Peggy Noonan

I’m neither an entertainment reporter nor an industry veteran, but I watch the business and culture of Hollywood pretty closely, and I have a bad feeling about this strike. I hope I’m wrong, but the struggle between the writers and actors unions and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers looks to me as if it will go long and be epic. We may look back on it as one of the consequential labor actions of the 21st century.

The industry said in 2021 that film and television directly create 336,000 jobs and support 2.4 million. Yearly wages total an estimated $186 billion. They constitute a major American export. So the strike matters economically but also culturally. Whatever your just criticism of its products, we want this story-telling industry to continue. You want it employing people who are trying and reaching, you want its art and the arts in general to flourish, because without them we’d be less human, less whole.

Last week smart people were thinking that the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists joining the Writers Guild of America on strike would add heft and force things toward resolution. I thought the opposite. SAG-Aftra’s going in raises all stakes, heightens passions and puts sharper emphasis on the existential aspects of the struggle. Barry Diller, an authentic wise man of the industry, shared his alarm last Sunday on “Face the Nation.” “Of course, who cares about Hollywood?” he said. “But these conditions will potentially produce an absolute collapse of an entire industry.” If the strike continues through the fall, people will cancel their streaming subscriptions because “there will be no programs.” No new broadcast dramas or comedies either. The longer the strike, the greater the damage to a major American industry.

My fear is that the conflict isn’t between competent owners of companies operating profitably and union members who want a larger share. It’s not Ford in 1960 vs. the guys on the assembly line or, still going back in time, prosperous newspaper owners vs. reporters. It’s not the secure vs. the hungry. It looks more like Lost People without vision vs. Aggrieved People feeling genuine grief.

The Lost People are the corporate CEOs and studio and streaming bosses who were concussed when the world shifted under everyone’s feet in 2020. The pandemic turbocharged existing trends, and they scrambled in response. Theatrical releases were impossible; streaming was everything; they followed and fell over each other mounting new services and spending billions on content, though it turns out no one so far knows how to make money reliably on streaming. (And, as Mr. Diller said in 2021, during the spending spree, “Netflix won this several years ago.”) They did high-price megamergers, leaving their companies with tens of billions in debt. Wall Street didn’t like it, and stocks wobbled.

They’re now trying to dig themselves out of the hole. Charitable gloss: They did their best as a historic plague collided with a technological revolution. Less charitable read: They made blunder after blunder and will now cut to reduce costs as uncreatively as they spent. When we think of Hollywood we can’t help think of the old pirates, the Sam Goldwyns and Jack Warners, who in their own bandit way loved movies. Their successors are more like some sort of detached abstract financialist mergerist persons who move around corporate pieces while intuitively understanding none of them. And somehow, succeed or fail, their astronomical pay keeps going up.

Against them are the Aggrieved People, the actors and writers. In the rise of streaming they were denied, against tradition and history, full residual payment for their work. And they see artificial intelligence for what it is: I am become death, destroyer of jobs. And worlds. And words.

The old writers’ rooms, with a dozen people with benefits, will be replaced by AI that will be told by producers to create a murder-mystery based in Chicago in 1970 and will do it. A single human writer without health insurance will then be called in to “make it a little more ragged and human.” You can say, “Oh, that will never happen, no machine can do what a writer does—the nuance, the subtlety, the sensitivity that comes with being human.” But AI’s capability is growing daily.

It will make worse the biggest creative deficit of the past 40 years or so. Long ago writers and actors learned their trades from life—from living in the thick of it, having pre-Hollywood jobs, often knowing low status. They brought that experience to Hollywood. They arrived knowing how real and average humans expressed themselves with words, how they moved and thought. It made for vitality, was democratic, and accounts in part for the great Hollywood acting and writing circa 1930-90. (Ronald Reagan, who served two stints as president of SAG, thought the Hollywood golden age was the 1930s, when the talkies settled in and the sound of words seemed like a miracle, and was thus treated with respect.) But by some point all the new writers and actors came from media, not some true America or true world. They learned how to think and express themselves through the TV shows and movies they’d watched all their lives; they acted and wrote based on what they’d absorbed in not-real life. It made everything less real, and with each generation authenticity thinned out a little more.

AI won’t relieve that problem, it will make it worse. It will feed on the artificialness and replicate it.

No formal negotiations are under way, and there is little discernible trust. When SAG-Aftra president Fran Drescher led the actors out last Thursday her speech was fiery. “We are the victims here,” she said. “We are being victimized by a very greedy entity. I am shocked by the way the people that we have been in business with are treating us.” Earlier, Deadline quoted an unnamed studio executive: “The endgame is to allow things to drag on until union members start losing their apartments and losing their houses.”

We aren’t labor mediators, but general advice would be to bring down the temperature. Both sides share a goal: perpetuation of the industry. It’s only a three-year contract. Neither side has to reach Nirvana; while reality sorts itself out, solid steps in the right direction are progress. Talks should begin. Being at the table and saying nothing is better than not being at the table. (Reagan, who presided over SAG in 1960, the last time SAG and the WGA went out together, once observed that more breakthroughs than you’d think happen during bathroom breaks.) Actors at the table should play against type, refrain from long emotion-laden speeches and be coldly factual. Producers, don’t be fat and imperious. Are those high cards you’re holding against your sweater vest? You don’t even know. Modesty is all.

In the end, producers will have to take a more generous share-the-eventual-wealth approach to talent, and put it on paper. A prediction: If they continue to stiff them, they won’t succeed in breaking the unions but they will embitter the industry for a generation—if it lasts that long—and put a cloud over their own names.

Once in Manhattan in the 1990s at a lunch to celebrate a friend I met the great philanthropist Brooke Astor. The conversation took a turn and she told us a story of when she was young, in her 20s, in the 1920s. It was a summer day on the north shore of Long Island and she was at a club or great mansion of some kind with a big broad lawn. There were tables scattered along the lawn where people were eating lunch, and suddenly they heard a sound from the sky, a deep booming series of stutters. They all looked up. It was an airplane, the first any of them had ever seen. It must have taken off not far away and had trouble, and now here it was, barreling down toward them to land on the lawn. Everyone said “Oh my gosh” and scrambled out of its path. The plane touched down and came to a halt. The pilot jumped out, did something to the engine, jumped back in, started the engine, used the lawn as a runway again and took off.

It was the most amazing thing, she said, everyone was so excited.

“What happened afterward?” I asked. Meaning, what did everyone say after such a marvel?

She cocked her head. “We finished lunch.” Which, even as I write, makes me smile. Those three words captured, in my imagination, a lot about humanity, about what we’re like—you see a miracle, good, but you still have to eat—and everything about the mood of the then-still-dawning 20th century: America was chock full of miracles, they were expected. You oohed and aahed but accepted it in the course of things and finished your tuna.

Googling around the other day I saw the plane could have come from nearby Roosevelt Air Field, in Westbury, Long Island. Charles Lindbergh took off in the Spirit of St. Louis from there, in 1927, for the first solo trans-Atlantic flight, to Paris. Amelia Earhart flew out of there too, and Wiley Post. It was named for Quentin Roosevelt, Teddy’s son, a World War I combat aviator who was killed in action in an aerial dogfight over France.

Anyway it was lovely, her sweet memory of a summer day. I have recounted it from memory, didn’t take notes because I didn’t realize it would stay with me. It’s come to mind after 10 summer days in Manhattan and on Long Island, of conversations with all manner of folk. I think I sense a general mood of carefulness about the future, a sobriety that isn’t down, precisely, but is, well, watchful.

At almost every gathering artificial intelligence came up. I’d say people are approaching AI with a free floating dread leavened by a pragmatic commitment to make the best of it, see what it can do to make life better. It can’t be stopped any more than you can stop the tide. There’s a sense of, “It may break cancer’s deepest codes,” combined with, “It may turn on us and get us nuked.”

My offered thought: AI’s founders, funders and promoters made a big recent show of asking Congress to help them fashion moral guardrails, but to my mind there was little comfort in it. I think they had three motives. First, to be seen as humble and morally serious—aware of the complexities of this awesome new power and asking for help in thinking them through. Second, they are certain government is too incompetent and stupid to slow them down or impede them in any meaningful way, so why not. Third, when something goes wrong they can say, “But we pleaded for your help!”

That unfriendly read is based on 30 years of observing our tech leaders. They have a sense of responsibility to their vision and to their own genius, but not to people at large or the American people in particular. They always claim they’re looking for better communication and greater joy between peoples when in the end it turns out they’re looking for money and power. And they only see the sunny side of their inventions because they were raised in a sunny age, and can’t imagine what darkness looks like, or that it comes.

A subject that came up only once, and indirectly, is Ukraine. I think support for that country is no longer the unalloyed thing it was. People once eager to discuss it now don’t. Time passes and doubts creep in. The loss in blood and treasure is high, the West is simultaneously proudly united and out on a limb, and Russia is in a way already defeated (huge financial and reputational loss, military humiliation, its government revealed as ridiculous). Vladimir Putin is possibly a psychopath and gives every sign of going out like Al Pacino in “Scarface”—“Say hello to my little friend.”

We don’t know where this goes. All who call for a battlefield victory as opposed to some sort of attempt at a negotiated settlement, unsatisfying as that would be, will probably eventually have to factor this in: that public sentiment means something, always, and it can change. Last week we hit 500 days since Mr. Putin invaded. People don’t like long wars.

I tried the patience of a foreign-policy specialist by saying that if China were thinking creatively it would stun the world by pushing itself forward as mediator and peacemaker. China has natural sway with Mr. Putin, but also would with Volodymyr Zelensky, who must be thinking of his country’s potentially brilliant postwar future in tech and industry. Two things Ukrainians have shown: They are a gifted people, and they are a people. You can go far with that. Anyway, everyone wants to be friends with big bad China. Xi Jinping has the standing to make a move. It would improve his country’s reputation after a dozen years in which that reputation has grown dark and menacing. Why not make a move that surprises the world?

A foreign-affairs specialist said this was a romantic idea. True enough. But the problem with the world isn’t that there’s too much romance in it, is it?

I close with a small lunch at a white-walled restaurant on Long Island. Present were accomplished foreign-policy thinkers and lawyers. After something said at dinner the previous night, the subject of ghosts crossed my mind. What do you think, I asked, are they real? Suddenly we were off to the races. One was a skeptic but the kind of skeptic who’s clearly spent time thinking about it. Another thought ghosts a real phenomena—the ghost of his late father, an artist, was seen in his studio. This led my mind to the enduring mystery of prophecies and dreams in history—Lincoln’s repetitive dream before major Union victories, his prophetic dream of his own death. Dreams are . . . something. Not just your mind at rest firing off neurons, not just an undigested piece of cheese, not only expressions of repression or family dynamics in the Freudian sense. They are something we don’t know. Maybe AI will figure it out.

Then the talk turned to magic. It was nice—all these smart and accomplished rational thinkers agreeing there’s a lot of mystery in life, things all around us that we don’t know, forces we can’t see and don’t credit, and that it’s all connected somehow to a magic within life. Hearing they thought this—it was sweet.

If you frequently have a screen on, your impression this summer is that all the hungry things are coming closer in. The sharks are coming closer to shore, the beaches suddenly closed. Bears have been coming in closer for years, deer too. Alligators are advancing onto the golf course and creeping out of the pond.

Candidates for president are coming in closer, away from their natural habitat in the greenrooms of the east and into the heartland primary states, marching in July Fourth parades, waving sweatily, hoping someone will wave back. To mark their summer kickoff, a few thoughts on the race.

The first primaries are just more than six months away, the first GOP debate is next month, and yet the only thing to be sure of is that clear and consistent majorities of Republicans, Democrats and independents don’t want the choice they’re likely to get, a race between Joe Biden and Donald Trump. It has a depressing effect on political talk. If either party were daring and serious about history, it would shake off its front-runner and increase its chances of winning in 2024. It feels weird that, politics being the cold business it is, neither is making this pragmatic decision.

Democrats are stopped by their fear of the apparatus of presidential power. They’re afraid to push against the big, inert, tentacled power blob that is the presidency. They fear they can’t raise money in such circumstances; they fear unsettling things—better the devil you know—and fear that a challenge to Biden-Harris will be interpreted by a major part of their base as a move against the multiracial first female vice president. They fear their party isn’t organized enough, in a way isn’t real enough, to execute an unexpected national primary race.

If Mr. Biden had more imagination than hunger, he’d apprehend his position and move boldly: “After long thought, I judge that I have done the job set for me by history: I removed Donald Trump and saw to the ravages of the pandemic. I now throw open the gates and say to my party: Go pick a president. You did all right last time, you’ll do fine this time too.” What a hero he’d be—impressive to his foes, moving to his friends. History would treat him kindly too: “Not since George Washington . . .” But he has more hunger than imagination.

Many Republicans, the polls say, are also having trouble letting go.

This weekend I reread Paul Johnson’s “Napoleon,” which came out in 2002, part of his series of brief lives. Johnson paints his subject as genius and devil and spends time on his political unscrupulousness: “French rule was corrupt and rapacious.” In conquered nations France took everything not nailed down, especially art, which would go to the Louvre for the convenience of the world. At birth, nature gave Napoleon great gifts but “denied him things that most people, however humble, take for granted—the ability to distinguish between truth and falsehood, or right and wrong.” He was a mountebank who hid his “small feminine hand” inside his waistcoat and lavished his person with cologne.

It should be noted, should your mind be going there, that Donald Trump isn’t Napoleon, who was a serious man, or anyone else. He’s a one-off, and of his time.

But Johnson writes of the cult of Napoleon in a way that is now pertinent. As he rose, “the English intellectuals, if that is not too fancy a term, were divided.” Lord Liverpool, who as a young man had witnessed the French Revolution and never got over its horrors, located his place in history: Napoleon was the man who took a violent French mob and turned it into an army that terrorized Europe. William Wordsworth protested his cruel treatment of the peasants in occupied countries; Samuel Taylor Coleridge saw him as a threat to democratic freedoms—“the evil genius of the planet.” Edmund Burke was of course Napoleon’s most powerful literary foe.

Others, still captivated by the revolution, saw him as its residual heir. Some hated monarchy and welcomed Bonaparte as an enemy of the British throne. Some admired him “more as a criticism of British institutions and ruling personalities than in approval of his doings.” The poets John Keats and Percy Shelley saw him as a romantic hero, a daring breakthrough artist of history. Johnson thinks they were influenced by the work of Napoleon’s paid propagandists, especially the painters Jacques-Louis David and Antoine-Jean Gros.

“The cult of Bonaparte was originally wide, but it did not last,” Johnson writes. It had power in the moment, but it passed. Reality settled in; history made its judgments. The cultists changed the subject, or added nuance when pressed to explain their previous support.

But Johnson sees in the Napoleon cult the beginning of something, the rise of mass and effective political propaganda. “In the twentieth century, this infatuation was to occur time and again.” George Bernard Shaw, that brilliant man, fell for Stalin and became his willing dupe. Norman Mailer and others worshiped Castro; French intellectuals celebrated Mao.

The Irish writer Fintan O’Toole wrote in the New York Times in 2017 of Shaw’s loyalty to Stalin. In political cults there is “the tendency to fantasize. . . . There is the same impatience with the messiness and inefficiency of democracy, and it leads to the same crush on the strongman leader who can cut through the irrelevant natterings of parliaments and parties.”

Back to now. Chris Christie could easily defeat Joe Biden. So could several of the GOP candidates now in the field. Donald Trump wouldn’t, for one big reason: His special superpower is that he is the only Republican who will unite and rally the Democratic base and drive independents away. He keeps the Biden coalition together.

A sad thing is that many bright Trump supporters sense this, and the case against him, but can’t concede it and break from him, in some cases because they fear him and his friends. They don’t want to be a target, they don’t want to be outside the in-group, they want to be safely inside. They curry favor.

This weekend at a party, one of Mr. Trump’s New York supporters, a former officeholder, quickly made his way to me to speak of his hero. He referred to the Abraham Accords and the economy and said: “Surely you can admit he was a good president.”

He was all wound up, so I spoke slowly. “I will tell you what he is: He is a bad man. I know it, and if I were a less courteous person I would say that you know it, too.”

He was startled, didn’t reply, and literally took a step back. Because, I think, he does know it. But doesn’t ever expect it to be said.

A journalist in our cluster said, musingly, “That was an excellent example of apophasis,” the rhetorical device of saying something by saying you’re not going to say it.

We all moved on, but that was the authentic sound of a certain political dialogue. “Surely you can admit he made France great again.” “He is a bad man.” Its antecedents stretch back in history.

Political cults are never good, often rise, always pass. May it this time come sooner rather than later.

What happened in Russia last weekend? What will it mean for the world? I remember the words of a veteran American diplomat years ago: “Avoid premature joy.”

We look at Vladimir Putin and think: That man has been rocked and exposed. He didn’t think an erstwhile ally was going to take arms against him and declare a march on Moscow. He couldn’t have imagined Yevgeny Prigozhin’s advance would be smooth, that town to town he’d meet no resistance, that the locals would stand around and watch, that Mr. Prigozhin’s forces would shoot down a half-dozen helicopters. This does deep damage to the dictator’s mystique—the sense that he’s the only man, the inevitable man, the strongman.

But he survived. He ended the rebellion with dispatch. He’s still here. And survival has its own mystique.

As this is written he’s back to business as usual: in meetings, making a speech at a Moscow technology fair. Wednesday he greeted happy crowds on the streets of Derbent, in southern Russia. The New York Times notes he broke with his longtime stringent Covid protocols to mix with the crowd and kiss a little girl. One of Mr. Prigozhin’s criticisms was that Russian leadership had been isolated throughout the war, not meeting with military leaders, doing everything by phone.

But we learned things about Mr. Putin. There is every sign he misjudged the situation and wasn’t confident of his position. This was telling. In his speech to the nation last Saturday, he looked scared, talked hot and drew a stunning historical parallel. He invoked 1917, when Russian troops threw down their arms during World War I and went home to join the revolution. That produced turmoil—“the collapse of the state and the loss of vast territories,” followed by civil war. “We will not allow this to happen again.” At war again, anything that weakens Russia is “a knife to the back of our country and our people.” “Those who staged the mutiny and took up arms against their comrades—they have betrayed Russia and will be brought to account.”

And yet before the weekend was out he’d essentially tell Mr. Prigozhin: It’s OK, never mind, go your way.

Mr. Putin’s problem: He didn’t know who’d be loyal to him. What are called the elites—the influential and prosperous, those holding secondary seats of power—weren’t going to back Mr. Prigozhin and weren’t going to back Mr. Putin; they were going to back the winner who emerged. Early this week the Center for Strategic and International Studies hosted a conversation on the still-unfolding events, and a comment by CSIS fellow Maria Snegovaya captured this. “The public, the society, the elites, they have all taken a pause while all this has been unraveling,” she said. “Particularly stunning is the silence of Margarita Simonyan, the notorious editor in chief of RT, who just disappeared from Telegram for a couple of days and then resurfaced saying that ‘Oh well, sorry guys, something happened—I was away, I’m sorry, on holiday, vacation.’”

Beyond that and more important, I think Mr. Putin looked so scared during the crisis because he didn’t know and could not know who his military would back under pressure. After 16 months of a demoralizing, embarrassingly unwon war, would the brass be loyal to the boss of 23 years or the supposedly competent mercenary commander in from the field?

The military probably didn’t know themselves. I suspect events would dictate their loyalties—whether Mr. Prigozhin’s forces grew and proved competent in fighting, or whether his column would be bombed, stopped and scattered.

That is probably why Mr. Putin made his unprecedented deal—stop, leave now, and I won’t hold it against you. And I suppose it’s why Mr. Prigozhin stopped and fled the field. He didn’t know if he could pull off something serious. He’s not Alexei Navalny, the dissident imprisoned for producing a compelling political challenge to Mr. Putin. He’s a hot-dog salesman turned Putin crony. He could organize certain things, but he’s not a serious man—he’s a slob. And if you’re a slob, you’re surprised when someone takes you aside and tells you when you take arms against a dictator you’ll be crushed like a bug. From reports, it sounded as if this hadn’t crossed Mr. Prigozhin’s mind, and he decided he might have to rethink.

It would be nice to think the past 10 days will leave Mr. Putin wondering if he’s pushed the war too far, made a terrible mistake, and must begin looking for the least humiliating path out. But I don’t guess he’s doing Putin Agonistes. I think he’ll conclude what he needs is more victories. And he’ll do anything to get them.

Here is a wholly imagined scenario that wouldn’t shock me in the least. Mr. Putin will not only publicly forgive Mr. Prigozhin and what remains of the Wagner Group; he will, in line with a great man’s magnanimity, privately befriend him. Mr. Putin will order Mr. Prigozhin to take some city. Mr. Prigozhin, his safety dependent on victory, will rouse his men and make some breakthrough. And after he wins the tragic news will spread—Mr. Prigozhin died heroically on the field. No one will mention the Russian colonel who calmly took him out with a pistol shot to the head and was overheard muttering, “Clean him up and ship him to Moscow for the state funeral.” Where Mr. Putin will deliver a eulogy about reconciliation in the greater, mystical cause of the endurance of the Fatherland.

I close with the one bit of lasting damage Mr. Prigozhin really did.

In the audio clips he posted on Telegram at the beginning of his adventure, he said things that have been said before in Russia but not by someone so prominent. Russia is losing in Ukraine: The cost in blood and treasure has been greater than the military admits. The army is “retreating in all directions and shedding a lot of blood. . . . What they tell us is the deepest deception.”

The war, Mr. Prigozhin said, was launched under false premises. Ukraine wasn’t the aggressor. President Volodymyr Zelensky wanted agreements. Russia’s Defense Ministry “is trying to deceive society and the president and tell us a story about how there was crazy aggression from Ukraine, and that they were planning to attack us with the whole of NATO.” This was “a beautiful story.” But “the special operation was started for different reasons”—chiefly to enrich the oligarchs and the ruling elite. “The task was to divide material assets” in Ukraine.

“The oligarchic clan that rules Russia needed the war,” Mr. Prigozhin said. “The mentally ill scumbags decided: It’s OK, we’ll throw in a few thousand more Russian men as cannon fodder. They’ll die under artillery fire, but we’ll get what we want.”

Russian elites want stability. They’d like progress, a better Russia in a better world, though after the last century they’d be forgiven for equating regime change with meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

But it will surely mean something in the execution of the war that Mr. Prigozhin described the entire effort as a cynical and cruddy little blunder.

Why are we still drawn to the Titanic? Why, 111 years after it went down, doesn’t our interest fade? What is the endless lure that billionaires and explorers put their lives in their hands just to see it? What is it about that ship and that story?

After its remains were discovered in 1985, the director James Cameron, who would make the blockbuster 1997 film, went down in a Russian sub to film the wreckage. Later in interviews he spoke of what he came to understand after the ship emerged from the darkness. “It wasn’t just a story, it wasn’t just a drama.” The sinking of the Titanic was “like a great novel that really happened.” His film carried the lore to new generations, but there had been popular books and movies before. Obsession was a pre-existing condition. It’s why the studios let him make the costliest film then ever made: They knew there was a market. Why?

The Titanic story is linked to themes as old as man. “God himself couldn’t sink this ship.” “If we eat the fruit against his command, then we’ll be in charge.” “Technology will transform the world; it’s a mistake to dwell on the downside.” It’s all the same story. In the search for the submersible this week Britain’s Telegraph quoted retired Rear Adm. Chris Parry of the Royal Navy. Why, he wondered, would anyone get into a “dodgy piece of technology” like the submersible? “It is fundamentally dangerous, there was no backup plan, it’s experimental, and I’m afraid to say there’s an element of hubris if you want to go down and do that.” Everyone thinks he’s unsinkable.

The Titanic’s story has everything. Splendor and perfection meet a sudden, shocking demise. A behemoth, a marvel of human engineering, is taken down by a stupid piece of ice. We make ships in our pride and nature makes icebergs for her pleasure. No one is insulated from fate: There was no protection in wealth, the sea took who she wanted. It’s a story of human nature, of people who had less than three hours to absorb that they were immersed in a massive tragedy and decide how to respond. Some were self-sacrificing, some selfish, some clever, some fools. But ultimately, as on 9/11, they all died who they were. The brave were brave, the frivolous frivolous. The professionals in the band did what professionals do, play through to the end of the evening.

Anyone who hears those stories wonders: Who would I have been if I’d been there?

The Titanic captured nearly everything about America at the exact point at which it happened. The ship was built and registered by the British but it is the American imagination it most captured.

In first class, the Gilded Age aristos and plutocrats—the merchants, industrialists and sellers of things in their fancy dress. They weren’t embarrassed to be rich, wore the grandest silks and top hats and jewels, not so much to be vulgar—that was new money’s job—but because they wanted to be noticed and admired, and perhaps they thought it said something about them as persons that they’d done so well.

In second class, regular people—sturdy coats and practical shoes. No one’s ever that interested in them. In third class, the ethnics of Europe—the immigrants to America coming in waves just then peaking. Satchels, rough clothes. It was crowded in steerage; there were more children.

And all the different classes could peer at each other from the different decks. Just like today.

Among those who died, was Isidor Straus, a co-owner of Macy’s department store. Something about him always touched my heart. His wife, Ida, refused to leave his side to get on a lifeboat. Thinking about him the other day, I made up a story about the dynamism of the era:

The last day of the journey he was peering down, watching a young Irishman on the decks below throwing a ball with his mates, comically enacting triumph. At one point the young man helped a mother of three as she lost control of her youngest, who was barreling toward the rail. Straus asked his valet to bring the young man up.

“What are your plans?” Straus asked.

“Don’t got a plan. Take a chance. It’s America.”

Straus gave him his card and said to look him up when they got to New York. The young man survived, holding on to big wooden chairs he’d strapped together. Weeks later he presented himself at Macy’s, showed a manager the card and told the story. The manager, knowing old Isidor Straus, knew it was true.

Macy’s gave him a job in the basement stacking inventory. He worked his way up and in 1937 became the first Irish-American CEO of a major department store. In 1942 he was dragged by a friend to a backer’s audition for a Broadway show, a musical about Oklahoma, the first from a duo called Rodgers and Hammerstein. He underwrote the show, it became the smash of the decade, his friends called him a genius, but he knew he wasn’t. There was just a thing in the music, a kind of dream ballet, and when he heard it his mind went where it rarely went, to a moment long ago—a man with a fiddle and a song in a big ship listing in the darkness . . .

Again, the story of the Irishman isn’t true, but something in the story of the Titanic gets you spinning tales.

My friend John Gardner says the reason the Titanic endures is that there was an immediate connection in the public mind with the Great War. The 20th century was to be the century of progress. Peaceful, prosperous Europe was beyond war. Everything was science—the new world of psychotherapy and a Viennese named Freud—and the arts—Stravinsky, Diaghilev, Seurat. And then one June day in 1914, two years after Titanic, an obscure archduke was assassinated. In Europe’s great capitals, miscalculation after miscalculation yielded a sudden continental disaster. “The glittering failure of a glittering Titanic came to be seen as a premonition of all that, the end of an old world.”

I end with something mysterious, for no tale lives without mystery.

Art sometimes heralds what’s coming. Artists—true artists—often know things they don’t know they know. In the years before big dramatic events there’s often something in the air, and sometimes the vibrations enter artists’ brains, whether they’re conscious of it or not, and show up in their work. In the foreword to Walter Lord’s great Titanic history, “A Night to Remember,” published in 1955, the first thing he notes is that in 1898 a struggling writer named Morgan Robertson wrote a novel about a fabulous Atlantic Ocean liner carrying wealthy, self-satisfied people that went down one cold April night after hitting an iceberg. “The [Titanic] was 66,000 tons displacement; Robertson’s [liner] was 70,000. The real ship was 882.5 feet long; the fictional one was 800.” Both vessels could carry some 3,000 people, both could make 24 to 25 knots, and both carried only a fraction of the lifeboats needed if something bad happened. But little matter, because both were called “unsinkable.”

What did Robertson call his ship? The Titan.

Isn’t that something? Makes you wonder what artists are seeing now.

I went back this stunning week to the first columns I’d ever written about Donald Trump, eight years ago, in the summer of 2015. It was for me a powerful experience. Columnists think aloud pretty much in real time, trying to apprehend and express what is true and important. I’ll speak of some of what I read and then go to the criminal indictments.

In early July, just after his announcement, I saw him this way:

“Donald Trump is an unstable element inserted into an unsettled environment. Sooner or later there will be a boom.” He “has poor impulse control and is never above the fray. He likes to start fights. That’s a weakness. Eventually he’ll lose one.

“But Donald Trump has a real following, and people make a mistake in assuming his appeal is limited to Republicans. His persona and particular brand of populism have hit a nerve among some independents and moderate Democrats too, and I say this because two independent voters and one Democrat (they are all working-class or think of themselves that way) volunteered to me this week how much they like him, and why. This is purely anecdotal, but here’s what they said:

“They think he’s real, that he’s under nobody’s thumb, that maybe he’s a big-mouth but he’s a truth-teller. He’s afraid of no one, he’s not politically correct. He’s rich and can’t be bought by some billionaire, because he is the billionaire. He’s talking about what people are thinking and don’t feel free to say.”

“He is a fighter. People want a fighter.” But “Mr. Trump is not a serious man. . . . Blowhards don’t wear well.” I didn’t see him lasting.

Three weeks later I talked with a Trump supporter in northwest Georgia, an old acquaintance who told me how she saw it:

“Why Trump? ‘He’s very wealthy and can turn around the economy. He’ll get things moving. The Donald will kick a—.’ She knows other supporters locally and among friends of her son, an Iraq vet. ‘. . . He’s igniting their passion. He’s telling them ‘I will make this country great again,’ and they believe him.’”

“Does it bother her that Mr. Trump has never held elective office? She paused half a second. ‘It bothers me a little bit.’” But “get it done” is more important.

I grappled with what I saw as a spreading movement. “His rise is not due to his supporters’ anger at government. It is a gesture of contempt for government, for the men and women in Congress, the White House, the agencies. It is precisely because people have lost their awe for the presidency that they imagine Mr. Trump as a viable president.” The GOP establishment is “waiting for Mr. Trump to do himself in—he’s a self-puncturing balloon. True, but he’s a balloon held aloft by a lot of people; they won’t let it fall so easy.”

In that column a theme arose that was important to me. I felt Trump supporters, who included family members and old friends, were being patronized and disrespected by political and journalistic establishments. They shouldn’t be dismissed as nihilists. “They’re patriots, and don’t experience themselves as off on a toot but pragmatic in a way the establishment is not.”

In August 2015, a second look at his appeal. “When citizens are consistently offended by Washington, . . . they become contemptuous. They see Mr. Trump’s contempt and identify. What the American establishment has given us the past 20 years is sex scandals, money scandals, two unwon wars, an economic collapse, an inadequate recovery, and borders we no longer even pretend to control. They think: What will you give us next, the plague?” Mr. Trump voices their indignation.

“I don’t know what happens with Mr. Trump, but Trumpism? That’s here now—outlandish candidates backed by indignant, enraptured people who’ve lost their judgment. Congratulations to the leaders of both parties: The past 20 years you’ve taken us far. We’re entering Weimar, baby. The swamp figure is up from the depths.”

I have been startled at how much I said then that I’d say now.

Here we get to the criminal indictment, and my real-time read on what it means.

The charges aren’t about press clippings, personal letters and autographed photos of foreign leaders. The federal criminal indictment charges Donald Trump with illegally keeping, hiding and showing to others national-security documents including information on U.S. nuclear programs, potential vulnerabilities of the U.S. and its allies to military attack, and plans for possible retaliation in response to a foreign attack.

You can’t get more serious, more breathtaking, in a charge against a former president. The documents have to do with the most essential of our security interests. They are about how we keep our country safe from military attack.

It is said Mr. Trump’s base never wavers and always rallies, and historically this has been true. When he’s accused of being a trickster in business they don’t care—it’s extraneous to presidential leadership. They don’t care if he’s an abusive predator of women—again, extraneous, old news. But endangering our national security, including our nuclear secrets? That is another matter.

This won’t solidify his position with hard-line supporters. Deep down they know “What about Hillary?” doesn’t answer the questions: “Why would Trump do this? Why would he put America in danger? Who did he show those papers to?”

As to soft Trump supporters, the charges do nothing to keep them in his camp. They reinforce the arguments of former Trump Republicans now backing other candidates: He was our guy but in the end he’s all danger and loss.

What were Mr. Trump’s motives? Why would he refuse to give the documents back, move them around Mar-a-Lago, mislead his own lawyers about their status and content?

Because everything’s his. He is by nature covetous. “My papers” he called them.

Because of vanity: Look at this handwritten letter. Kim Jong Un loves Trump. See who I was? Look at this invasion plan.

Because he wished to have, at hand, cherry-picked documentation he could deploy to undercut assertions by those who worked with him that he ordered them to do wild and reckless things.

My fear is that Mar-a-Lago is a nest of spies. Membership in the private club isn’t fully or deeply vetted; anyone can join who has the money (Mr. Trump reportedly charges a $200,000 initiation fee).

A spy—not a good one, just your basic idiot spy—would know of the documents scattered throughout the property, and of many other things. All our international friends and foes would know.

Strange things happen in Mar-a-Lago. In 2019 a Chinese woman carrying four cellphones, a hard drive and a thumb drive infected with malware breezed past security and entered without authorization. She was arrested and jailed for eight months. Another Chinese woman was arrested soon after; a jury acquitted her of trespassing but convicted her of resisting arrest. In 2021 a “Ukrainian fake heiress and alleged charity scammer” gained access, according to the Guardian.

Who else has?

Mar-a-Lago isn’t secure. Those documents didn’t belong there. It is a danger to our country that they were. This story will do Mr. Trump no good with his supporters. It will hurt him—maybe not a lot but some, maybe not soon but in time. I mean the quiet Trump supporters, not big mouths and people making money on the game, but honest people.

Here is a small thought that arose from the big firing at CNN.

Shifts in personal fortune and unexpected turns remind us of what we know in the abstract and forget in the particular. They remind us that life is not, as a friend once reflected, a painting. In a painting the curtain doesn’t move. In life it moves, often softly but sometimes, in a storm, wildly.

They remind us of rise and fall. Life is dynamic—fate, chance and character play big, determinative roles. We go through the daily grind thinking nothing ever changes, but life is change. Sometimes it’s barely perceptible; sometimes it goes boom.

“Expect the unexpected.” That was the attitudinal advice of the veteran newsman Harrison Salisbury to the young then joining his profession. Born in 1908, he’d covered World War II, Moscow after the war, Vietnam. You have to hold your mind open to the constant possibility of sharp turns.

As this is written, Donald Trump is said to be a target of a criminal investigation by the Justice Department. We don’t know how broad or persuasive any charging document would be, how soon an indictment might be handed up. We don’t know if any information released might leave a Trump-inclined voter saying, “That’s it, I’m done.” Or if an indictment would increase Mr. Trump’s popularity, as legal charges have in the past.

Mr. Trump may be sailing unimpeded to the Republican nomination. He may be cruisin’ for a bruisin’.

But here is the potential political surprise that is on my mind. For months people have been talking about a serious third party entering the 2024 presidential race. I believe that if the major party nominees are Joe Biden and Mr. Trump—but only if they are—a third party will certainly enter the race and put up candidates for president and vice president. And if a few crucial things break its way—they have to get on almost every state ballot; and put forward a solid ticket, not a brilliant one but solid, two accomplished people, one from each party, presumably political veterans, whom people could see, hear, and think they could do the job—they’d have an even or better than even chance of surprising history by winning.

If they can do those two difficult things, and avoid scandal and total incompetence, they could do it. I don’t know other people who think this, but I do.

The biggest political group in America isn’t Democrats or Republicans; it is the unaffiliated. Gallup, which does a monthly poll on political affiliation, reports a record number of Americans say they are politically independent. In March Gallup put the share of independents at 49%—pretty much the same as the two parties put together. A Gallup analyst told Axios that while it’s not unusual for the young to declare themselves independent more than the old, it is unusual that as Gen X and Millenials get older they seem to be staying independent and not joining a party, possibly out of aversion to a perceived stigma of partisanship.

An NBC poll in April reported 70% of voters don’t want Mr. Biden to run for re-election, and 60% don’t want Mr. Trump to run again. It said about half of Democrats don’t want Mr. Biden. An AP-NORC poll found 44% of Republicans don’t want Mr. Trump as their nominee.

These are huge numbers, and if you believe them—they roughly comport with my observations, so I do—then the predicates for a successful third party are there.

But here’s where my mind always goes: Ross Perot launched his independent presidential bid in 1992, when America was a more normal country, one that colored more within the lines, and not as furious and polarized as now. Even then certain fault lines were emerging—on trade, globalism, and the growing distance between elite perceptions of what was real and important, and those of common folk. Perot was a business visionary, the founder of a great company, Electronic Data Systems. He was public-spirited and blunt-talking. In June 1992 he was leading both George Bush and Bill Clinton. But his campaign was hapless and gaffe-filled, and he was unpredictable. He dropped out of the race, re-entered in the fall, said operatives were trying to spy on him, and by the end it was pretty much out there that Ross Perot was slightly crazy.

Even with all that, Perot got almost 20% of the vote. Twenty percent when they thought he might be a little nuts. With that in mind I can quite imagine a competent third party now getting 35% of the vote to the other guys’ 32% and 33%, say. What would happen then? Most likely, no candidate would receive a sufficient Electoral College vote. The election would go to the House, causing uncertainty that would at some point be resolved. It would be real edge-of-the-seat stuff in a nation that already has too much edge-of-the-seat stuff, but also seems to like it.

The group No Labels has so far got a third party on five ballots. A spokesman said it hopes to be on 29 by the end of the year and 34 not long after. No Labels plans to hold a convention in April in Dallas to announce a ticket, and final ballot efforts will be led by the nominees. So far, state to state, it’s been hand to hand. Democrats and their aligned groups see a third party as an existential threat. Trump people aren’t in the game yet, but if and when Mr. Trump seems assured of the GOP nomination they likely will be. It’s unknown and unclear which party would lose most through a third party challenge. My guess: both more or less evenly.

Third-party supporters always have a reputation as political dilettantes—affluent people with too much time on their hands. They’re slammed as unrealistic, the kind of people who’d order off-menu at a bad restaurant and assume for some reason the food will be better. Actually in the past when thinking about them I’ve been reminded of what JFK said, musingly, about businessmen and union leaders. Business executives he met with were well-educated, culturally conversant, sophisticated—but strangely clueless about politics. Union leaders were unlettered and crude but knew everything about politics, down to the precinct level.

Third-party people like to get together and fantasize about their dream ticket. They should be hyperfocused instead on getting on ballots. And they should stop seeing themselves as the world sees them, nice dreamy centrists. They should take themselves and their position more seriously.

It will be hard to get the ticket right. Why not just throw the question open to a convention? Because you probably want seasoned and attractive political veterans as your nominees, but the moment prospective candidates come forward they’re dead within their own party. They’ll probably put themselves forward only if a nomination is sure.

A lot has to be done right to make a third party real. But I don’t know why people dismiss the idea. Life is surprise. In life the curtain moves, and in a storm it moves wildly.

If Trump Republicans propel Donald Trump over the top in the primaries, they will be doing and will have done two things. They will have made him their nominee for the presidency, and they will have ended the Republican Party.

I don’t mean this rhetorically, in the way of people walking around the past eight years crying, “The party as I knew it is gone.” I mean it literally: The GOP will disappear as a party. Meaning the primary national vehicle of conservative thought and policy will disappear.

Whether you approved or disapproved, tearing the party off its deep-dug tracks in 2016—away from things it had stood for since 1980, away from the sort of candidates it had generally put forward—was a wrench, for some a trauma. But the party proved itself able and elastic. There was “a great deal of ruin” in it, as Adam Smith said. It had enough give to absorb and endure.

But a third Trump nomination? The third time it breaks.

Put another way, once is what you did (made a mistake, as people and parties do). Twice is what you did (almost out of loyalty to the first mistake). But a third time—that isn’t what you did, it’s who you are.

If the party chooses Trump in 2024 it will mean it has changed its essential nature and meaning, and that it is split in a way that can’t be resolved by time. Republicans of the suburbs, of the more educated and affluent places, won’t agree to be the official Trump Forever Party. They just won’t. They will leave. Some will go third-party and try to build something there. Some will blend into the Democratic Party and hope they can improve things there.

Trump supporters will stay on in a smaller, less competent party. But they will, as time passes, get tired of losing and also drift on somewhere.

But there will be no Republican Party after a Trump ’24 race, which, again, means the vehicle of conservative thought and policy will be gone.

So the question right now isn’t so much whether you like Nikki or dislike Ron, it is: Do you wish the Republican Party to disappear as a force in American political history? If you answer honestly that you do, you will be leaving the entire national field open to the Democratic Party, where the rising energy will continue to be from the hard left. (The old boomer moderates of both parties are aging and leaving.) Do you want to abandon America to progressive thinking? If you do, you are no longer a politically involved conservative, but more like a nihilist. It’s all ugly and corrupt, blow it up. Like a young Antifa activist.

To think about the long term, to be strategic, to be serious about the implications of your decisions—those are good and needed things right now.

In the past we worried here that a crowded field would equal a Trump victory. This may prove true, but the field is crowding up because Ron DeSantis started to look as if he might tank, and if he does there has to be someone. The political ego always says, “I’m someone.”

Maybe at the end they will coalesce. For now the field grows. Chris Christie is—still!—expected to enter soon. A few weeks ago I wrote of his street-fighting ways. He is almost Trump’s equal in showbiz and his superior in invective, so he can do some damage. Would it be a suicide mission? I don’t know. But those kamikazes took out a lot of tankers. He has been told that if he takes down a bad guy and loses, he goes down in the history books, and if he takes down a bad guy and wins, even better. Seen this way he can’t lose.

Here are two strengths and two challenges.

Mr. Christie is a wholly undervalued executive talent. People forget what a good governor he was when he was being a good governor, which is not a typo. In eight years (2010-18) in deep blue New Jersey he capped property taxes, used the line-item veto to limit spending, increased school funding, got more charter schools, and got the state through the true disaster of superstorm Sandy.

He shared by text a few weeks ago what he considers his two biggest policy achievements: He won public-employee pension reform with big Democratic majorities in both state legislative chambers and despite huge and intense public union opposition. And, interestingly: “Camden was the most dangerous city in America in 2013. We fired the entire police department, rehired a new force built around community policing and violence de-escalation. . . . Ten years later murder is down 63%, shootings down 68%, and robbery down 70%. No violence after George Floyd.”

Love him or hate him, he knows what to do with power. He isn’t secretly frightened of it, as many politicians are.

Second, he is politically gifted. In 2013, the year he won re-election by 22 points, I spent a day with him on the trail and wrote of what I saw—the presidential-sized crowds, the affection and something else: the lost joy of politics. His pleasure in the game and the meaning of the game, his remembering that on some level it is a game, to be won or lost to cheers or boos. What a figure.

A challenge: People don’t remember what a golden boy he was. He was at his political height 10 years ago, in a country that barely remembers last week. He is going to have to do a lot of reminding without sounding like the guy at the bar remembering that time he kicked the field goal.

And there were scandals. He’s from Jersey, where by tradition they play fast and loose and there’s no Big Journalism to patrol the streets and scare the alderman on the take. And Bridgegate. People may not remember the specifics—for days in 2013 his office secretly blocked and diverted traffic on the George Washington Bridge to punish a local political foe—but they remember the outlines. He said he didn’t know what his office was up to, but the damage was severe. People thought: Whatever he knew, whatever he did, the leader sets the tone. At one point in the 2016 cycle he led Hillary Clinton, but his primary bid failed, getting only 7% in New Hampshire.

From the Department of Unasked-For Advice: Own it, big boy, own it all. Scandals like that either deepen you, make you wiser, smack you in the head and make you reflect—or they kill you. It’s one or the other. He doesn’t look dead to me.

Make it part of the story. You had everything and lost it in a big mistake that was linked to personal flaws. “I broke my own heart.” All that unused talent, all the guts. What did he learn? What is it like to be, as he said, “humiliated” in front of the whole country?

He did break his own heart. He can’t say it? This is America, 2023; no one here hasn’t broken his own heart.

Radical candor for your last-chance power drive: Concede what people know and tell them what they don’t, or have forgotten.

Two political opposites declared for the presidency this week. Sen. Tim Scott has the most winning personality in American politics but few policy accomplishments. Gov. Ron DeSantis has the least winning personality in the field but a long record of policy victories and a vivid political persona.

Mr. DeSantis is getting beat about the head for a strange and unsuccessful launch. Twitter Spaces audio? How about—a far-out idea, but stay with me—a TV channel where you can just hit the “on” button and see a face? A campaign introduction video narrated by some guy with an English accent? Is that supposed to evoke Winston Churchill?

I don’t know if Mr. DeSantis is baffling, but his campaign is. While Donald Trump rose the past three months, the campaign was like Gen. George McClellan, endlessly training his troops, carefully preparing them for the coming war, not noticing the war was already raging.

I’m not sure normal people care if a campaign launch was a mess. A good launch would surely have been a boon, stopped a bleed or provided a boost. But the battle is won day to day. Kamala Harris had the best launch of the 2020 cycle—a crowd of 20,000 flooding Oakland City Hall in a beautifully advanced event—and she dropped out at the bottom of the polls before a single vote was cast.

Anyway, pile-ons are boring. I would say Mr. DeSantis has two unusual and important virtues as a political figure. He knows it—he understands his policies on a granular level. He means it—as he speaks, you don’t suspect that he’s faking it, that his inner views are different. If he wins the nomination, the argument will be over those views. Right now the argument is about the delivery mechanism, Mr. DeSantis himself.

Man, he’s intense. He reminds me of what was said of young Joe Biden, that his fuse is always lit. He should play up his biography, because it’s interesting. Regular middle-class kid, local baseball, then Yale, Harvard, the U.S. Navy. This is the dream. What did he learn? What does he know from that? It’s not boorish to share your story. Kind of a compliment to the country that a kid with no special connections rose so high so quick.

At some point, I think soon, he’ll have to make a serious, textured and extended case against Donald Trump. Not insults and nicknames, not “Can he take a punch? Can he throw a punch?” No, something aimed at the big beating heart of the GOP that tells those who’ve gone on the Trumpian journey and aligned with him that they can no longer indulge their feelings. At a crucial point in history they’ll lose again, and the damage to the country will be too great. Throwaway lines like “the culture of losing” aren’t enough. That’s just a line that signals. Don’t signal, say. Include the long history of political losses—Congress, the presidency, the opportunity for a red wave in 2022.

Yes, tell those good people that you served your country in a tragedy called Iraq and the other guy claimed bone spurs and ran during a tragedy called Vietnam. You think you don’t have to say it, but you do. People who love Mr. Trump need reasons they can explain to themselves to peel away.

Mr. DeSantis has obscured and hidden his main calling card, which six months ago people were familiar with. His calling card was that in a time of true national crisis—a historic pandemic, the sharp rise of woke ideology—he provided strong leadership under which his state thrived. He had a terrible hurricane and kept the place up and operating. That is his headline. It’s all gotten obscured by other things. People say “Disney,” and I say not only that but yes, Disney. That corporation made a big mistake when it inserted itself into the “don’t say gay” fight—it was overbearing, claimed too much space, presumed, messed with the public. It was a mistake, and Mr. DeSantis beat it back early and won. More is overkill. You can’t just be against corporations—they make jobs, provide services, help communities thrive. Their taxes pay for rebuilding the bridge when the hurricane comes. They are full of moderates themselves fighting internally to keep things sane.

On transgender issues, it is hard to resist a destructive ideology while maintaining, in public ways, respect and affection for those who are wrong. And who don’t necessarily want your respect and affection. But you have to try anyway. Because it’s right and nice, and we’re human beings, and people can see good faith, sometimes in time and often reluctantly. And because it keeps those you’re opposing from arguing, persuasively, that you’re just playing a culture-war card and they’re only road kill on your highway to victory.

Mr. DeSantis should embrace the clichés about his personality—that he is awkward, distant, unfriendly. He shouldn’t run around grinning, laughing and kissing babies. Or rather he should, but also he should make fun of his charmlessness. Name some victory and then say, with a straight face, “It must have been my charm.” Refer to a legislative triumph and say he must have gotten it through the state Senate because of his fabulous warmth. “That was my people skills.”

As people laugh they’ll realize it wasn’t charm and wasn’t warmth but might have been something more valuable and rare: skill. Actual competence.

I am running out of space for Tim Scott, who deserves more. “He is a breath of fresh air,” former Sen. Rob Portman told me by phone. “He is truly a good person willing to look to the brighter angels. He is not a cynical pol.” They sat next to each other on the Senate floor through two impeachments, “one of the few times you’re required to be in your seat.” A lot of notes were passed back and forth. Mr. Portman saw who came to talk. “He is beloved,” Mr. Portman said.

Mr. Scott knew real want and instability as a child, has told his story and will tell it on the trail. His competitors say all he has is bio. But in politics in the current moment, biography is policy. Donald Trump was a rich businessman; he’ll make the economy good. Barack Obama was an intellectual community organizer; he can bring us together. And biography can take you far when it reflects your basic political essence. In Mr. Scott’s case, he rose through basic conservative principles, faced it all as a black man, and still loves America, seeing it for what it is and not as the cartoon others draw. That is powerful. But yes, it will have to be undergirded by broader policy stands.

He’s from South Carolina, a frisky conservative state, and watched his fellow senator, Lindsey Graham, be batted about for independence on various issues and early opposition to Mr. Trump. It left Mr. Scott cautious. But running for president is an incautious act and will demand more.

It’s said he’s really running for vice president. But nobody puts himself through a grueling presidential campaign who doesn’t want the top job. Then again, as Ms. Harris will tell you, the way to become vice president is to run for president. Trump’s Truth Social post welcoming Mr. Scott into the race did sound a lot like, Welcome, future running mate!

Some thoughts on Trump/Russia occasioned by the release of the Durham report, which found that the Federal Bureau of Investigation got ahead of itself in launching a full-scale probe of allegations of Trump campaign collusion with Russia, that it relied too much on “raw, unanalyzed, and uncorroborated intelligence,” and that partisan hostility played a determinative role in investigators’ decisions.

Sounds about right. Yet I still don’t know what to think of Trump/Russia and am not satisfied we’ll ever fully understand it.

Certain aspects of the overall Trump story fed the Trump/Russia saga. One is that from the day Donald Trump announced his presidential candidacy, June 16, 2015, there was a distance, which proved unbridgeable, between elite knowledge of Mr. Trump and normal American knowledge of him. At the time he announced, he had been a New York character for 40 years. We knew him. He was part of our sideshow—the tuxedo-clad hustler plagued by scandals and accusations of shady business deals. He called reporters using fake names with fake voices to plant fake items.

New York, the center of the nation’s media, was, in 2015 as now, full of people in leadership positions in newspapers and networks who’d been watching him for four decades. They came at his candidacy with an unusual level of intimacy; they knew pretty much everything.

But in normal America, which hadn’t spent 40 years reading about him and literally walking by him on the sidewalk, he was the star of “The Apprentice”—the strong, decisive man at the boardroom table. They’d known him that way for a dozen years. He’d written some books. He was a regular guest on “Fox and Friends” with refreshingly heterodox views. They had a completely different sense of who he was.

People high up in government agencies in Washington would have started with a view of Mr. Trump closer to New York’s than normal America’s.

Another aspect that contributed to Trump/Russia is that Mr. Trump was such a shock to the system of experienced people in positions of authority in the professions, very much including government—he was so impossible to imagine as president, such an obviously bad man and thus a threat to our country—that otherwise temperate and responsible people found themselves willing to believe anything about him, and, in the case of the FBI, willing to pursue any probe even when the evidence was thin or nonexistent. They experienced themselves as motivated by patriotism: They were protecting the country. They wound up damaging the reputation of the great institution of which they were part.

This is what they forgot: Even a bad man can get railroaded.

A signal moment in the mess was the release of the famous Steele Dossier, the allegations contained in a report by a former British spy named Christopher Steele, first published by BuzzFeed in January 2017. The dossier claimed that Mr. Trump, in past Russian travels, had been surveilled by Russian intelligence, whose agencies exploited his “personal obsessions and sexual perversion in order to obtain suitable ‘kompromat’ (compromising material) on him.” According to “Source D,” “TRUMP’s (perverted) conduct in Moscow included hiring the presidential Suite of the Ritz Carlton hotel, where he knew President and Mrs OBAMA (who he hated) had stayed on one of their official trips to Russia, and defiling the bed where they had slept” by engaging in perverted acts. The hotel was known to be under FSB control, “with microphones and concealed cameras in all the main rooms to record anything they wanted to.” The FSB had documented enough of his “unorthodox behavior in Russia over the years . . . to be able to blackmail him if they so wished.”

Anything is possible, but the dossier read like the breathless work of a 10th-grader who’d just read a spy thriller. It was puerile, half literate—the hissy “he hates Obama” offered as a revelation when anyone who watched television knew that; the prissily careful definition-for-dunces of “kompromat;” the information that spies might use microphones and cameras, the sourcing—the Ritz story was supposedly “confirmed by Source E.”

This wasn’t a first-class intelligence product. It wasn’t even second-class. It sounded like a former spy out of a job and making things up for money. And of course it turned out the whole thing came from a Hillary Clinton operative as part of an operation funded by the Clinton campaign. It was merely a Watergate-type dirty trick.

But then, in July 2018, came a swerve in the opposite direction. The famous Helsinki news conference between President Trump and Vladimir Putin was shocking in a very different way.

By then, Russian attempts to disrupt and interfere in the 2016 election were clear. In the news conference following the meeting of the two presidents, Jonathan Lemire of the Associated Press stood with a question for Mr. Trump, noting that every U.S. intelligence agency had concluded that Russia interfered with the 2016 election. Mr. Putin had just denied it. “My first question to you, sir, is who do you believe? My second question is, would you now, with the whole world watching, tell President Putin—would you denounce what happened in 2016 and would you warn him never to do it again?”

Mr. Trump took that moment to denounce the FBI, implying the bureau was incompetent or corrupt. He then said he had been told by the director of national intelligence Dan Coats, that Russia had interfered. But Mr. Putin denied it: “He just said it’s not Russia. I will say this, I don’t see any reason why it would be. . . . I will tell you that President Putin was extremely strong and powerful in his denial today.” Mr. Trump thanked Mr. Putin for cooperating with the investigation. “I have confidence in both parties.” (Mr. Trump later said he misspoke and meant to say he didn’t say “why it wouldn’t be.”)

It was chilling: An American president, on foreign soil, was denigrating America’s own intelligence and law-enforcement agencies, undermining his own country, and in front of a dictator he would have known was guilty of interfering with a U.S. election. Russian entities had attempted to contact his campaign in 2016; his own campaign manager had offered polling information to Russian operatives.

In 2016 Russia had hacked the computer servers of the Democratic National Committee and arranged for the leaking of its emails. Mr. Trump didn’t publicly call this unacceptable or vow that Moscow would pay a price. Instead he gave a news conference in which he said, “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing” from Mrs. Clinton’s private email server.

Sen. John McCain called Helsinki, “one of the most disgraceful performances by an American president in memory.” It was.

I’m glad for the Durham report, respect it, and have no reason to doubt any of its conclusions. But its purpose wasn’t to answer every question about Donald Trump and Russia. To my mind there’s still a lot of mystery there.

What was that strange thing between Messrs. Trump and Putin? People say Mr. Trump just likes dictators, but I don’t know. He’ll trash anyone and has—his own vice president, “Little Rocket Man,” China during the pandemic. He never trashes Mr. Putin.

What was that? What is it?