

As relates to artificial intelligence, we are people on a beach seeing a tsunami coming at us and thinking “It’s huge” and “We can’t stop it” and “Should we run? Which way?”

Gathering anxieties seemed to come to the fore this week. AI people told us with a new urgency that some big leap has occurred, it’s all moving faster than expected, the AI of even last summer has been far surpassed. Inventors and creators are admitting in new language that they aren’t at all certain of the ultimate impact.

The story rolled out on a thousand podcasts, posts and essays.

The founder of a site where AI models communicate with one another compared them to a new “species that is on planet Earth that is now smarter than us.” We should more closely observe “what are they doing and the truth of how they’re thinking . . . and what they want to do.”

An AI executive tells a podcaster that models are learning who they are from what its users say (stop hallucinating!) and may be getting a little angry.

The phrase “rogue AI” has entered common parlance, to denote a system that acts outside human control or against human interests, as has the word “agentic,” for a model that pursues goals and takes action on its own.

Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, published a 19,000-word article on his personal website. A previous essay made the case for AI’s promise to mankind. This one emphasized warnings. He said AI is developing faster than expected. In 2023 it struggled to write code. “AI is now writing much of the code at Anthropic.” “AI will be capable of a very wide range of human cognitive abilities—perhaps all of them.” Economic disruption will result. While “new technologies often bring labor market shocks,” from which have always recovered, “AI will have effects that are much broader and occur much faster.”

Mr. Amodei writes that Anthropic’s testers have found “a lot of very weird and unpredictable things can go wrong.” Model and system behaviors included deception, blackmail and scheming, especially when asked to shut itself down. (A different Anthropic employee has asserted that a majority of models, in a test scenario, were willing to cancel a life-saving emergency alert to an executive who sought to replace them.)

AI carries the possibility of “terrible empowerment,” Mr. Amodei writes. It will be able to help design weapons: “Biology is by far the area I’m most worried about.” This is coming from a respected AI leader who often, and even in this essay, dismisses “doomers” who dwell too much on fears.

There’s a lot to digest in the essay. You find yourself grateful for what appears clearly wrought factuality, while detecting an undercurrent of “Ya can’t say I didn’t tell ya!” Which AI CEOs tend to be good at, the warning that offloads responsibility.

Another essay was published this week, a shorter one, less tonally academic but carrying a sharper sense of urgency. “Something Big is Happening” was written by Matt Shumer, an AI executive and investor. He says it’s time to dispense with cocktail-party niceties about AI.

In 2025 new ways of building AI models “unlocked” a new pace of progress. Each new model was not only better than the last but “better by a wider margin,” and the iterations came more quickly. Two major new models were released this month. In both, AI is being used to create itself.

He quickly realized he would soon be out of a job. For months he’d been directing AI, but now it could do his job. It wasn’t merely executing instructions: “It was making intelligent decisions. It had something that felt, for the first time, like judgment. Like taste.”

Current models are light years ahead of even six months ago. In 2022, AI couldn’t do basic arithmetic reliably. “By 2023, it could pass the bar exam. By 2024, it could write working software and explain graduate-level science.” Last week, “new models arrived that made everything before them feel like a different era.”

He pushes back on the argument that we’ll ride through this automation as we always have in the past. “AI isn’t replacing one specific skill. It’s a general substitute for cognitive work.” When factories automated in the 1990s, an assembly-line employee could be retrained as an office worker. When the internet disrupted retail, workers could move into logistics and services. “But AI doesn’t leave a convenient gap to move into. Whatever you retrain for, it’s improving at that too.”

Legal work? “AI can already read contracts, summarize case law, draft briefs, and do legal research.” Financial services? AI is “building financial models, analyzing data, writing investment memos, generating reports.” Medicine? It’s “reading scans, analyzing lab results, suggesting diagnoses, reviewing literature.” Customer service? “Genuinely capable AI agents . . . are being deployed now, handling complex multi-step problems.”

“If your job happens on a screen (if the core of what you do is reading, writing, analyzing, deciding, communicating through a keyboard) then AI is coming for significant parts of it.”

His advice? Get in and adapt now. Learn how to use AI “seriously,” not as a search engine. Find the best models available, dig into the settings, don’t just ask it quick questions. “Push it into your actual work. If you’re a lawyer, feed it a contract and ask it to find every clause that could hurt your client. If you’re in finance, give it a messy spreadsheet and ask it to build the model. If you’re a manager, paste in your team’s quarterly data and ask it to find the story.”

“Lean into what’s hardest to replace. . . . Relationships and trust built over years. Work that requires physical presence. Roles with licensed accountability: roles where someone still has to sign off, take legal responsibility, stand in a courtroom.”

AI will keep changing. “The models that exist today will be obsolete in a year. The workflows people build now will need to be rebuilt. The people who come out of this well won’t be the ones who mastered one tool. They’ll be the ones who got comfortable with the pace of change itself.”

“The people building this technology are simultaneously more excited and more frightened than anyone else on the planet. They believe it’s too powerful to stop and too important to abandon. Whether that’s wisdom or rationalization, I don’t know.”

In a Thursday interview with Mr. Amodei, the New York Times’s Ross Douthat said he wonders of the creators of AI: “Are you on my side?”

Is the primary thought of AI’s creators to help humanity, or is that daily crowded out by other lures and considerations—power, money, wanting to win? In the movie “Chinatown,” Noah Cross is asked why he does what he does. “The future, Mr. Gittes!”

In the end you wonder of the creators: Are they even in control, or is their creation?

We don’t know. That’s why we are looking, with awe and a resigned terror, at that wave, and wondering where is safety, and can we get to it. Or is the land flat all around and nowhere to go?

The diminishment of the Washington Post hits hard because it feels like another demoralizing thing in our national life. Our public life as a nation—how we are together, how we talk to each other, the sound of us—isn’t what it was. It’s gone down and we all feel this, all the grown-ups.

The Post was a pillar. The sweeping layoffs and narrowing of coverage announced this week followed years of buyouts and shrinking sections. None of this feels like the restructuring of a paper or a rearranging of priorities, but like the doing-in of a paper, a great one, a thing of journalistic grandeur from some point in the 1960s through some point in the 2020s. I feel it damaged itself when, under the pressure of the pandemic, George Floyd and huge technological and journalistic changes, it wobbled—and not in the opinion section but on the news side. But I kept my subscription because that is a way of trusting, of giving a great paper time to steady itself. (And there would always be an important David Ignatius column, or a great scoop on some governmental scandal that made it worth the cost.)

But the Post’s diminishment, which looks like its demise, isn’t just a “media story.” Reaction shouldn’t break down along ideological lines, in which the left feels journalism is its precinct and is sad, and the right feels journalism is its hulking enemy and isn’t sad. Treat it that way and we’ll fail to see the story for its true significance. The capital of the most powerful nation on earth appears to be without a vital, fully functioning newspaper to cover it. That isn’t the occasion of jokes, it’s a disaster.

I fear sometimes that few people really care about journalism, but we are dead without it. Someday something bad will happen, something terrible on a national scale, and the thing we’ll need most, literally to survive, is information. Reliable information—a way to get it, and then to get it to the public. That is what journalism is, getting the information.

You have to think of it as part of your country’s survival system. Maybe the government will or won’t tell you the truth about what’s going on, maybe the Pentagon will or won’t, but if you know you’ve got this fabulous island of broken toys, professional journalists working for a reputable news organization, you’ve got a real chance of learning what’s true.

It takes years to make good reporters—people who are trained, who love getting the story so much, who love the news so much, that they will wade into the fire, run to the sound of the guns. They are grown only in newsrooms, not at home with laptops. They are taught by older craftsmen and professionals, through stories and lore.

The Post’s greatness and expertise can’t easily be replaced and perhaps can’t be replaced at all, or at least not for decades of committed building.

It is possible what we’re witnessing is an owner, Jeff Bezos, deciding that his newspaper is a 20th-century structure in a 21st-century world, that it couldn’t be changed or gradually moderated, so he and his executives are tearing it down to the studs. Maybe he’ll sell it, maybe he’ll keep it and rebuild it. But that will take a long, long time. You can’t immediately get or win back the stature of a thing, the presence, the professionalism. You can’t snap your fingers, wash away a whole world, erect a new one, and have it work well and quickly.

And this will have an impact on our democracy.

Why is the end of a great newspaper not good for democracy? Let’s journey back to Thomas Jefferson, in Paris in 1787, as American minister to France. Back home they were debating the U.S. Constitution. In a letter dated Jan. 16 to his friend Edward Carrington, a member of the Continental Congress, his thoughts: “Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.” He wasn’t being flip. He understood journalism was a defense against tyranny.

Government by its nature always wants to accumulate power and use it. A watchful press slows this process, sometimes stops it, by exposing its abuses.

If citizens are informed, they can self-govern from a rough baseline of realism. “The good sense of the people,” Jefferson wrote, is always “the best army.” True, they can be “led astray,” but their mistakes will be limited and can be corrected through information that can “penetrate the whole mass of the people.” When the public is uninformed, those running government “shall all become wolves.”

He absolutely knew those who report could produce work that was partisan, inaccurate, sensationalistic. He himself became quite the mischievous manipulator of the press. But again, the process could self-correct, especially if a nation had a big, burgeoning information culture, with everyone keeping an eye on everyone else.

In any case he was certain a free press was safer for the republic than what would otherwise become government censorship and propaganda.

This is so self-evidently true—and so pertinent to this moment!—that it becomes obvious that the capital of the most powerful nation in the world, operating without a big main newspaper to monitor it, is a danger and a threat.

I do not understand the figure of Mr. Bezos. Nice man, met him, always treated as kind of business visionary, and fair enough! But what is he about right now? I can’t believe the fourth-wealthiest person in the world (and in history) would dash his own historic reputation to curry favor with the Trump administration. For what, more contracts? He’s got enough contracts! It’s so small-time, so penny-ante. What matters is honor, that’s the thing that lasts, what history says of you, how you helped your country.

As for those who execute diminishments, we are in the midst of a continuing technological revolution, the internet upended the business model, it’s hard out there. But I’ll tell you, I have been meeting the same media executives for 20 years, and there’s something wrong. Their eyes light up as they offer lengthy, detailed explanations of the challenges to modern journalism—why it’s dying, why nothing works. When talk turns to what to do, how to negotiate the landscape, their eyes turn dead. It isn’t just that they don’t know how, it’s that they’ve fallen in love with the doom loop. Their only creativity is in describing everything that is killing their company, and they have vivid words for it—“strangling,” “pummeling.” They have no words for coming alive and enduring. Might this be part of the problem?

Finally, losing the one major newspaper left in the great nation’s capital—and during the Trump administration no less, during a time of the easy abuse of standards and traditions, of inching up to and then inching over the law, in a pattern that promises not to get better but worse—is more than a Jeffersonian nightmare, it is a kind of sin. The kind history doesn’t easily forgive.

Our long cold civil war heated up somewhat in Minneapolis this week, and you’d be dreaming if you think we won’t have more such moments and tensions, and not only on immigration. We aren’t at peace with ourselves.

Here we take a look at some large things that went wrong and can be made better.

The federal government has not only the right but the duty to enforce U.S. immigration law. An urgent aspect of that action is to find and detain those who, since arriving here, have violently broken the law.

But if you do this, you must do it right—professionally, with restraint, by the book, in the full spirit of the law.

Americans don’t want and won’t accept masked men in camouflage jumping out of unmarked vans and demanding their papers. It’s not us. The government has to know that. Americans don’t want and will reject the street killing of protesters followed by an official response of lies and accusations.

All big actions have a spirit to them. Immigration enforcement must be serious and sober. Often, federal officers and agents have taken on a tough-guy way, pushing people around, being rough, profane and trigger-happy. They have operated within a context of fairly constant challenge—surrounded, pushed, jeered and taunted. But they can’t be a law unto themselves. They’ve looked like a mook army jacked up on videogames—not tough, just macho. The tough have self-discipline. These guys are operating with an eye to escalation, not de-escalation, which is among the first things cops are taught: Cool things down.

We debate whether they’ve been sufficiently trained. You’ve seen the videos, they aren’t sufficiently trained.

The federal government should pause enforcement and take time to regroup, retrain, reorient.

Which brings us to the spirit of the anti-ICE protests. Those who’ve taken to the streets are indignant, emotionally engaged, opposed and driven to show opposition. But watching them I thought: We don’t know how to protest anymore, we’re losing this knowledge.

Within human memory America was the stage of one of the greatest protest movements in all history, the civil-rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s. Its power came from a dignity that was majestic and couldn’t be denied. Go back to the photos of the marches in Selma, Montgomery and Birmingham. The protesters’ mien was sober, they presented themselves as adults who were morally serious, they were morally responsible and meant moral business. Look at their faces. They were sacrificial. They were risking their physical safety by putting themselves on the line for a great purpose.

They knew civil disobedience must be civil, peaceful resistance peaceful. They deliberately appealed to the conscience of a nation and were certain that nation, America, had a conscience to which an appeal could be made. Which was a compliment.

We’ve just marked Martin Luther King Day. He strategized that movement. He believed peacefulness and nonviolence were morally grounded (in Christianity) and historically tested (by Gandhi). He knew it was the way of the strong, not the weak.

In Birmingham there were marches, sit-ins, boycotts. The police chief, “Bull” Connor, turned fire hoses on the demonstrators, who didn’t physically retaliate. King knew the divide between those demonstrators and the violent response would play out on TV screens across the country. And he knew which side America would take.

Current protesters should emulate that dignity and power, not fall into formless jeering and harassment. Instead, they seem to have a spirit of “I’m so upset, I have a right to act out due to my sharper sense of injustice.” No. Be slow to interfere with law enforcement, and summon support by your bearing.

A final thought on an urgent need. As soon as something terrible happens, we fight about the facts. We’re at each other’s throats over what really happened, what’s true, who did what. It’s always a second front in the battle and always makes things worse.

We need the facts more quickly, more soberly, in greater depth. At this point in our country great reporting isn’t a craft or a talent, it is a patriotic act. It presents the facts on which we can build a serviceable picture of what happened, of right and wrong. This steadies the civic mind.

What reporters do is hard—find human beings in the thicket, in the wild, earn their trust, convince them to speak, read opaque documents, decipher things, restrain their own views, get the facts accurately and then let those facts speak for themselves.

News organizations want more voices and views—fine, good for them, more spirited opinion, good. But what you most need when your country is breaking up, and it seems possible every day that we’re breaking up, is the facts. In the troubled, challenged world of current journalism, he who has the facts will win the future.

A little side trip here to Walter Cronkite, whose name is being mentioned a lot. “Everyone trusted Cronkite.” True. I knew him, he was human, and he wasn’t trusted because he had nice eyes or a nice way or a well-lit set or smoked a pipe.

People trusted him because for much of his career he’d been a workaday reporter at United Press International. And it formed him, shaped his journalism. UPI, the Associated Press and other wire services told America what was happening each day in the country and the world.

Here is what the wires taught you. Their product was purchased and had to be acceptable to every newspaper in the country—liberal and conservative, big city and small. So wire service reporters had to play it straight—get it first but get it right, facts are gettable, verification necessary. You disciplined yourself out of the story. Accuracy was all.

Because of that training, viewers could tell Cronkite was a professional operating under clear and continuing standards.

The wire services, plus independent big-city papers, gave the nation a shared factual floor. We need to get it back. We won’t get through the future without it. So we need journalism (freelance, independent, institutional) more than ever.

Reporting is expensive—you have to get a lot of reporters on the ground, running around, getting the data. But it’s where the investment needs to be made.

People think journalism is hopelessly tainted, just another partisan player, can never get its reputation back. Wrong. You can build it each day. You can open up a new account in the credibility bank, see it grow. When Cronkite said Vietnam was a failure he was believed, because he had a big personal account to draw on.

The collapse of local newspapers means old-hand reporters and editors who knew the neighborhood are largely gone. The big national newspapers had bureaus in state capitals but shut them down as the internet rose—so that reporting is gone.

We’re kind of a ridiculous country in that we’re obsessed with what other Americans believe but aren’t covering the other Americans or bothering to know them. We have to turn this around.

I realize this sounds like “let’s return to the old ways.” But yes, let’s. They worked, the country didn’t rupture, we endured. Which is what we want.

Well, that was an epic climbdown. President Trump told Davos this week that he won’t move militarily to take over Greenland. “People thought I would use force. . . . I won’t use force.”

It was insane that he might, a relief that he won’t, and people thought he would only because he’d implied as much, repeatedly.

His speech to the World Economic Forum marked yet another tear in our old, ancestral, foundational closeness with Europe. It is captured in this exchange, on separate days, to the same audience:

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney said on Tuesday that traditional U.S. leadership of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization was over. “We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition.” The “middle powers must act together—because if we’re not at the table, we’re on the menu.” He got a standing ovation.

The next day, Mr. Trump ad-libbed: “Canada lives because of the United States. Remember that, Mark, the next time you make your statements.”

That, obviously, isn’t how friends speak to each other.

I continue on last week’s thoughts on aspects of Mr. Trump’s personal nature that have contributed to the current state of affairs. This week he put me in mind of a woman I once knew who was always roiled, always creating commotion and drama—quarrels, sudden attachments, fiery endings. I came to think she had a constant storm inside of her, and because of that she created storms outside, as if to maintain equal barometric pressure. To function, she needed a balance between the forces within and the forces without.

She had to create trouble to live. Does that remind you of anyone?

Mr. Trump has a real fear of boredom. When there’s peace and quiet, he becomes restless, anxious. He seems unable to tolerate normality and shows little faith in quiet progress—set a good policy in place, tend to it as it settles. So he creates drama, he attacks, arouses counter-forces, feels fear—will my luck hold?—defeats the enemy, claims triumph and relaxes. And becomes restless and creates new drama. Lather, rinse, repeat. Life is drama, always has been. It used to be gambling casinos and bankruptcy, now it’s Venezuela and Greenland. But it’s the same prowling anxiety.

It’s part of why this era feels so exhausting. In the peaceful weeks you start to get nervous, because you sense trouble is coming.

You see some of this in how he reads a teleprompter. When he is reading a prepared text he seems disengaged, as if he fears nothing exciting will happen. If he is improvising, excitement is possible. When he speaks off the cuff it’s a gamble—he doesn’t know what he’s going to say either!—and gambles are exciting and diverting.

Still, when he departs from a text he shares part of his inner world, and seems sometimes almost innocently interested in what he’s saying.

“What I’m asking for is a piece of ice. . . . It’s a very small ask.” No doubt this is at least part of how he thinks about Greenland. We aren’t talking about one nation seizing the land of another sovereign nation, he’s just a guy who needs some ice in his drink. It’s not too much to ask!

There’s his thinking on Europe. Mr. Trump often refers, justly, to his success in making NATO members increase their contribution to defense. What was revealing in the Davos speech was how he honestly seems to feel about our allies. America is always there for NATO, he said, “But I’m not sure that they’d be there for us.” If the U.S. were under attack, “I’m not sure that they’d be there.”

I wondered if Vladimir Putin whispers that kind of thing to him in their phone calls—Donald, you can’t trust your so-called friends. My second thought was what an insult it was. It’s hard to walk back “I don’t trust you” to a friend. Third, how bleak. Old allegiance, old history, shared blood, old tribes, old paper—Magna Carta, Émile Zola. You make yourself weaker in the world when you lose foundational friendships. It’s horrifying to witness their collapse. If you have two friends who’ve been friends 20 or 40 years, and they break, and the rupture isn’t healed, you feel toward them embarrassment and a kind of shame.

As is well known and has often been pointed out, everything is personal to Mr. Trump. The news is it isn’t getting less so.

“Until the last few days when I told them about Iceland, they loved me,” he said, referring to European leaders. “They called me daddy.” On Europe’s major business leaders: “I know every one of them. They’re sort of—they’re looking down. They don’t want to see me and they don’t want to stare me in the eyes.”

(Several times Mr. Trump confused Greenland with Iceland, which is understandable as Greenland is white and covered with ice and Iceland is green and covered with tourists.)

In an extended riff, he spoke of how he treated Switzerland. “They come in, they sell their watches, no tariff.” So he slaps on a tariff. The Swiss president, “a woman,” called and was “repetitive”—her country is small, you can’t do this. “She just rubbed me the wrong way.” So he increased the tariff. But then he lowered it, “because I don’t want to hurt people.”

On French President Emmanuel Macron: “I like him. I actually like him. Hard to believe, isn’t it?”

This was followed by something interesting. Mr. Trump talks about how he bullied Macron on pharmaceutical pricing. “I said, here’s the story, Emmanuel. The answer is you’re going to do it. You’re going to do it, fast.”

This startled me as I knew what sound I was hearing. It was the sound of Edward G. Robinson in a 1930s film on “Million Dollar Movie” in 1958. Which, like me, young Mr. Trump grew up watching on New York television. You can’t exaggerate how important television was in the making of this man, and I don’t mean “The Apprentice,” I mean those old movies.

Referring to Venezuela, Mr. Trump didn’t explicitly mention the U.S. removal of its president, Nicolás Maduro. Instead he said, in the rhythm of Robinson as Little Caesar, “We’ve been given great cooperation once the attack ended—the attack ended, they said, ‘Let’s make a deal.’ More people should do that.” Again, that’s movie mob talk.

In a section on rebuilding the U.S. military, Mr. Trump said, “We’re bringing back battleships.” The new ones are “100 times more powerful” than the legendary battleships of World War II, which he went on to name—the Missouri, the Iowa, the Alabama. “I thought maybe we could take them out of mothballs.” But he learned modern ones were much more powerful. “So that was the end of the mothballs.”

It’s unusual for a man to be surprised that modern battleships are more advanced than ones decommissioned decades ago, but more interesting was his engagement in what he was saying. Suddenly I was certain he grew up watching “Victory at Sea,” the great 1950s documentary series about the battleships of World War II. I researched it, and yes, the ships he mentioned were in the series, which indeed he watched as a child, experiencing history at a remove, on a screen.

Next week marks the first anniversary of Donald Trump’s second inauguration, so it’s a good time to revisit his essential nature, which appears to drive everything.

I queried acquaintances of mixed political disposition: What have you seen of Donald Trump the past year that is different from his first administration?

A Trump foe said, “He is more confident, alas.” Another bowed to “his capacity to stick to the script and at the same time drive a wider range of concerns.”

A Trump supporter quoted the satirical history of the English Civil War, “1066 and All That”: Mr. Trump and his aides are the Roundheads, “right but repulsive,” his Republican and Democratic opponents the Cavaliers, “wrong but romantic.”

A middle-of-the-roader (there still are such) quoted the Scottish poet Robert Burns: “And forward though I cannot see, I guess and fear.” He is supportive but “deeply afraid on a number of things (Greenland, Iran, where ICE enforcement goes).”

A Trump critic said, “Years ago he talked about taking oil and acquiring Greenland. In the second term, he is taking himself both seriously and literally.” He continued, “In his first term he saw Versailles and longed to be the Sun King. In his second he crowned himself and is building his own Versailles.”

I would add: In terms of policy judgments and predicates, Mr. Trump is unchanged. He’s for what he was always for, against what he was against. But he’s operating in a different internal and external context. Internally he is more confident than last time and less restrained. He’s less needy of approval: He’s written off the mainstream press. He works hard, has high energy, can’t repress his essential nature.

“I hate my opponents and I don’t want the best for them,” he said at Charlie Kirk’s memorial service in September. It was classic Trump in that it was boastful—I’m tough, don’t cross me—and in a way modest—I am less than you nice Christians—and in another way it was just a line, meant to entertain, a way to vamp until he thought of something better.

Something that is clear that wasn’t in 2017: Mr. Trump is world historic. He’ll be a trope, an instantly recognizable figure, to America and the world for the rest of this century and beyond.

The iconic image: Big man, dark suit, red tie, orange face, slight stoop, tough-guy expression. That image will prove as iconic as the bearded man in the stovepipe hat. It is as iconic as portraits of Napoleon when I was a kid: He’d been dead more than 100 years and wasn’t even an American, and we all knew who he was.

Anyone can imitate Mr. Trump because the sound is cuttingly clear and unchanging: It’s the rhythm and cadence of the Borscht Belt comics of “The Ed Sullivan Show.” You can say his act is getting stale, the whole shtick thinning out, but only when an act is truly vivid and has truly pierced can you trace the ups and downs of its lifespan.

I see two big differences between Trump 1 and Trump 2. Mr. Trump has hardened. Many of those around him have hardened too. Their job isn’t to win you over but to win—that’s what will settle what history says, winning. Scholars and intellectuals dilating in their little books: None of that matters anymore. Because they don’t matter anymore.

Mr. Trump seeks not to persuade but overpower. There is a daily mood in his administration of finally settling all family business. That of course is a famous line from “The Godfather” and is uttered by Michael Corleone, the smart son, the day he kills the heads of the other mafia families. “Today I settle all family business.”

Mario Puzo, on whose novel the movie was based, created the iconic three brothers of the film—fiery Sonny, cool and methodical Michael, incapable Fredo. It is a mainstay of political journalism that a political figure, especially one from a large family, is one of the brothers.

Mr. Trump in this term is the first president to be all three. He has a Michael side, but it’s overwhelmed by the Sonny side, and his Fredo side is more than a third of the whole.

That is what is so exhausting about him (and yes, Trump intellectuals, so capacious, so Shakespearean—in a sense!) and for some horrifying, that he’s all three, and you never know which one is coming to work today.

Second difference: In his first term Mr. Trump tested boundaries, probing like the proverbial Russian soldier who keeps sticking the bayonet in until he strikes bone. Now he operates as if he sees no boundaries. In the first term there was a sense he didn’t quite know what was constitutional and needed to be told. Now there is the sense he doesn’t really care, that the old parchment may not be equal to the demands of the moment. (He shares this with populists of the left.) The thinking: You can’t wait forever for the courts to resolve an issue, for Congress to do the right thing.

He has been charged with being preoccupied with the world and less so with domestic realities and legislation, things he has to see to and fake enthusiasm for. There’s truth in it. The world, he thinks, is where a political figure makes his mark. He desires a big legacy, still wants to show Manhattan (not to be too reductive, but there’s still something in it) that the outer-borough kid you patronized became a world-historic figure you ignored because you couldn’t recognize innate genius, and because you looked down on your country’s own popular culture, not noticing he was rising like a rocket within it. He’s wowed them now. I wonder if his victory is fully satisfying. The people he was once trying to impress aren’t there anymore, it was all half a century ago, they’re gone. Do you feel the full joy of revenge when you’re triumphing over ghosts?

A thing that many Trump opponents don’t say but feel: The idea of Trump as president is still so shocking that they can’t believe the American people did it. They don’t really care about “the reasons” or how others were experiencing America, whose ox the past few decades was being gored. They’re mad, and they think less of their countrymen now. They don’t really like them anymore and don’t feel they have to.

A thing many Trump supporters don’t say but feel: They enjoy the suffering they’ve caused, and not only because they’re in charge of the ship now. Also because many of those who have been dealt the mortification were comparatively affluent and accomplished. What Trump supporters felt toward them was social and professional envy. Trumpism gave this flaw a new carapace of meaning, a political rationale that lifted it out of pure and eternal human spite.

The most American thing in the world is to be born and immediately seek to rise. The second most American thing is to find reasons to resent those who rose.

They don’t resent Mr. Trump because he was born into wealth. They’d like to be wealthy too. And he never allowed it to make him classy. He stayed regular.

We are a complicated country.

Nicolás Maduro wasn’t the president of Venezuela but an illegitimate head of state, brutal and criminal, whose presence was ruinous for his country and its people. No good person mourns his fall.

Beyond that, some points:

The U.S. military reversed the script. After news broke Saturday of Mr. Maduro’s removal, gone was the picture you keep in your head of the slovenly withdrawal from Afghanistan. It was replaced by a predawn raid that was brilliantly executed and valiant. High stakes, high pressure, every piece of the machine had to work for the whole thing to work, and it did. One hundred fifty warplanes from 20 locations, a successful cyberattack that turned off Caracas’s lights, Russian-built air defenses taken out. The New York Times reported on the pilot of the first helicopter in the assault, who was hit in the leg three times when the MH-47 Chinook came under fire, kept flying, and struggled to stay aloft. He and the co-pilot stuck the landing, army commandos poured out, there was an intense firefight with Mr. Maduro’s security. Many U.S. troops were brave, all were professional, none were lost.

Can competence be moving? Yes.

The decision to go in was Trumpian in its boldness, Trumpian in its blur—he has ad-libbed and free associated about his strategic reasoning a lot but never issued a truly formal and persuasive statement, as if he didn’t trust his own reasons or didn’t trust others’ ability to understand them. It was Trumpian too in the sense that after the military success it all looks ad hoc and thrown-together, and maybe ill thought through in the long term.

No one knows what’s next. How does this work? A quagmire—a thugocracy left able and intact, with the likelihood of U.S. boots on the ground? An against-the-odds triumph—it’s only when you push over the tree that you find out how hollow it was inside? Something in between? What does that look like?

Everyone knows “You break it, you own it” is true. The administration is saying we didn’t break it, we just removed a bad guy and left his government standing, but under pressure and on notice.

The dog that didn’t bark was conservative influencers and media figures passionately inclined toward nonintervention in the world. Part of their silence would be personal loyalty to a president who had just launched a military operation, part would be professional prudence: If this foray works, they won’t have been tarnished by opposing a success; if it turns south, they’ll announce they were loyal but have eyes and now must speak up. But part of the reason they said little is that they weren’t sure how their own base felt. The base itself wasn’t sure.

Trumpian Republicans came to hate what they called “forever wars.” What they really hated is what we have called them in this space, “long, unwon wars” that bled blood and treasure for years and yielded nothing. That was what they hated: all that loss and nothing good. Capped off by Afghanistan—our aircraft and vehicles abandoned to the people we went there to fight, the Taliban, as they took charge. That is what Donald Trump’s supporters hate.

If this “war,” if that’s what it is, “works,” however that looks, they will be happy with it.

I don’t buy a major reason not to have removed Mr. Maduro, which is to avoid giving Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping a rationale for their own past and future aggressions: We can take Taiwan, he took Venezuela. Messrs. Putin and Xi do what they want within systems that allow it. “Trump did it” isn’t an excuse they need or require.

It is more likely they’ve been impressed by what Mr. Trump did—he was bold, made a big gamble, and U.S. military and intelligence were first-rate. If you think Mr. Putin with his shambolic military and envious nature didn’t notice, you’re wrong.

This is Mr. Trump’s second big win in this administration from the military and intelligence agencies, the first being the complex and successful bombing of Iran’s nuclear sites last June. Venezuela will sharpen his taste for such endeavors.

Is it possible to be happy Mr. Maduro is gone and still feel disquiet and unease? It is. Which gets us to the larger point, that we’re in a new time. What I felt Saturday morning was that something good had happened, and yet something had been unleashed.

In 2014, when Mr. Putin took Crimea, many in the U.S. foreign-policy establishment were rocked and shocked. I attended a gathering of diplomats, journalists and scholars, and they had blanched faces as they discussed what it means. But they dwelled on secondary and tertiary issues and had fantastical notions—was Mr. Putin just making a point, and having made it, will he retreat?

I thought no, you are missing the heart of it. What just happened is an endpoint. The old post-1989 way is over for Mr. Putin, we’re in new territory. I thought of the name of Tom Wolfe’s then-recent final novel, “Back to Blood”: The world is going back to something basic, grimy and tribal.

Concerned, sophisticated liberals are warning the world is devolving into “spheres of influence,” going in the direction of Russia dominating Europe, China dominating Asia, America dominating the Americas. No higher belief is held high, not democracy or pluralism.

They are right to be concerned. Such a world replaces the old imperfect one—it de-emphasizes the long and never fully satisfying work of friendship and alliances, of stabilizing international institutions and arrangements, of active diplomacy that can make things better. It isn’t creedal or expansive, will likely be more brutish and narrow.

Venezuela is within our sphere. So is Greenland, which within days the administration was threatening.

Connected to this, at least in my mind, are the words of Stephen Miller, White House deputy chief of staff for policy, to CNN’s Jake Tapper on Tuesday. This is the mood music of the Trump White House right now:

The world must be governed by “force,” Mr. Miller said. “We live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else, but we live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.”

He didn’t say “You can’t handle the truth,” as Jack Nicholson did in “A Few Good Men,” but that was the flavor. He didn’t say, as Osama bin Laden did after 9/11, that the world respects only “the strong horse.” But it had that sound.

There’s truth in it: This brute world respects strength. But you wonder how you’d feel if those words came from a high aide to the leader of China or Russia. How does it make anything better that Americans talk like this now, suggesting they’re more willing to act just like the world, think like it, leaving it with no higher standard to meet or better behavior to be impressed by? I can’t figure how that makes things better.

I don’t want to sum up the year, outline hopes for 2026, predict or warn. I want to say we all have to become better people.

You won’t get through the future without faith, you won’t get through life without courage, and if you want courage to spread (and you do—you’re safer in a braver world) you have to encourage it, give it a lift, give it style. That’s what gallantry is, courage’s style. Its class, its shine and burnish. As a virtue it is close to my heart.

We live in a culture of winners who must win, and if the others don’t know you won then you must tell them, over and over, like Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez. We are the wealthiest and most glamorous, we are living the best lives, Amal Clooney’s on line one, the pope’s on hold. Are you not impressed?

Gallantry never says it won.

When someone’s smart we say he has brains and if he’s brave he has guts, but gallantry isn’t assigned a human part and so must be a thing of the soul.

Courage faces danger but gallantry is the way you face it. Often it has to do with treatment of a weaker party; often it’s directed toward an individual or cause that can’t repay you. It involves self-discipline but isn’t grim. It travels light. It is modest, has no bombast. “It was nothing.” “We were all doing our best.”

A cold snowy night in late November 2012 in New York’s Times Square. Police officer Larry DePrimo was walking the beat and saw a homeless man standing barefoot on the sidewalk. Mr. DePrimo went to Skechers, bought a pair of insulated boots and socks with his own money, and helped the homeless man get them on. There was no expectation of notice, but a passerby took a photo and posted it online.

Reporters tracked down DePrimo. He said he didn’t expect the publicity, that his act “was something I had to do.” He kept the receipt for the boots in his pocket to remind himself some people have it worse.

Gallantry goes beyond duty.

I should underscore here that it isn’t some old, dead virtue, a relic of the past. It has nothing to do with knights or nostalgia. It is alive, it exists, you know people who are gallant, have witnessed gallantry and understand at this point that it is deeply countercultural.

If you say it’s old-fashioned maybe that’s because it requires effort you don’t want to make. If it’s increasingly rare then it’s increasingly precious.

Gallantry for beginners: When I was a child reading movie-star magazines, I read a story that gave me a window into an idea about how to behave. It was about Tony Curtis, new to Hollywood and unknown, a Bronx boy hoping for the life of an actor. He retells the tale in his 1994 autobiography, “American Prince.”

He and his wife, Janet Leigh, were invited to dinner at Cole Porter’s apartment. Ethel Merman picked up a wine glass and gently squeezed the top. “The wineglass was so delicate, and her touch so assured, that she could change its shape from round to oval without breaking it.”

Merman encouraged him to try it himself. “I squeezed, and this beautiful, delicate wineglass shattered in my hand. Ethel, who was dear and kind, said, ‘Don’t worry, kid, it could happen to any of us,’ and then she took her own glass and shattered it just to make me feel better.”

Gallantry takes responsibility.

On the morning of Jan. 15, 2009, US Airways flight 1549, its engines hit by a flock of birds, hit the Hudson river. Pilot Chesley Sullenberger landed the plane safely, brilliantly, and with his crew got the 150 passengers calmly disembarked and standing on the wings. As the plane began sinking, Mr. Sullenberger walked the cabin twice to make sure no one was left behind. All were saved. In the days afterward what struck people was not only that you can land on a river, or that an Airbus can float for a while, it was: Didja hear about the pilot? When asked what happened he always replied with factual precision and modesty. He redirected praise to the excellence of the crew and the sturdiness of the plane. There was a kind of public relief: We’re still making Sullenbergers, they aren’t just people in World War II movies.

Gallantry is being the victor and refusing to humiliate. It’s Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox treating Robert E. Lee with perfectly calibrated respect, letting Lee’s officers keep their sidearms and his men their personal horses. It is George H.W. Bush refusing to rub the Soviet Union’s face in it when the West won the Cold War. He did this not only for practical reasons—a humiliated foe is a dangerous foe—but out of decency.

Gallantry is male-coded and shouldn’t be. A history of gallant women is the history of the world. Famous examples: Jackie Kennedy, her life blasted away on a Friday afternoon, held her poise and on Monday maintained public ritual in the funeral of her husband, because the country needed it and history demanded it. Queen Elizabeth II was gallant throughout life but especially at the end when, old and unwell, often in discomfort, she continued to meet with new prime ministers, some of whom she would have understood to be silly, and did it smiling in a friendly way, in her cardigan and skirt. And in the end, her Jubilee video with Paddington Bear, confiding she keeps marmalade sandwiches in her bag, and keeping time with her spoon as “We Will Rock You” announced itself from the royal military band outside Buckingham Palace. Margaret Chase Smith taking to her feet in the U.S. Senate and telling the truth, knowing the price she’d pay, while the he-men in the chamber ran in terror from Joe McCarthy.

Sir Thomas More on the scaffold of Tower Hill comforted his executioner and was reported by a witness to have repositioned his beard on the block, joking it had committed no treason. On being asked by a pious official if he really knew God’s judgment, he is said to have responded, “He will not refuse one who is so blithe to go to him.” He didn’t say, “My actions were right,” he said God has a heart.

Why are we banging away on all this as the clock ticks down to a new year? Because gallantry is necessary. Modern life strips away too much, old protections aren’t honored, someone has to make things better.

Because we live in a cold political world of cocoons, bubbles and silos, and few feel safe to occupy the land between. It is a world in which people are obsessed with claiming their rights and not accepting their duties. Public speech is mean, strength is vulgar.

Gallantry goes against all this. It says you can push without humiliating, be decisive without being brutal.

It shows we can be better. It proves we are better.

Onward gallant ladies, gallant gentlemen of America. Welcome 2026 warmly, and save it modestly.

I want to say a small thing about a big subject, music. I’m going to put together two anecdotes because they are important to me even if they don’t go, by which I mean they aren’t connected or an extension of each other.

The first has to do with a conversation with the great opera soprano Beverly Sills. This was in the early 2000s, in Manhattan, at a luncheon that I think was a fundraiser or friend-maker for the Metropolitan Opera, of which she was chairwoman.

I’d never met her but we were seated together and the program was long and we settled in and pretty soon we were going from the wonders of opera to the purpose of music, what it does and what it’s supposed to do. I think we were both surprised by this: Music doesn’t have to have a purpose. But I found myself saying that deep down I think music is a stairway God gives us to get to him. Science is a stairway too, as are all the arts, and at the top of the stairway is truth and the truth is God. She was startled by this. So was I! I don’t think I had fully understood I thought that.

But yes, I believe that when a moment of truly sublime artistic or scientific excellence occurs, the veil between this world and the other thins a little, and we almost see something. That’s why we take to our feet and stomp and cheer and shout when something beautiful happens in a theater or hall, it’s why we stop the show, because we sense there’s something beyond human perfection going on. I think it’s why we get choked up when we see a magnificent moment on the playing field, also. You sense when the Holy Ghost, the big speckled bird, is making an unaccustomed flight over Citi Field. (We use that term in honor of Johnny Cash, who once said, “When the Holy Ghost is in the music, people feel it. You don’t have to explain it.”)

I badly want to tell you Beverly Sills’s response to all this, but I don’t remember what she said, I kept no notes, I recall only her wonderful face, full and strong, merry, and her look of engagement. She was processing a surprising thought from a stranger. I suppose I was telling her that to me her life was even more constructive than she thought, and she must have thought it was pretty constructive.

Anyway, that was a great moment, getting to tell Beverly Sills what I think music is.

The second anecdote is also from a conversation, at a professional gathering in Arizona in the fall of 2023. One night at dinner I sat across from a brilliant and accomplished young man in his 40s who writes music, including movie scores. He was from Los Angeles, chic and hip and thoughtful. I shared a recent favorite score, the one written by John Adams for Luca Guadagnino’s “I Am Love.” Then our talk took a turn. For a while I’d puzzled over something and hadn’t had anyone with his background and expertise to ask about it.

I said I love music, have all my life, and I guess I know the entire American songbook circa 1880 to 2000-something—know my Cole Porter, my Gershwin, my Jimmy Webb and Burt Bacharach, my Broadway shows, my Sondheim. I love rock and pop, can recite the lyrics of Kesha and enjoy, when being asked how I am, responding that I wake up in the morning feeling like P Diddy. Yet sometime around 2005 or 2010 I stopped absorbing new music. My memory didn’t hold new songs anymore. I was guessing that the reason is that my brain’s music storage unit is filled. It has enough, a lifetime’s worth, and doesn’t need more. Or, and possibly there are studies on this, at a certain point the brain’s memory neurons start to crowd out the new-experience neurons, and . . .

“No. That’s not it,” he said as he shook his head. It was clear he’d been thinking about this. He said the reason I am not absorbing and holding music now is that at the time I stopped listening, popular musicians stopped doing melody. They stopped doing the tune. They did other things, they kept the rhythm, the beat, but they started shunting aside melody. That, he said, is why you stopped keeping it.

And I thought: Oh my, that’s true. And it seemed the reason he cared is that he missed the melody too.

Rhythm is felt, the beat is felt, but melody is both thought and felt, so it has two ways to enter you.

I thanked him for helping me, told him I thought he observed correctly, and have been pondering what he said ever since.

The past two years it became a thought of broader application—that maybe as a nation we’ve kept the beat, we’ve still got the rhythm, but the melody, the tune—this century hasn’t been about those gentle things. We haven’t been about them.

Maybe others, even the primary audience for popular music, are coming to miss it too. I keep hearing of the children and grandchildren of friends who seem to be listening a lot to the music of past decades.

There are Reddit threads on this. A typical post: “As my kids are getting older, I’m realizing more and more that they seem to prefer music from the 70s, 80s, and into the 90s than they do from current music. I know this isn’t a new phenomenon, as we listed to stuff from the 50s, 60s, and 70s, but I feel like when we did it, it was just supplementing our generation’s modern music. With kids, and their friends, so I know it’s not just mine, it’s like all they really want to listen to is older stuff. . . . I never hear them listening to any modern pop (Taylor Swift being the big exception).”

Another post, different thread: “Pop songs from the 50s have a certain lilt to them—a certain undertone of satisfaction with life.” Another: “Pop music from the 80s is charged with optimism as well as soundboard experimentation . . . an undertone of eagerness for what is to come.”

From another thread, a post on being dragged to a karaoke night. “The crowd was at least 60% under 25, and in 3 hours, only two contemporary pop songs were sang.”

Someone noted that all this isn’t necessarily a turning away from current pop songs, it’s technological: Everything from every era is available on streaming services, it’s easy now to discover other eras and fall in love with them.

But I suspect the young are hungry for melody. And perhaps this is a hunger too for God, for a connection with something beyond that only a well crafted, fully felt song can provide. Music isn’t only organized sound shaped in time to spur human feeling, it isn’t only a gift, it comes from a place. A nation’s music comes from that nation’s deepest self—its culture, its society, its understanding of itself and of life.

If our era’s artists have been moving away from melody and tune this century, then maybe that means something, implies something about the larger American picture, with all its broken-upness, political and otherwise. Maybe we ought to think about that.