Peggy Noonan

How much can one speech do? When you’re a president in a hole (approval numbers stubbornly stuck below 40%, a re-election campaign under way) a big speech can help a lot or a little, be a wow or a mess. You know fairly quickly when the speech didn’t work: People start making jokes and the jokes gel. If the speech is splendid you may only know in retrospect because it takes time for history to see where it fit in the scheme of things and what it really did.

On cable Thursday afternoon they were calling Joe Biden’s State of the Union the most important speech of his career, and not only because they were trying to get you to watch. The cumulative effects of 50 years of speaking sort of made Joe Biden the figure he is, but he never really had a make-or-break speech, and maybe this was it.

The headlines in the speech: There’s life in the old boy yet.

And: Boy, he came in hot. It was fiery. He opened by comparing the current moment to 1941 and suggesting his right presidential corollary is Franklin D. Roosevelt and “no ordinary time.” He immediately pivoted to Ukraine and NATO, issuing passionate vows. “We have to stand up to Putin.” “Europe is at risk.” “Freedom and democracy” at home and abroad are at risk. Then quickly on to Jan. 6.

He sure didn’t ease into things. It was pow pow pow.

Then—this again was in the first few minutes—to abortion: “In the decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court majority wrote the following, and with all due respect, Justices: ‘Women are not without electoral or political power.’ ” He said “those bragging” about the decision “have no clue about the power of women.” He said they found out in 2022 and 2023, “and we’ll win again in 2024.” That was a perfect play to his base and deeply aggressive toward the justices seated immediately before him, who couldn’t reply. He vowed, with a new Congress, to “restore Roe v. Wade as the law of the land again.” I’m not sure how that works.

But it was all part of the drama of a dramatic speech.

The great question the past month was about his persona. Would he walk in shakily? When he was done, would we be using words like old, frail, incapable, embarrassing? We won’t. People will say that guy has a lot of fight in him. He was wide awake, seemed to be relishing the moment, did not seem to tire much, and in fact improved as the speech moved along.

He showed energy and focus, blurred some words and thoughts, maintained a brisk pace. He almost never spoke softly. He sometimes yelled. There was a give-’em-hell-Harry vibration, as if he’d been reading up on Truman. The White House meant to quell growing Democratic fears on the president’s age and acuity. They succeeded, at least for a while. Congressional Democrats looked happy to the point of bubbly when it was over.

It can also be said the president often maintained an indignant and hectoring tone that he confuses with certitude and commitment. In the end I don’t know if the speech came across to a viewer at home as strong and focused or, as has been said, “Angry Old Man Yells at Clouds.” That probably depends on where you stand on Joe Biden.

He was ready for back-and-forth from the floor and seemed to summon it. Conservatives and Republicans need to field a better antagonist than Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who wore a “Make America Great Again” hat and heckled from the floor. She makes her party look stupid and her movement vulgar.

Mr. Biden’s expression was mostly plain-spoken and blunt. He tried to rouse emotion but he didn’t do it with fancy, opaque phrasing. He has a tropism toward words and phrases that sound like high-end ad copy. He says, “America’s comeback is building a future of American possibilities,” and I hear, “Dodge trucks are Ram tough.” But he didn’t do a lot of that in this speech. He was unfrilly and direct, which added to his power.

The speech was to begin at 9 p.m. At 9:09 members were still milling around the chamber patting each other’s arms and backs. Politicians touch each other more than actors on opening night. The president wasn’t announced until 9:16 and didn’t make it to the podium until 9:25.

All this was rude and self-indulgent on everybody’s part. They milked it. Ladies and gentlemen of Congress, tighten up, keep it crisp. Don’t be slobby like a not-great country.

Before the president’s speech began, when the networks were filling time showing scenes from the floor, every time they cut to Vice President Kamala Harris at the podium she was giving the new House speaker, Mike Johnson, the brush-off. He’d try to chat, she’d say a word, look away, smile at the crowd. She was collected; he looked at a loss. It was his first State of the Union in that chair. She had no mercy for the bumpkin. There was something take-no-prisoners about it. It seemed to me suggestive of the coming campaign.

I close with my impression that the press corps, to use an old term, has been feeling increasingly pressured by the White House. Biden folk always expect the mainstream press to carry their water; whatever they want said of the president and the administration, they poke the press to say and think about and look into. The press in turn is thinking: Why don’t you make your own points in front of cameras and at events, and we’ll report what you did? It is a real weakness—and ultimately self defeating—that Democratic White Houses expect so much from the press, focus on its members so much and cuff them about when they don’t come through.

This White House is in this respect the opposite of Ronald Reagan’s. Reagan never expected a break from the press, ever. They were liberal Democrats; he was delighted and surprised when they achieved simple fairness. He went over their heads to the American people to tell his story. If he wanted to be considered vigorous he had to show vigor. If he wanted to impress with his views and his plan he walked up to a mic. One of the Biden White House’s mistakes on the issue of the president’s health is the now heavily spoofed spin about how energetic and on top of it he is behind the scenes—in the thick of it, at the vital center, the bride at every wedding, as was said of the honestly energetic Teddy Roosevelt. It’s nonsense. If it were true, wouldn’t the White House allow some cameras to capture it just once?

The president did try to show things through his own presence and performance Thursday night, and it worked. They should leave it at that.

I don’t know if Mr. Biden changed his situation, but it sure was interesting. We just heard his half of the 2024 presidential campaign. His stump speeches will derive from it.

A man on CNN is reporting live from outside a polling place in suburban South Carolina and recounts a small story. An 18-year-old man had just voted, and the election clerk called out, “Ladies and gentlemen we have a first-time voter.” The room burst into applause. “They say that’s a tradition here,” the reporter said. It touched me.

All the networks had been showing all these normal Americans who showed up to vote, the people who make the country work, and interviewing them on the way in and out. “I voted for Trump because . . .” “I’m for Haley.” All of them patient and good-natured with the media folk. I thought, not for the first time, that America has become an 80/20 country, with 80% so sterling and responsible and constructive, taking part, keeping the whole edifice up and operating, of all faiths, colors and persuasions. But we only pay attention to the 20% because they make all the news—outrageousness of every sort, hurting people on the street or making threats on TikTok or acting out in every field, including politics, in some ignorant way.

The 80% never make news because they’re modestly doing what’s expected. But we should never forget who we are, a good people, and by an overwhelming majority. That gets drowned out in the daily drumbeat.

On the evening of his South Carolina triumph, Donald Trump said of the Republican Party: “I have never seen the Republican Party so unified as it is right now.” It isn’t a united party but one broken in two, with one half bigger than the other. Mr. Trump won South Carolina roughly 60/40 and that is a win, a big one, a landslide. But as Nikki Haley said, speaking after him that evening, “40% is not some tiny group.” Especially when you consider that South Carolina Republicans are pretty Trumpy. Forty percent of voters not desiring his return is a big deal. The South Carolina outcome mirrored New Hampshire, but Michigan this week was different, a bigger and more decisive split for Trump, roughly 70/30. But still a split.

Eight years ago the Trump part of the party was a small minority, though one that in the end triumphed. Now the non-Trump part is a rump.

When a party is broken both sides get to speak of why they’re right and the other side’s wrong. That is why it is legitimate and constructive—it is a very 80% move!—for Ms. Haley to stay in and argue against Mr. Trump and his policies. This is right, helpful and clarifying. Mr. Trump tends to avoid this, or rather to do half, the part about why he’s the right person. He doesn’t much address his own policies, or explain why Ms. Haley is wrong in hers. But he owes it to the country. Is he capable of engaging on issues? Is he too old, too scattered and unfocused?

Some say Ms. Haley should get out now to preserve her viability for 2028. This is fantasy. She is taking on the more-than-half part of her party now and alienating them every day. They won’t forget it. In any case, future presidential cycles aren’t at all predictable or plannable. Everything changes; people will enter whose names we don’t know. If Ms. Haley has a presidential future it will more likely be with a third party. For now she is doing an authentic public service in bearing a standard and explaining why it must be borne, and that is enough.

Next week is Super Tuesday, when certain overwhelming trends, if they continue, and there’s no reason to believe they won’t, will produce the expected outcome: a Trump-Biden race, a repeat of 2020, even though no sane person would want to return to that dreadful year.

Meanwhile, for eight years normal, old-style Republicans—normal and old-style not only in policy but in terms of personal and professional seriousness—have been saying: We can’t win without the Trumpers. It has yet to dawn on the Trumpers that they need the normal, old-style Republicans, too. They were alerted to this in the elections of 2018, 2020 and 2022, but the lesson didn’t take. At some point in the future it must. Trumpism is by nature triumphalist: We are the unstoppable wave. But that wave broke in ’18, ’20 and ’22 on the rocks of the normal, old-style Republicans who ringed the shore. They may well break it again, in November. This hasn’t moderated Mr. Trump’s approach.

*   *   *

We close with Mitch McConnell. On hearing of his decision to step down in November as GOP Senate leader, I thought what I have been thinking for some time as various House veterans, and serious younger members, have stepped down: The doctors are fleeing the asylum.

Age and a recent family loss, the death of his sister-in-law Angela Chao, played into the decision, but so surely did the current moment. Mr. McConnell entered the Senate in 1984, and became Republican leader 2007. He came up in one party, during the Reagan revolution, and a different one has risen since.

As leader, Mr. McConnell was subtle, saw around corners, never lost his head, skillfully herded some highly unusual cats. He wasn’t a visionary but kept in his mind the big picture and played a long game. Politics to him was the art of the possible; he respected the mathematics of the situation. I suspect the political regret of his life was his decision not to back Donald Trump’s second impeachment, after 1/6. It would be a right regret.

Democrats in the Senate knew him as a formidable foe; when he blocked the Supreme Court nomination of Merrick Garland in 2016, he sent them into a blazing rage. They painted him in return as a great villain, understandably, and as he knew they would. The break never fully healed. Yet to the extent the Senate as an institution still holds, Mr. McConnell is a primary reason. His Democratic counterpart, Chuck Schumer, looked honestly moved as, at the end of Mr. McConnell’s remarks announcing his decision, in the well of the Senate, he crossed the aisle to take Mr. McConnell’s hand.

His remarks were moving, and there was throughout an air of gallantry. He quoted Ecclesiastes: To everything there is a season. He said: “One of life’s most underappreciated talents is to know when it’s time to leave.” Would that others heeded his example.

“I said exactly what I felt,” he said afterward by phone. “The reaction has been surprising and rather heartwarming, and I wasn’t sure that would be the case.” A historian of the Senate wrote that he had not only been the longest serving party leader in the Senate; he had been the best. When I mentioned Mr. Schumer, Mr. McConnell said their “shared passion” on Ukraine had brought them closer.

He was one of the last grown-ups. Trump people will jeer him—“Another head we’ve cut off.” They couldn’t carry his sandals.

He will remain in the Senate and, liberated from the constraints of leadership, no doubt feel free to be a thorn in the side of irresponsible presidential and party leadership. Something tells me in this area he’ll make John McCain look like a piker.

You know that look everybody gets when a long, bad Zoom meeting ends and you’ve said goodbye and you’re searching for the Leave Meeting button while keeping a determinedly pleasant look on your face? That’s how I’m feeling about our national political life! Or that tingly feeling you get when the novocaine starts to wear off but your jaw doesn’t have full feeling yet and you know when it does it’s going to hurt? That’s how I’m viewing 2024! Like a certain amount of pain is coming but one must maintain one’s poise. (I just thought I’d share. But it’s how you’re feeling too, isn’t it?)

Ol’ Cranky vs. Ol’ Crazy continues apace. Mr. Trump’s campaign is odd for a probable primary victor in that he is obsessed with the love of his assured followers while giving no apparent thought to anyone else. He says mad things, inviting Russia to invade U.S. allies and comparing himself to Alexei Navalny. But he takes questions from the press even when not emerging from a courtroom, and a friend suggests one whose answer might clear things up: “Would the killing of Navalny come under your idea of presidential immunity?”

Nikki Haley plugs away, sharpening her critiques. The South Carolina primary is Saturday, and one wonders how expectations will play into its coverage. She has consistently trailed by about 30 points. If she loses by 15, can she claim momentum? She’ll likely call it a victory. Will it be? Honest question.

It’s good she’s in and still swinging, because her simple presence says something important: that a significant portion of the party doesn’t support Donald Trump for president, and all arguments as to why will be made.

As for Ol’ Cranky, he delivers his State of the Union address on March 7, two days after Super Tuesday. This will be President Biden’s kickoff to the election year, his final scheduled speech to Congress before November, his last chance at a new unveiling. I’m leapfrogging the news cycle because I have thoughts.

The speech is an exhausted form, bloated and interminable. People say it’s too long because it is. The shortest by a modern president was Richard Nixon’s in 1972 (under 29 minutes), the longest Bill Clinton’s in 2000 (almost 90). Last year Mr. Biden’s went 73 minutes. Does anyone remember anything he said?

Make it short—no more than 30 minutes. Instruct party members not to jump up and cheer constantly. Say you asked them not to, there’s much at stake and this isn’t theater.

If Mr. Biden is going to stay in this thing, he must turn serious. Not somber or ponderous, but serious.

There are only three subjects: America at home (illegal immigration), America in the world (Ukraine, Israel), and the economy.

No one knows how Mr. Biden is thinking about the massive illegal-immigration crisis. People are coming to believe, and they are right, that it isn’t only a matter of the law, our capacities and our culture, but what is happening now at the border has a huge national-security component. All the friendly, well-put-together Chinese nationals crossing—who are they, why are they coming, how did this happen? All the Eastern Europeans, Asians and Africans. Once Mexico was coming illegally, then Central and South America, now the world, including people on the terrorist watch list. This is a border collapse.

It’s easy to imagine how the Joe Biden of 1984 would have thought about this: That’s bad, the people won’t buy it, we gotta stop. Or even 2004: This is gonna be a problem for us and a gift to Republicans. It’s not at all clear how he thinks about it now. He owes it to the country to say. About half of us feel we’re experiencing an unaddressed invasion. We can’t imagine how this ends well.

America in the world: What are we doing? What are we trying to do? The president has to get back to the basics. Many conservatives see Ukraine as a secondary interest, a place far away with no immediate bearing on our safety, the effort to help it defend itself driven by unrealistic assumptions about American power. Answer this. Why must Russia be stopped? Why is it in America’s interests? America has to hear a clear, contained argument that isn’t emotional, that isn’t cheap applause lines, that gives a clear sense of strategic thinking.

On Israel, decent people who were moved and horrified by the atrocities of Oct. 7 are now four months out from that event. Gaza, tens of thousands dead, Benjamin Netanyahu as the face of the Israeli government—an attrition of support is undeniable. Quinnipiac had a poll this week that said more Americans support aid to Ukraine than to Israel. We’re in a sea change in U.S. public opinion. What should America do? What is the right way to think? The president should reject the soft, rubbery language of the State Department and the National Security Council, which can always be interpreted in several ways because it’s supposed to be interpreted in several ways.

On the economy, we have functional full employment and inflation isn’t worsening. Bragging rights, but keep it low-key, not “we did this” but “America did this.” Americans need to hear from the president why food prices are so unbudgeably high. And what the plan is.

He should avoid the soaring phrases he loves; they always sound like high-end ad copy. Say it plain and straight. All of Mr. Biden’s political life he saw rhetoric as magic wordage, as if the right series of words a consultant pulled from his hat would put him over the top. He should forget that formula. It was never true. Mr. Biden rose because he was young and attractive, perceived as moderate but malleable, and wanted it so much, and looked the part, and people kind of liked him. They never thought he was eloquent. They thought he had a noncrippling and almost endearing tendency toward blowhardism.

The past week reading the old speeches I found myself drawn to the simplicity of the language of Harry S. Truman in 1948. He was another old busted valise whose electoral prospects were dim. “We are here today to consider the state of the union.” What a great, straight beginning. “The United States has been great because we as a people have been able to work together for great objectives even while differing about details.” That was plainness in service of tact.

A good thing for the president: If he does a perfectly adequate job, the press will be inclined to call it brilliant. Expectations are low. There’s a politesse about State of the Union coverage, nobody wants to pounce. The media have been slapped around recently for taking notice of Mr. Biden’s age after three years of ignoring it.

Bad news: People won’t be impressed if anchors call it brilliant, because our media world is all broken up in pieces and anchors speak to mere shards. And most Americans aren’t watching. Viewership declines each year.

But some are, and they’re intelligent, and when you play it straight with them they are generous.

The only time Democrats get excited now is when the subject is Donald Trump. Then they get marvelously worked up. An official of the administration called to let off steam. “Trump says NATO doesn’t pay its bills—has anyone noticed the irony? Donald Trump is the biggest deadbeat in history. How many hundreds of contractors did he stiff through his career, how many plumbers didn’t get paid for their work, and he complains about others? Talk about projecting!”

But when the subject is Joe Biden, they’re depressed. They have accepted that he is the inevitable nominee and explain the reasons. I can’t get myself to buy them. The thinking is too limited, too weary and defensive about life. And so a last stab at why it doesn’t have to be this way.

Mr. Biden is stuck at 39% approval; Mr. Trump is leading; a large majority of the country thinks he’s too old for the job. It’s not that his walk is slow or stilted, not that he occasionally loses his thought. It’s that the presidency is a speaking role and he can’t make a sustained case on Ukraine, Israel, illegal immigration, all the great issues. This leaves things confused, without a central voice, and makes people nervous: there’s too much mystery around this White House. They say he’s fine when he’s well-rested, but events don’t knock softly on the door and ask if you’re ready for them.

This is what Democrats argue: There is nobody else. But there is. Here we summon the usual names, starting with the Gs—Gov. Gavin Newsom, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo. Add Jared Polis, Josh Shapiro, all the candidates of the 2020 primary. There is no Biden movement within the party that would bolt without him, no Biden cult that must be appeased.

The Democrats will never be able to agree on anybody. Then they aren’t a party. A party’s function is to yield up and secure the election of candidates who fulfill its mission and meaning. The Democratic Party is a mess, but its constituent parts don’t want it to die, they have too much invested. In the end they’ll make a choice.

It would be bloody. So what? It would be vital, not as if the party is in some somnambulistic shuffle toward a dark, inevitable fate.

It’s too late. Lyndon B. Johnson, the last president to decline to seek a second term, dropped out on March 31, 1968. There was still time for contenders to launch and fund races. The primary rules have changed since then, and ballots have been printed up. Mr. Biden can free his delegates, either from the day he steps aside or at the convention. Only political romantics think an open convention is possible. You can’t know it’s impossible. Now and then in life you have to say, “History, hold my beer.”

But the American people would see chaos. Americans appear to enjoy chaos. It will only help Trump. His campaign is planning on a Biden rematch; he’ll be crowded out of the news cycle for months; it’ll throw a wrench in his works.

What about the Kamala problem? What problem? She can run for the nomination like anyone else.

It’s too big a gamble. Backing Mr. Biden is a gamble. Bookmakers give him a nearly 70% chance of losing.

The family won’t go for it. They aren’t the arbiters of American history; the White House isn’t their candy store.

He will never change his mind. Barack Obama dissuaded him from running for president in 2016. If Mr. Biden steps aside, sacrificing all vanity and need, he is a hero to his party forever. If he stays and loses, he’s Ruth Bader Biden. They’ll never forgive him. His legacy is the second Trump term.

Has anyone had The Talk with him, his family and staff? All the odds laid out, the arguments made, a plea spoken? Has anyone been frank, candid, tough?

If not, why not? Donors love to talk, so do senators and governors.

We end with the famous political intervention that took place 50 years ago this summer, in August 1974. Sen. Barry Goldwater, Sen. Hugh Scott and House Minority Leader John Rhodes went to Richard Nixon to tell him it was over.

Goldwater, in his blunt and gossipy 1988 autobiography, remembered telling a newspaper, in the spring of ’74, that the Watergate scandal reminded him of Teapot Dome. He was summoned immediately after for dinner at the White House. He hadn’t seen Nixon much and was taken aback. The president’s conversation was a stream of “ceaseless, choppy chatter.” He was “constantly switching subjects,” “hunching and quickly dropping his shoulders.” Goldwater drove home and dictated for his personal files: “I have reason to suspect that all might not be well mentally in the White House.” The next day he phoned fellow guest Bryce Harlow, Nixon’s counselor, who offered comfort: Nixon had merely been drunk.

On Aug. 6, as impeachment loomed, Goldwater alerted the White House the president may only have a dozen Republican senators with him. The next day he, Scott and Rhodes saw the president. Goldwater had been asked by chief of staff Al Haig not to demand or suggest resignation—that would leave Nixon defiant. In the Oval Office, Goldwater wrote, “Nixon put his feet up on the desk, leaned back in his swivel chair, and began reminiscing about the past.” Then Nixon’s voice turned hard. He challenged his visitors. Goldwater was direct: “Things are bad.” Nixon was sarcastic. “Less than a half-dozen votes?” “Ten at most,” Goldwater said. He’d taken a nose count that morning. “You have four firm votes. The others are really undecided. I’m one of them.”

Nixon asked if he had any options. None were offered. Goldwater left feeling, “He would make the decision in the best interests of the country. It was going to be all right.”

But after the meeting, Goldwater returned to his office and called Katharine Graham of the Washington Post. He didn’t much like the Post—earlier that day he’d stood on the Senate floor, looked up at the press gallery and declared “You are a rotten bunch!” But he knew the Post’s place in the story and its power with its readers. He had one, Richard Nixon, in mind.

He decided to trust her. “I told Mrs. Graham what had happened in the Oval Office.” Nixon might “go off in any direction, depending on how the media, particularly the Post, handled the story. Could they play it cool for just one day, refrain from saying Nixon was finally finished?” If they got Nixon mad, “there was no telling what he would do. As things stood, I believed he would resign.”

Kay Graham chose to trust Goldwater. “The Post was as circumspect as it could be the following morning.” Afterward she never mentioned it to Goldwater when they saw each other. Goldwater thought he knew why. “Newspapers call their own shots.” But he felt the Post that morning put country over self. “I will never forget their recognition of responsibility as long as I live.”

Nixon resigned that night.

These old stories are always so moving, because everyone was always thinking about America, and thinking imaginatively, too, as if history’s a thing you can personally shape.

How should the press cover a presumable Trump-Biden presidential rematch? More pointedly, how should it cover Donald Trump?

The history that precedes that question is well known. In 2015-16 the media, having discovered that Mr. Trump was a walking talking ratings bump and being honestly fascinated by his rise, turned the airwaves over to him knowing he couldn’t win. He won. In a great cringe of remorse and ideological horror, many did penance by joining the “resistance.” The result: Mr. Trump wasn’t stopped—he got a whole new fundraising stream out of “fake news”—but journalism’s reputation was drastically harmed.

George Packer, in a December 2023 piece in the Atlantic, noted that 58% of Republicans now say they have no trust in the news media. “If half the country believes most of what the mainstream media report and the other half thinks it’s mostly lies, this isn’t a partial win for journalists.” Their purpose isn’t to be the opposition but “to give the public information it needs to exercise democratic power.” Mr. Trump made American media more like him: “solipsistic (foreign reporting nearly disappeared), divisive, and self-righteous.”

Many in media are reflecting on how exactly to cover 2024, the question seemingly made more urgent by the decisions of MSNBC and CNN to forgo live coverage of Mr. Trump’s victory speech in Iowa. That deprived viewers of legitimate information while reinforcing the networks’ reputation for anti-Trump bias.

Here we take a stab at what kind of coverage might help the country.

A first and guiding principle: The temperature will be high throughout 2024; some fear actual political violence. So if you can’t make things cooler, don’t deliberately make them hotter. This will require a new and heavier emphasis on evenhanded coverage. Will everyone in America appreciate it? No. People are so used to seeing bias that they imagine it when it isn’t there, and Trump supporters label as biased any coverage that isn’t fawning. But it would be a boon to the country and the profession to do it, and some will notice. So do it.

Second, know where you are. Former Washington Post editor Marty Baron told NPR in December that journalists must earn back public trust. “Make the assumption that people won’t believe a word we say, and then say, OK, here’s the evidence.” Much of the 2024 news cycle will revolve around court cases. “We need to lay out the evidence,” Mr. Baron said. “If we’re talking about a court document, we need to show that court document.” Annotate it to show on what sections interpretations are based.

Third, he who fact-checks A must fact-check B. A fact-check that persuades isn’t “Trump here is lying because he’s a lying liar who lies.” Both candidates lie, or at least mislead. You might say Mr. Trump lies more. Fine, his fact check will be longer. But when Joe Biden says his policy on illegal immigration hasn’t contributed to the border problem, that needs a serious, detailed, nonpartisan fact check.

If either candidate says something interesting and important in a rally or speech, show it. Show as much as you can that captures the tone and feel of these events. If Mr. Biden isn’t holding them, that’s a story, get it. Don’t use Mr. Trump to get ratings if he proves to be still a ratings magnet. Don’t manufacture your own showy rally for him to enhance your reputation for fairness. That was the CNN mistake last May. But do have sit-down interviews with Mr. Trump, and make them tough. If he insists on specific terms—that, say, he be addressed throughout the interview as “Your Highness”—it is your responsibility to refuse the terms, tell your audience exactly what he demanded, and why you took a pass.

If Mr. Trump has a bad moment on the trail, show it. It’s not bias, it’s news. If he goes wild in a rally and promises death for his foes, show it. If Mr. Biden has a bad moment, if he voices some rambly disconnected aria and has to be saved by the Secret Service from walking off the stage into the orchestra pit, show it. It isn’t your job to protect him.

Demand interviews with Mr. Biden, who gets away with not sitting for long grillings. His own staffers have so little confidence in his ability to withstand scrutiny that they’re not allowing him to do the traditional softball Super Bowl interview. In an election year, with a hundred million watching. What a story. Why has it been played down? Who made the decision?

Two other items specific to 2024 itself. Mr. Baron warned that newsrooms aren’t ready for the impact of wholly believable but fake video, audio and images that come from artificial intelligence. Newsrooms should be setting up dedicated units to catch, verify and immediately report AI abuses. The first newsroom to dominate that space will become a boon to its owners and institution.

Also, newsrooms are going to have to make big and consequential decisions on coverage of third party candidacies. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., No Labels—someone is going to start to get substantial ballot access, and that is a potential game-changer for the 2024 outcome.

Finally, this week Mark Halperin, in a meeting on his video platform, 2WAY, asked veteran journalists what guidance they’d give regarding 2024 best practices. They said: Calm down and dig, no one needs your florid disapproval, they need information.

The writer Todd Purdum, a New York Times veteran, said: “There’s way too much heavy breathing in the daily coverage of Trump in the so-called mainstream media, and to me the tone of, ‘In another goddamn outrage Donald Trump today did—.’ I just think, tell me what he did, let me decide what to make of it. Don’t lean so heavily on the pedal to tell me with loaded phrases and words how dastardly and disastrous this is, let me discern that myself.”

Jill Abramson, a former editor of the Times, saw great stories to be reported that would broaden public understanding. The press should be “driving the point home how incredibly influential Trump has been in what he’s doing in real time. He’s getting rid of Ronna McDaniel, he’s trying to get rid of Mitch McConnell, which could succeed, he did blow up [the immigration bill].” He’s a driving force in what’s happening, it’s a big story. On Mr. Biden: “People are writing that he’s quote-unquote laying low right now, and that may be tactical but it also could be physical.” Dig, find out.

I would add that Susie Wiles, a top Trump campaign adviser, is right now the most important woman in American politics. Who is she, in a deep way? What drives her? What does her rise foretell?

The answer to how to play the 2024 story, and to refute a reputation for bias, isn’t to “ease off criticism” or “pull punches.” It’s to dig. It’s to get off the company Slack channel, grab your jacket, go out and get the story. The country will benefit. People will respect it. And it will make reporters what they really want to be and should be: dangerous.

It was the first time I felt hope. Then I felt irritated with myself for feeling hope. But it was a heck of a hearing. (Was it what used to be called boob bait for Bubba, Bubba being American parents?)

It was Wednesday’s Senate Judiciary Committee grilling of the heads of social-media companies—Meta, TikTok, X, Snapchat. The subject was the online abuse of the young—child sexual exploitation, sexual predation, porn, extortion, internet-purchased pills laced with fentanyl.

The senators seemed serious, even grave. Parents of kids who’d committed suicide after what happened to them on social media were there, holding pictures. No one after all these years, not senators or spectators, needed to be informed of the depth of the problem. One senator referred to an investigation in the Journal last June. It reported that Instagram “helps connect and promote a vast network of accounts openly devoted to the commission and purchase of underage-sex content.” The platform doesn’t merely host pedophiles, “its algorithms promote them. Instagram connects pedophiles and guides them to content sellers.”

Since the turn of the century, families have wondered about a great unanswered domestic question: Exactly when did we as a people decide that a new technology could come along, make itself pervasive by making its products addictive, and feed our children images and information that are actively harmful to them—and this is not only fully legal, it can’t even be regulated by the government? Put another way: When do the American people get to have a say on the culture in which they raise their kids?

The social-media giants position themselves as missionaries: They’re just trying to help people be in touch so the world might grow closer and warmer. Mark Zuckerberg of Meta trotted it out Wednesday in an exchange with Sen. John Kennedy: “We give people the ability to connect with people they care about.”

As to the threat their services pose to the young, their response has been that it’s up to parents to monitor and control what their children do online. This is like cigarette companies getting away with saying, “It’s not our fault, don’t smoke cancer sticks if you don’t want to get sick.” The social-media giants have shown a stunning indifference to two key facts. One is that America has a lot of parents who are neglectful or incapable and don’t or can’t monitor and control their children. The other is that parents who are excellent and on the case are simply overwhelmed by tech. It’s coming in every portal; dam one up and a new one opens. They can’t fully “control” what their kids and their kids’ friends are exposed to. They need help. They have a right to expect this of their government.

Ranking Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham was fiery: “Social-media companies as they are currently designed and operate are dangerous products” that must be “reined in.” He told Mr. Zuckerberg: “You have blood on your hands.” He said “it is now time to repeal section 230,” the 1996 statute giving tech companies liability protection for content posted on their platforms. It was written before modern social media. Facebook wasn’t launched until 2004; TikTok arrived in 2016.

Sen. Marsha Blackburn was angry: “Children are not your priority, children are your product.” She said to Mr. Zuckerberg: “It appears that you’re trying to be the premier sex trafficking site in this country.” He hotly denied it.

Sen. Josh Hawley’s grilling of Mr. Zuckerberg made an impression. Mr. Hawley enjoys enacting indignation in hearings and is good at it.

“Did I hear you say in your opening statement that there’s no link between mental health [in teens] and social-media use?” Mr. Hawley asked.

“I think it’s important to look at the science,” Mr. Zuckerberg replied. “The bulk of the scientific evidence does not support that.”

Mr. Hawley pointed out that one of Mr. Zuckerberg’s own subsidiaries, Instagram, studied the effect on teenagers and found it “harmful for a sizable percentage of teenagers, most notably teenage girls. . . . That’s your study.” Mr. Zuckerberg answered with deflection and doubletalk.

Mr. Hawley: “You’ve been doing this for years,” testifying that “your product is wonderful . . . while internally you know full well your product is a disaster for teenagers.” He showed sworn testimony from an Instagram whistleblower that 37% of Instagram users between 13 and 15 had encountered unwanted nudity in the previous seven days, and 24% had received unwanted sexual advances in the same period. “You knew about it, who did you fire?”

Mr. Zuckerberg: “Senator, we study all this because it’s important and we want to improve our services.”

Had Meta compensated or helped any of the victims? “Our job is to make sure that we build tools to help keep people safe.”

Mr. Hawley persisted: “Will you take personal responsibility?”

Mr. Zuckerberg: “I view my job and the job of our company is building the best tools that we can—to keep our community safe.”

Mr. Hawley: “Well, you’re failing at that.”

Mr. Zuckerberg: Meta is involved in an “industry-leading effort, We’ve built AI tools that—”

Mr. Hawley interrupted: “Oh, nonsense, your product is killing people.” “Your job is to be responsible for what your company has done. You’ve made billions of dollars on the people sitting behind you here. You’ve done nothing to help them. . . . You’ve done nothing to put it right.”

It was satisfying. Why are we skeptical it will lead to helpful legislative action?

Congress has been holding these hearings for years with little to show for it. Reforming social media would require focus, tech sophistication, a real commitment of time. Congress isn’t known for these things. Repealing Section 230 is likely the one thing that would make a huge difference, but that would require an ideological and philosophical struggle in Congress and disruption in the tech industry. Do lawmakers have the stomach for that?

A friend who worked in Washington a few years ago was struck by the question he was asked at a lunch of think tankers and lobbyists: “Who owns you?” Not who do you work for, what do you believe, but who bought your loyalty? It is the Washington problem in three words.

The social-media companies have bought up Washington. They give money to politicians and political action committees, to think tanks and media shops; they hire the most influential and respected. They give the children of politicians jobs. They’ve got it wired. Mr. Kennedy mordantly joked about this at the hearings: “We know we’re in a recession when Google has to lay off 25 members of Congress.”

There’s reason to believe it’s all Kabuki. The CEOs show up for a day of ritual denunciation, then go on unbothered. It’s not a high price to pay for the lives they lead.

But it’s a crucial and popular issue, what our children see on the screens. Parents understand what’s at stake and will thank those who help. All the money and power is on the other side, and money and power guarantee you can play the long game.

When you know what you know, it can feel immature to be hopeful. But hope is what we’ve got. And attentiveness: watching who came through and who didn’t.

This shouldn’t even be a question.

A great party is trying to produce its presidential nominee. Donald Trump is the leader in the contest so far, and looks likely to be the victor. But the cycle has just started (61 delegates allocated, 2,368 to go) and the party isn’t united, it’s split, roughly 50/50 pro-Trump and not.

Nikki Haley is right to stay in and fight. No one has the right to shut her down. She’s stumping in her home state, South Carolina, and getting a lot of advice. I remember George H.W. Bush at a difficult point in the GOP primaries in 1988, after he lost Iowa. All his friends were saying, “You have to show you’re strong!” He’d listen politely, thank them, now and then ask if they had any specific ideas on how to show “strength.” They’d wave their hands and flounder. Finally Bush growled to his aides: How do they want me to show it? Maybe I’ll get off the plane, go up to the greeting party and slug ’em in the face, plaster ’em, maybe that’ll do it.

That’s from memory, thus no quote marks, but I think of it when the subject is the well-meaning but useless advice candidates under pressure receive.

For useful advice I turned to my friend Landon Parvin, savant and veteran Washington speechwriter, who tore himself away from work to offer practical thoughts.

Go for broke, Landon said; there’s only one subject now and it’s Mr. Trump. Go at him, make it new. “Feel the freedom of your situation,” he says to Ms. Haley. “Self-respect is at issue. You’re not slinking off under pressure. There is something glorious about a last stand.”

“You alone now carry the banner. Speak up for all the Republicans who have been demeaned, diminished and threatened by Trump. He can no longer hurt you. Pick up the sword. You don’t have to give Shakespeare’s band-of-brothers speech but live it!”

Lean into being a woman. “The woman card is untapped by Republican women because they don’t like identity politics.” But the suburbs will appreciate it, and Mr. Trump is going after you as a woman, insulting how you present yourself, calling you “birdbrain.” “You were once in the Little Miss Bamberg, S.C., pageant and sang ‘This Land Is Your Land.’ That’s a beautiful thing for the daughter of immigrants. Trump desecrates such images, this man who owned the Miss USA pageant and grabbed women by certain parts. This is bigger than you. Speak up for Republican women.”

It’s OK to note you beat Joe Biden in the polls while with Mr. Trump it’s a toss-up, fine to point out that Mr. Trump has lost a step, but be careful. “Do it with humor or you’ll look like you want to stand on his ventilator tube.”

But the issue is Mr. Trump’s nature. Start, Landon says, with something like this: “Remember when Trump said he could shoot somebody in the middle of Fifth Avenue and people would still vote for him? Well, if he would try to shoot somebody in the middle of the street here in South Carolina, we would return fire. And that is what I intend to do today.”

“Don’t attack with anger, just quote the terrible, terrible things he says about specific people and larger groups. It is not right what he says, and on some level most Trump supporters know it. Make fun of his self-importance and self-regard. Take on the Great Pumpkin far away in Mar-a-Lago. Show that he’s out of control, that he has no rails, no boundaries. Quote the past few days’ overnight rants on social media. Let the audience draw the conclusion about whether this man should be returned to the presidency.” Quote his former chiefs of staff and cabinet secretaries who say he has no business in the Oval Office. “Let that settle in.”

More: “Don’t be strident, don’t strain your voice, don’t try too hard. When I was writing for Ronald Reagan, I would give him a sure-fire, tough applause line, and he would often deliver it gently, seeking no applause. And yet it landed, and he looked the stronger, the bigger and the more genial for it. Don’t yell at Trump, be sad for him.”

“Let me talk about stereotypes, as unfair as they are, because some voters think in them. You are the Asian girl in the front of the class with her hand up. You’re smart, you did the work. Trump is the blond jock in the back, cracking jokes and popping gum. Gently smack that gum out of his mouth. Have some fun going after him, not in a Chris Christie perturbed way but as someone who seems to enjoy the give and take of battle.”

Another thought: Admit you are not as entertaining or maybe exciting as he is, but that’s OK, you’re running not to entertain but to lead. A rabid squirrel in a chemistry lab is exciting to watch but can do a lot of damage. You believe in old-fashioned values like professionalism and capability. “I am here to capably close the border. Wouldn’t that be the real excitement? I’m here to capably force the executive agencies to end their woke, partisan nonsense. Wouldn’t it be exciting if somebody got that done?” “Doing the real job of the presidency so that the American people benefit actually is exciting.” Perhaps one day when she worked for Mr. Trump she saw the blubbery self-pity kick in; perhaps she wanted to shake him by the shoulders and say snap out of it, we have a country to save.

Mr. Trump is currently in a rage cycle and Ms. Haley is likely expecting a new nickname—Tricky Nikki, whatever. But nothing is below Mr. Trump and he may go more off-color than that. Staff can respond, but a reporter will catch Ms. Haley going into an event and demand reaction. Landon suggests, in a confiding tone, “Yes. I heard Stormy Daniels gave him that.”

Don’t be afraid of pulling the heart strings. You’re home in the state that made you. The people you’re talking to are your fellow Republicans. Whatever they decide you’ll always remember you were a child there, a student, a young bride. You are of them. Landon likes “When I walk into that old White House, I will be thinking of one of our state mottos, ‘While I breathe.’ While I breathe, I’ll be thanking you for how you prepared me for this moment.”

“You can’t go wrong with gratitude, and grace for that matter, which are concepts her opponent does not grasp.”

Landon once told me of a difference between writing for women in public life and for men. Men like to tell personal and emotional stories because they think it means they’re sensitive. Women are more likely to fear it will make them look weak—“She got all weepy.”

Ms. Haley, he suspects, may be reticent in part because she was trained as an accountant—just the numbers, please. His advice: “Slow down your pace, soften your voice, tell an honest story. That is what people want, not the grandiosity of the man you are running against. Nikki, it’s time to go to your core.”

He got 51% of a modest turnout in a small state, but a win’s a win and a 30-point win is a landslide. Still, part of what we saw in Iowa was Donald Trump’s continual losing battle with himself. His Des Moines victory speech was unusually gracious and statesmanlike. The strategy was to reassure moderates and centrists and to undermine the coming argument against him in New Hampshire: that he’s a bad man who’s violent in his rhetoric because he’s violent in his heart.

“I really think this is time now for everybody, our country, to come together . . . whether it’s Republican or Democrat or liberal or conservative, it would be so nice if we could come together and straighten out the world,” he said. “I wanna congratulate Ron and Nikki. . . . They’re very smart people, very capable people.” “We’re going to rebuild the capital of our country, Washington D.C. We’re going to scrub those beautiful marble columns . . . and get the graffiti off them.” “We’re going to rebuild our cities, and we’ll work with the Democrats to do it. I’d be glad to work with the people in New York. We’re going to work with the people in Chicago and L.A. We’re going to rebuild our cities and we’re going to make them safe.”

He was trying to turn a page, but what followed the next day—late-night rants on social media, putdowns of Nikki Haley—marked a return to verbal incontinence. He can’t sustain normality. It makes him nervous. Something he said about Doug Burgum showed his assumption. The North Dakota governor, Mr. Trump said, didn’t succeed in his presidential bid because he didn’t gain “traction,” he wasn’t controversial. “Sometimes being a little controversial is good.” It is, but Mr. Trump is a poor judge of the line between controversial and destructive.

In New Hampshire, Ms. Haley may gain traction, may even triumph. Something good may happen for Ron DeSantis. Life is surprise. But it’s time: Ms. Haley should take Mr. Trump on directly and make the serious case against him. Not “I don’t like all the things he says,” but something deeper, truer, more substantive. She could ruminate on the Trump tragedy. He was a breakthrough figure, he did defeat a weak and detached establishment. But he can’t be president again because there’s something wrong with him. We all know this, we all use different words to describe the “something,” but we know what it produces: impeachments, embarrassments, scandal, 1/6.

Meanwhile three things cause unique disquiet among the non-Trump-supporting majority in America, especially after Iowa. One is that in 2016 Trump supporters didn’t know precisely what they were getting. Now they do. Eight years ago it was a very American thing to do, giving the outsider a chance. You never know in life, people grow in office, the presidency softens rough edges. That didn’t happen. They know what they’re electing now.

Second, when Mr. Trump first came in, in 2017, he didn’t know a president’s true and legitimate powers, he wasn’t interested in history, wasn’t up nights reading Robert Caro. He got rolled by a Republican Congress, was too incompetent to get a wall, was surrounded by political aides who were inexperienced and unaccomplished—the famous “island of broken toys.” This time he’ll go in with experience and can be more effectively bad. How long will it take before he starts saying the Constitution mandates a limit of two presidential terms, but his second term was stolen so that means he gets another term after this one?

Third, Mr. Trump shouldn’t be president, and neither should Joe Biden, because they aren’t what we need for the future. What do we need? Someone who feels in her or his gut the wound of the open border and will stop illegal immigration; someone who can cut through the knot of “globalism” vs. “isolationism,” a serious argument that is becoming a cartoon one (internationalists don’t really want to start wars all over; isolationists know we are part of the world and can’t just pull up the bridge). If we can cut through all that we’ll go some distance to forging a true national stance toward the world, and only then can we answer the proper strategy toward China, the responsibility of America in Asia and the Mideast. Someone who can take on identity politics, who knows we all must stand equal. Someone who can reiterate the idea that we do have national values.

Those few (but huge) things, if a leader got them right, would mark a national comeback, and not a further sinking into the mire of the dramas of the past decade.

G.K. Chesterton wrote: “What we all dread most is a maze with no center.” That’s what our national politics feel like now.

Eight years ago I wrote of the driving force behind support for political newcomer Donald Trump. America had devolved into a protected class of the socially and politically influential vs. regular people at the mercy of the protected class’s favored doctrines and political decisions. I think it still pertains, but eight years later I see new shadings. The distance between the elites and the non-elite has widened, the estrangement deepened. When the university presidents testified before Congress in December it became a catastrophe for the elites in part because viewers could fairly come away thinking: They don’t just live far away and have their own ideology, they have their own private language. Their minds seemed to work in a kind of self-satisfied robot loop: “It depends on the context. It depends on the context.” All this delivered with an honestly unconscious condescension.

Something else that I think has changed is—well, something I haven’t fully thought through, but I think the unprotected at this point do not only feel ignored and betrayed, they feel invaded. Twenty twenty, that epic, nation-changing year, tripped something off, began something new, a sense among regular people that some new ideology that doesn’t even have a name had entered their lives on all levels, in their intimate family and work space. The pandemic, with its protocols and regulations and vaccine mandates; the strange things taught in the schools, which were suddenly brought into your home by Zoom; the obsessions with gender and race, the redefinitions of the founding and meaning of America. At the office, the stupid and insulting race and gender instructions, and the index you have to meet when hiring to achieve what someone has decided is the right “diversity” balance.

I think people feel invaded by the ideology with no name. They know it is unhealthy for society, is in fact guaranteed to make us, as a people who must live together, weaker and more divided.

We are not sufficiently noting that this isn’t only a Trump election, it is also the first national election since the full impact of 2020 and its epochal changes sank in.

Voters are going to want more options. Talk will turn seriously to a third-party bid. The great unanswered question will be whether those mounting that party have enough imagination to understand what they could be this year.

Finally we vote. Iowa is Monday, New Hampshire a week from Tuesday. I refuse to see the story as over. “Nothing is written.” Both big parties look set on making a mistake, but there’s time to turn it around.

Democrats on the ground are making a mistake in not rebelling against the inevitability of Joe Biden. He’s no longer up to the job, the vice president never was, and this doesn’t go under the heading National Security Secret Number 379, everybody knows.

The problem isn’t the Biden campaign, however lame it may or may not be. It isn’t that the president’s most important advisers are in the White House, not the campaign. It’s him, and it’s not only his age. His speeches are boring, he never seems sincere, he seems propped up. He doesn’t have a tropism toward intellectual content and likes things airy; his subject matter isn’t life as most people are experiencing it but something many steps removed. He often seems like he just met the text.

His advisers would think, “Then we’ll do more interviews,” but he’s not good there either—hesitant, lacking the confidence you must have to express your own thoughts as they arrive in your head. This means we have a president who, in an election year, has no way of communicating effectively, in person, with the American people. He hasn’t provided the sentence that makes the case for his being kept in office, and he hasn’t painted what a second term might look like, what its Great Intention might be.

Democrats on the ground should raise a ruckus, issue a mighty roar. They can do better than this. To win, I think, they must.

Republicans similarly shouldn’t accept the inevitability of Donald Trump. On the debate stage Wednesday Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis were the Bickersons, and seemed smaller. On Fox, in a counterprogramming coup, the former president was Big Daddy with a sinister side, and seemed big. He’s riding high. He thinks he’s got this thing.

In just the past seven days we learned that he refused to sign Illinois’s traditional candidate’s vow not to attempt to overthrow the U.S. government. Everybody signs it and always has. He warned of “bedlam” if he’s convicted in court and he loses the election. A few days before, Rep. Elise Stefanik, major MAGA mover, refused to say, on “Meet the Press,” that she would accept the outcome of the election. Is that all stubbornness and rhetorical posturing, or is it something more, something hiding in plain sight? If there is ever another day like Jan. 6, 2021, it will be led by people who were there the first time and are now better at it. Last time we didn’t wind up in full constitutional crisis, because systems held. Will they next time? Do we really want to find out?

Mr. Trump will say anything for attention; he wants the cameras on him. He says—again, confining ourselves to the past week—the Civil War could have been negotiated and avoided. Heroic figures in Congress for decades attempted precisely that, trying to thwart and limit the spread of slavery while keeping the nation together. Mr. Trump implied Lincoln wanted war: “If he negotiated it, you probably wouldn’t even know who Abraham Lincoln was.” Yes, Lincoln was a cynical, self-aggrandizing pol, not a genius deal maker like Mr. Trump. What an idiot he is.

What is behind a Republican voters’ decision to stick with him?

Hope—he’ll be better than Mr. Biden, he was good until the pandemic and 1/6, but he’s learned.

Pride—you took a lot of guff for past support, you’re not gonna back off now. Identification—he’s a nonelite. Anger—he’s a living rebuke of the system that has produced disorder. Cold calculation—“In a world full of animals, he’s our animal.”

Mischief, sheer humor—his antics make you laugh, and it isn’t a bad feeling to subvert things when you feel what you’re subverting is decadence.

Some other things, I think. Americans have long used political debate as a distraction from their real lives. Once Mr. Trump is in office again you have a job again. When he’s in power he dominates the stage, the national conversation. Everyone is forced to argue about Trump. Your job the next four years is to defend him. It’s a full-time job so you get to ignore your life and what needs fixing in it. These tend to be the hard parts—lost kids, loneliness, job problems. You can’t fix them, you’re too busy saving the nation! You have to avoid them!

The left does this too, maybe more so. But it all got turbocharged in the Trump era.

More seriously—most seriously—deep down a lot of hard-core Trump supporters, and many not so hard-core, think it’s all over. They love America truly and deeply but think the glue that held us together is gone. Religion and Main Street are shrinking into the past, and in the Rite Aid everything’s locked up. School shootings, mass shootings, nobody’s safe, men in the girls’ locker room, race obsessions, a national debt we’ll never control. China, Russia, nukes and cooked-up plagues. If they decide to do a mass cyberattack and take out our electricity for six months we’ll never get through it. Once we would.

I am always struck by how many jolly, kind, cheerful, constructive Americans hold this sense of impending doom in their hearts and go cheerfully through each day anyway.

But they figure if we’re at the end times, he’s the perfect end-times president, a guy who goes boom.

Some feel our problems are so deep that a democratic republic is maybe at this point just another form of governance, one of a variety, including various forms of autocracy, that might be adopted. Ours is the preferred one, to be sure. But different eras demand different governmental forms, and we don’t exist to serve the form, the form exists to serve us. An odd variation on this is an overconfidence about our democratic republic—we’ve had it since the Constitution was ratified in 1788, we’ll always have it, so stop manipulating people with “Democracy is on the ballot”; nobody’s threatening it, we can never lose it.

But of course we can’t know that. It has to be kept healthy and operating, which means at this of all times we have to be careful. We have to navigate in a sound and prudent way, we have to steer clear of the rocks.

A practical argument would be that whatever the nature or flavor of your conservatism, you surely want to make progress, urgently, with the next Congress. Ron DeSantis or Nikki Haley would come in with the whoosh of the new, aim at conservative legislation, know how to use the levers of power, and get things done. Mr. Trump would come in a lame duck (provided he accepts Constitutional proscriptions), do his crazy-man antics, say his crazy-man things, and proceed with a mad blunderer’s imitation of sophistication.

If your intention is to stand and fight and make things better he’d be the least effective choice.

Ms. Haley is a steely, orderly lady, Mr. DeSantis a bull, Mr. Trump a malign screaming meemie.

The voting begins now. May Iowa prove the heartland of a sound and hopeful nation.

Thoughts arising from the incident at Tokyo’s Haneda Airport and the extraordinary exit:

On Tuesday Japan Airlines Flight 516, carrying 367 passengers, many of them revelers returning from the New Year’s holiday, collided on landing with a Japanese coast-guard plane that was carrying supplies for earthquake survivors of the Noto Peninsula. Five of the six on board the latter aircraft died as a fireball engulfed it. Flight 516, an Airbus A350, also quickly began to burn, its cabins filling with smoke so thick they turned pitch black and flight attendants had to use flashlights. In less than 20 minutes the jetliner was consumed by flames; it burned to a husk. Yet all 367 survived, as did the 12-person crew. It has been called a miracle.

From reporters Motoko Rich and Hisako Ueno in the New York Times: As smoke filled the cabin, “the sound of a child’s voice rose above the din of confusion onboard. ‘Please, let us off quickly!’ the child pleaded, using a polite form of Japanese despite the fear washing over the passengers as flight attendants began shouting instructions.” Order held. Attendants evacuated passengers through the exit doors that were usable. Of the factors that produced a good outcome—a well trained crew, a veteran pilot—“the relative absence of panic onboard during the emergency procedure perhaps helped the most.”

The Times quoted a 17-year-old passenger from Stockholm, Anton Deibe: “The cabin crew were very professional, but one could see even in their eyes that they were scared.” Still, “no one ran ahead to save themselves. Everyone waited for instructions.” It grew hot inside, and people yelled, but, Anton later told the Times, “there was a lot less commotion than I would have thought. The passengers were calm.” He and his family crawled to the door and made it down the emergency slide. “It was a long drop.”

From Journal reporters River Davis, Megumi Fujikawa and Alison Sider: As a blaze spread in the back of the plane, passengers understood “they had only minutes to save themselves from a fiery death.” They shouted to open the doors. Joseph Hayashi, 28, was in seat 27B. He said people screamed at the initial impact, “and then everything got eerily quiet.” The woman in the next seat seemed to know something about emergency procedures. “She started yelling, ‘Put your head down, keep your seat belts on, stay in your seat,’ ” he said. When some people tried to get their things, other passengers responded. “People were like, ‘What are you doing? Those things don’t matter.’ ” Hiroshi Kaneko, a 67-year-old philosophy professor, told the Journal no one around him panicked. “He was more scared when he got home and saw the footage on television.”

After the crash a friend visiting Kyoto wrote me to say he felt the primary reason no one lost their life is that the Japanese are “less individualist and more consensual.” They see themselves as a corporate entity; they are part of something, a nation with ingrained mores and ways of being.

I asked Rahm Emanuel, the U.S. ambassador to Japan, what it is about the Japanese that saved the day. “It’s a society that places high value on personal honor, responsibility to community, and respect for authority,” he said. “No one in Japan would mouth off or be violent with a flight attendant trying to protect you and the rest of the flying public, for example.” He followed up, in a text: “Also, here five year olds walk to school unaccompanied, crossing busy streets for blocks. Cars stop and kids at walkways cross. It’s sublime.”

A question that I suspect crossed a lot of American minds: What if that had been a Delta flight at JFK full of Americans revelers home from holiday? Would it have gone in such an orderly way and ended so successfully?

My guess is that it would have been different. More every-man-for-himself. American individualism is a beautiful thing but can tip toward narcissism, and we’re tipping. The guy in seat 3A would be rummaging through the overhead looking for his bag and blocking the aisle. The 20-year-old woman would be standing on her seat and screaming as she live-streams on TikTok. The social-media influencer in 15B would be demanding someone come and lift her from her seat.

We less and less see ourselves as part of a large corporate endeavor, something with traditions and expectations. We have less expectation the other person will do the right thing. We spend a lot of time on social media watching Americans let other Americans down—robbing them, hijacking cars. We are demoralized by what we see of us. We haven’t absorbed in a long time a healthy sense of “we are the people of America, we stay calm.” Because the meaning of “we are Americans” has changed from “we come from something real and hold just pride in it” to “we come from a rapacious nation founded on wicked things.”

Who wants to be part of that, and carry on that way of being? This too has demoralized us. And since the internet and its constant images, we honor emotion more than thought; and if at the moment what people feel is wild fear, well, be true to your emotions. We don’t respect self-restraint so much, and wonder if it’s cowardice.

Our current virtues, off the top, right now in 2024? We are a people of wild creativity—it’s still there, though more and more feels latent. We are inventive—we find the latest in medical research and devices. We are involved—we’re always fussing about the world and trying, in sometimes dizzy ways, to improve it. We are ambitious: We mean to rise, we like money, fame and glamour, but more-serious attainment, too. We are by nature and tradition egalitarian, deeply so, always have been. Our religious faith, among those who feel it, is profound and unembarrassed, though they seem fewer each year. A lot of us wish to be artists—we’re writing scripts and songs, eager to perform. And we’re friendly: Everyone in the world still acknowledges that.

But we do need to work on our national style. In these areas: common courtesy, which doesn’t have to be an old-fashioned thing. A shown respect for others, an actual concern for them. Putting reason back up there with emotion. And yes, the adults being the adults in the room and on the plane. And looking around and spying the guy in 15F, who looks like an Army Ranger on vacation, who’s alert, focused and capable. And asking him to pick up the guy in first class who’s blocking the aisle while he rummages in the overhead bin. “Just pick him up and put him aside like he’s a piece of luggage.” And the Ranger does, and then announces, “OK, everyone, we’re walking forward. Follow.”

A sense of somebody in charge—that’s one of the things that we lack. A sense of someone taking responsibility.

Maybe I’m wrong, maybe we’d all be peerless on Flight 516. But it can’t hurt to ask: Who you would have been in that crash? What role would you have played?