Peggy Noonan

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?

Well, that was a disaster, a politically historic one. It situated Donald Trump as the central figure of the 2024 presidential cycle, certainly more compelling than the incumbent or the other competitors. It will have an impact on the campaign’s trajectory.

When it was over I thought, of CNN: Once again they’ve made Trump real.

It was one of those events in which you understood within 45 seconds what you were seeing. He was greeted by a standing ovation. The audience didn’t surprise itself by doing this; it knew how it felt.

He was focused, high-energy, looked capable in his insane way. Tanned, rested and ready. Actually he looked pretty much as he did in 2016; on Wednesday night at least, age hadn’t taken the round side of its ball-peen hammer to him.

He steamrolled the moderator, talking over her, dismissing her, as they stood together, as nasty. He spoke with what seemed like conviction, backed down on nothing, made things up.

It was salutary in that it was a reminder of Donald Trump’s power. But it was all misconceived.

CNN is taking incoming fire from everyone. Should it? Yes. It was early to play around like this, to introduce all the proto-presidential hoopla, to give him this solo boost, to re-enact so showily all the careful respect they showed him in 2016.

I don’t suppose we’ll ever know, but one got the impression the network agreed to a lot of conditions to get the get. He was addressed as “Mr. President” throughout when, considering the circumstances and after Jan. 6, Mr. Trump would have been just fine. He gave no sign he saw the moderator as formidable. As for the audience, a local New Hampshire official seemed to sigh in a text: “I assume that was part of the deal.”

That wasn’t Gov. Chris Sununu’s broad GOP. It certainly wasn’t representative of New Hampshire in general or of New Hampshire on primary day, when undeclared voters can cast ballots for any presidential candidate in either party. The Republicans in the audience seemed more like supporters of the Trump-endorsed candidates who went down in flames last year. They sounded to me like the constricting part of the party. They chuckled when he talked about sexual assault.

It all sort of dragged us back into a hopeless repetition of the past: “Crazy Nancy,” “rigged election,” “whackjob.” Like a harrowing memory endlessly looping back on itself.

If I were the president of CNN I’d feel like the Alec Guinness character at the end of “The Bridge on the River Kwai.” Suddenly he realizes that all his work, his entire mission, only helped the bad people he meant to oppose. “What have I done?”

The interview questions were predominantly mainstream rehashes that producers thought might make news. They were a step removed from actual debates going on within the Republican Party Mr. Trump wants to lead.

Ramesh Ponnuru in the Washington Post offered the kind of questions he wished had been asked: Why have so many high-level officials of your own administration, including an attorney general, national security adviser, defense secretary and two communications directors, turned against you? Are you bad at hiring people? With Republicans holding both the House and Senate in the first two years of your presidency, why didn’t you get funding for the border wall? Were you rolled by Speaker Paul Ryan, or did you just drop the ball?

Mr. Trump’s critics, foes and competitors will say that he often lied. Of course he did, over and over. It’s what he does. Dogs bark, bears relieve themselves in the woods; we can’t keep “discovering” this.

He lied about the 2020 election (he lost it, it’s been probed and adjudicated), the Jan. 6 riots (there is no evidence, written or otherwise, that he issued an order to send in 10,000 National Guard troops, and his acting defense secretary testified that he was never given such direction), his tax cuts (they were neither the biggest in history nor bigger than Ronald Reagan’s) and the wall (he didn’t build one across the border with Mexico.)

He spun out assertions, charges and interpretations. His special talent, his truest superpower, is seeming to believe whatever pops out of his mouth, and sticking to it. Observers shake their heads despairingly: “He lies and people believe him.” I think it’s worse than that. He lies and a lot of supporters can tell it’s a lie—they know from their own memory it’s a lie, that, say, Jan. 6 wasn’t a “beautiful day” of “patriots” full of “love”—but they don’t mind. They admire his sheer ability to spin it out.

You’re tickled by his boldness, his fearlessness, and when the lie drives the media and the stuffed shirts mad, you’re delighted. He’s subverting the elites and the corrupt power structures they’ve erected. And the great thing is you’re in on the joke, on the mischief. You get to take part.

In a big lonely country that has power. I suspect he knows this.

To a Republican who might vote for him, who’d consider it but isn’t committed, Mr. Trump likely came across Thursday night as on point, committed and informed, though a little wild around the edges, and maybe not totally trustworthy. But I imagine a lot of wavering Republicans might be thinking to themselves: inflation, crime, interest rates, senility, we’re slipping, Joe Biden went too far left . . .

I’m not sure people are nostalgic for Mr. Trump, I think they’re nostalgic for this: “I could buy a car in 2019.” They may come to think Mr. Trump’s malice and crazy are a price they can pay to get back to how it was when they felt less besieged.

They might assume he’s learned at least some practical lessons from his mistakes in 2017-21. But he hasn’t. That’s what the town hall told us: He’s exactly the same guy.

For months I have held in my head two separate and opposing thoughts. One is that the more Republican candidates get into the race the better the chances for Donald Trump. In 2016 in a field of 17 all he needed was a plurality to win, and he almost always got it. Therefore, Republicans should discourage new entrants.

The second thought is that this strategy is weird and limiting. Nothing gets said, no policy or meaning of things is discussed. Everything feels frozen. It’s a strategy that’s all about Donald Trump’s fate. It turns the primary into a waiting room. It’s passive and stokes an air of inevitability. It almost disenfranchises the half or more of the party that doesn’t want Mr. Trump, that needs to hear other voices. It renders the race lifeless, bloodless. It ain’t human. And politics must be human.

I now think Republicans should do the opposite of the Democrats and have a big, needed brawl—wake this thing up, talk about meaning, have the argument, brawl it out.

It’s not all up to Mr. Trump and his fate. Nothing is inevitable. He is evitable.

It is a party with a great history. Maybe it’s dying, but if it is it shouldn’t be like this, without a last, hellacious fight. What the heck. Everyone into the pool.

GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump will be going on CNN next week, for a live Town Hall, for several reasons:

To mix it up, like the old days. To be the dramatic focus of attention in a potentially sparky environment, like the old days. To remind people of positive things they experienced during his administration. To go at Joe Biden. To show a contrast with Ron DeSantis, who avoids mainstream media—Mr. Trump has no fear of them. To attempt to stanch the bleeding among independents.

A sophisticated friend of his wondered this week what attitude Mr. Trump will bring to the stage. Will he double down or act as if he’s learned some lessons? Will he say what he always says about Jan. 6 and the pandemic, or will he go broader, perhaps even share a hindsight regret? The friend thought the latter route smarter—it would be fresh, and independents might say “huh, interesting”—but expressed no confidence it would happen. I think that was a hint that if Mr. Trump doesn’t present himself as a man who’s learned some lessons, his prospects aren’t good.

Reports continue from Trumpworld that he will skip the first few Republican primary debates, and has told the Republican National Committee as much. This should surprise no one. This isn’t The Master jerking around the organizers to win concessions—How about only Trump speaks and the rest express their thoughts in pantomime?—it is sheer and obvious calculation. He’s leading, his competitors are trailing; they need it, he doesn’t; he’s famous, they aren’t. One of them could land a shot and ding his mystique. Why expose himself? The audience grows if he shows, shrinks if he doesn’t; his absence hurts his rivals. And he can always counterprogram, going live on another network while the debate is on. (I have a rooting interest: The second debate is at the Reagan Library, where I’m on the board.)

But I think the real reason he might skip the debates is that he’s scared of being up there on stage for two hours in an uncontrolled environment with a group of people who are gunning for him. He hasn’t had to do that since 2016. The last time he did, he had nothing to lose. His competitors flailed—he was an unknown quantity; they didn’t know what they were up against. He’s older now, 77 in June. He’s out of political shape. He’s throwing reporters’ phones. He mostly does venues he can control—rallies.

When I was writing this I saw what Chris Christie said on Hugh Hewitt’s show: “If he really cares about the country, then he’s going to get up there, and he shouldn’t be afraid. I’m sorry to see that Donald Trump feels like if he gets on the stage, he’s at risk of losing his lead. If, in fact, his ideas are so great, if his leadership is so outstanding, then his lead will only increase. . . . But obviously he’s afraid. He’s afraid to get on the stage against people who are serious. . . . And if he’s afraid he has no business being president.”

That’s a taunt that’s the truth. If Mr. Christie gets in, it would be as an undervalued executive talent who’s learned a few lessons and is a street fighter. When I think of him in debate with Mr. Trump, I think of the old World War II movies in which the captain of the sub is at the periscope and sees the enemy warship. “Right full rudder.” “Load torpedo bay.” “Fire torpedo one.” You see the straight line going underwater at the fat belly of the ship. Kaboom.

The other candidates, announced and potential, are leery of Mr. Trump—his pull with their own supporters, his success as the nickname assassin. But Mr. Christie would open up a can of Jersey on him.

There’s an old boxing saying attributed (with varying language) to Joe Louis and Mike Tyson: Everyone has a plan until he gets punched in the face. Donald Trump has never had to rethink his plan because he never took it full in the face. He doesn’t have to take what he dishes out. He’s never been the focus, onstage, of a serious, capable, sustained assault on policy or comportment. No one on his side has ever challenged him to his face on how and why he failed as president.

No one knows if he could take it. He doesn’t know.

Trump supporters think in terms of wrestling: “To be the man, you gotta beat the man.” To defeat Mr. Trump you have to attack him. But here, they say, is the problem: If you attack Mr. Trump, his base will never forgive you.

They say this as a warning: Damage Mr. Trump and you seal your own fate.

But Donald Trump isn’t some protected species, he’s a politician subject to the same rules of politics as anyone else. If you go at him successfully you’re a hero to many, a villain to some, and you move from there. He should be challenged like anyone else, not treated like a golden egg on a down pillow.

The presidency requires a fight. It doesn’t need your deft little jabs, your prudent self-protectiveness and indirect critiques.

I don’t think Mr. Trump’s people understand the immovable boulder in the path of a Trump election. It’s not the chaos, the impeachments, the scandal—at this point no one can keep them or their outcomes straight. It’s the actions he took from Nov. 3, 2020, through Jan. 6, 2021—the fraudulent attempts to subvert the election, culminating in the violent overrunning of the U.S. Capitol. Which an entire nation, very much including Trump people, watched in honest horror.

Mr. Trump’s people see this as a political problem, a messaging problem, and not what it is, a moral one. But it is the thing Mr. Trump can never get past. I believe Republicans who are soft Trump supporters, who feel drawn in his direction out of loyalty or indignation at his enemies but who aren’t settled or sure, must begin to see that the American people won’t let that man back in the White House. Because they know he’ll try to do it again, only more competently, next time.

Most of those around Mr. Trump know his problems—bad judgment, little understanding of history, disordered ego. They’re for him for their own reasons. But to their credit, they never say, “He’s wiser than he was in his first administration,” or “He’s mellowed,” or “This is a good man.”

When your own people can’t say these things, that is a weakness. What they do believe, and will say, is the Democrats are worse, the media is worse, and Mr. Trump was never treated fairly. That is their sole unifying principle.

Those around Joe Biden believe in Mr. Trump, in that they believe they can take him. He can take Mr. Trump again. They can’t know that about other candidates but they know it of Mr. Trump because he does what Mr. Biden has long struggled to do, rally and unify the Democratic base. They long to read, “Trump Wins GOP Nomination.” It means the November headline is “Biden Re-Elected.” How odd it would be for Republicans at this point in history to give Democrats what they so long for.

Look at people’s faces when you say, “Looks like it’ll be Biden and Trump.” Those faces tell you everything—the soft wince, the shake of the head, the sigh. Those are the emblems of the 2024 campaign right now.

Seventy percent of his own party doesn’t want Joe Biden to run. More than half his party doesn’t want Donald Trump to run. Yet here at the moment we are, with this growing sense of sad inevitability. “Apparently there are only two people in America,” Desi Lydic, sitting in on “The Daily Show,” explained.

Mr. Biden is unopposed because his party couldn’t rouse itself to do what Democrats have almost existed to do, have a big, mean, knockdown, drag-out brawl. Sometimes party discipline is a failure and a mistake. Republicans at least are having a fight but, yes, primary state polls show Mr. Trump dominating.

Feels like another disaster, doesn’t it?

I agree with those who say the problem isn’t only Joe Biden’s age but the implication his age carries: that if he is re-elected there’s a significant chance Kamala Harris will become president. She has been a mystery, a politician who has been unable to say anything pertinent or even coherent on policy. Instead, the loud and sudden laughter unconnected to any clear stimuli, and the sheer looping nonsense of her words. This will give voters pause.

On the Republican side the great not-Trump option, the consistent number two in the polls, has been deflating. It is too early to say Ron DeSantis’s candidacy won’t work. But it feels like it won’t work. But life is surprising.

I’m not going to pick on him on the Disney fight. I thought Disney wrong to come forward, as a major corporation, and use its beloved name to take sides on a delicate state educational issue that was being handled democratically—as in, the governor, who would soon be up for re-election, made a policy decision, got a bill passed, and if the voters don’t like it they could throw him out. Disney shouldn’t have pushed its way in to advance its cultural preferences. That said, Mr. DeSantis’s pushback was as dramatic as it was incompetent.

A big challenge for politicians is the management of powerful and competing interests and institutions, especially those that want to galumph into local political arguments. You have to manage this with firmness but as little friction as possible, because there are always a million arguments and friction keeps things too hot. Not explaining your stand, and Mr. DeSantis isn’t good at explaining his thinking, doesn’t help. Giving the sense you’re getting a partisan kick out of the fracas makes it worse.

Yes, a big challenge for corporations is to remember their mission. For more than a century Budweiser’s mission was to make beer and sell it at a profit. Disney has been entertaining America for nearly a century. They should do that. Except in the most extraordinary and essential cases they shouldn’t give in to the temptation to put themselves forward as deep-thinking cultural leaders. Mind your business, keep your side of the street clean, treat your people well, set a standard, pay them well. Don’t add to the friction. It doesn’t help; it only makes things more bitter.

Mr. DeSantis is reported to be announcing his presidential run later this spring. I got an interesting note about him the other day from the veteran political operative Alex Castellanos. He said the problem for Mr. DeSantis is not that he’s unlikable: “The problem for Ron is worse. It’s that he does not like us.” When voters see a political figure likes them, they start to trust him, because they know “he will do a lot to preserve their affection.”

Politicians find ways to be popular when they’re not so likable. Richard Nixon was one.

But here is the real point of this column. If it starts to seem clear that America is once again locked into a Trump-Biden race, I think the electorate is going to get frisky. I don’t see people just accepting it. I see pushback and little rebellions. Two examples:

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who announced last week, this week hit 19% support among Democratic voters. That’s a lot! Especially for a guy who’s been labeled a bit of a nut. (He has been a leader of the idea that childhood vaccines are connected to autism.) But his larger general message would appeal to the edges of left and right, and blends into the general populist mood: Corporations and the government are lying to you, playing you for a fool.

And in an odd way his past nuttiness bolsters his believability: He has worn the scorn of establishments as a medal. His own family isn’t for him. It doesn’t seem to mess with his swing.

He has what Mr. Trump has: star power. And there is the name. I recently was with a physical therapist—early middle age, suburban, not especially interested in politics—who, while working my back, asked if I knew Mr. Kennedy. No, I said. Is he drawing your interest?

She spoke admiringly of his family—of JFK, of RFK the father. She liked them and thought their politics were similar to hers. I asked if she had any living memory of JFK or RFK. No, she said, she was born after they were killed. And yet she spoke of them as if she remembered them.

I say watch him. He is going to be a force this year.

Second, watch a third-party bid. The centrist group No Labels says it’s provisionally attempting to get on the ballot in all 50 states. We’ll see how that works. But a third party, if it comes, could have real and surprising power in this cycle. I am the only person I know who thinks this but, again, look at peoples’ faces when you say it will be Trump or Biden.

Independents now outnumber members of each party. No hunger for a third-party effort is discernible in the polls. So the effort would have to blow people out of their comfortable trenches and make them want to go over the top to seize new ground. It would have to be something centrists, by their nature, aren’t: dramatic. The people who would lead such an effort worry about whether or not they’d wind up as spoilers for the Democrats. You could argue as well it might spoil things for the Republicans.

They should be thinking: We are past the moment for such questions. If you think the country is in trouble and needs another slate of candidates, do it. No ambivalence, no guilt about spoiling it for the lesser of evils. If you’re serious, go for it. Look at the other two guys as spoilers.

A third party would have to have compelling candidates for president and vice president. That would be hard. I am not certain a third party is desirable. But I don’t think it’s impossible.

Third-party enthusiasts tend to be moderate, sober-minded. Such people are almost by definition not swept by the romance of history. But we are living in a prolonged crazy time in American politics. Anything can happen now.

Really, anything. I wonder if they know it.

The dawn of the internet age was so exciting. I took my grade-school son, enthralled by Apple computers, to see Steve Jobs speak at a raucous convention in New York almost a quarter-century ago. What fervor there was. At a seminar out West 30 years ago I attended a lecture by young, wild-haired Nathan Myhrvold, then running Microsoft Research, who talked about what was happening: A new thing in history was being born.

But a small, funny detail always gave me pause and stayed with me. It was that from the beginning of the age its great symbol was the icon of what was becoming its greatest company, Apple. It was the boldly drawn apple with the bite taken out. Which made me think of Adam and Eve in the garden, Adam and Eve and the fall, at the beginning of the world. God told them not to eat the fruit of the tree, but the serpent told Eve no harm would come if she did, that she’d become like God, knowing all. That’s why he doesn’t want you to have it, the serpent said: You’ll be his equal. So she took the fruit and ate, she gave to Adam who also ate, and the eyes of both were opened, and for the first time they knew shame. When God rebuked them, Adam blamed Eve and Eve blamed the serpent. They were banished from the garden into the broken world we inhabit.

You can experience the Old Testament story as myth, literature, truth-poem or literal truth, but however you understand it its meaning is clear. It is about human pride and ambition. Tim Keller thought it an example of man’s old-fashioned will to power. St. Augustine said it was a story of pride: “And what is pride but the craving for undue exaltation?”

I always thought of the Apple icon: That means something. We are being told something through it. Not deliberately by Jobs—no one would put forward an image for a new company that says we’re about to go too far. Walter Isaacson, in his great biography of Jobs, asked about the bite mark. What was its meaning? Jobs said the icon simply looked better with it. Without the bite, the apple looked like a cherry.

But I came to wonder if the apple with the bite wasn’t an example of Carl Jung’s idea of the collective unconscious. Man has his own unconscious mind, but so do whole societies, tribes and peoples—a more capacious unconscious mind containing archetypes, symbols and memories of which the individual may be wholly unaware. Such things stored in your mind will one way or another be expressed. That’s what I thought might be going on with Steve Jobs and the forbidden fruit: He was saying something he didn’t know he was saying.

For me the icon has always been a caution about this age, a warning. It’s on my mind because of the artificial-intelligence debate, though that’s the wrong word because one side is vividly asserting that terrible things are coming and the other side isn’t answering but calmly, creamily, airily deflecting Luddite fears by showing television producers happy videos of robots playing soccer.

But developing AI is biting the apple. Something bad is going to happen. I believe those creating, fueling and funding it want, possibly unconsciously, to be God and on some level think they are God. The latest warning, and a thoughtful, sophisticated one it is, underscores this point in its language. The tech and AI investor Ian Hogarth wrote this week in the Financial Times that a future AI, which he called “God-like AI,” could lead to the “obsolescence or destruction of the human race” if it isn’t regulated. He observes that most of those currently working in the field understand that risk. People haven’t been sufficiently warned. His colleagues are being “pulled along by the rapidity of progress.”

Mindless momentum is driving things as well as human pride and ambition. “It will likely take a major misuse event—a catastrophe—to wake up the public and governments.”

Everyone in the sector admits that not only are there no controls on AI development, there is no plan for such controls. The creators of Silicon Valley are in charge. What of the moral gravity with which they are approaching their work? Eliezer Yudkowsky, who leads research at the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, noted in Time magazine that in February the CEO of Microsoft, Satya Nadella, publicly gloated that his new Bing AI would make Google “come out and show that they can dance. I want people to know that we made them dance.”

Mr. Yudkowsky: “That is not how the CEO of Microsoft talks in a sane world.”

I will be rude here and say that in the past 30 years we have not only come to understand the internet’s and high tech’s steep and brutal downsides—political polarization for profit, the knowing encouragement of internet addiction, the destruction of childhood, a nation that has grown shallower and less able to think—we have come to understand the visionaries who created it all, and those who now govern AI, are only arguably admirable or impressive.

You can’t have spent 30 years reading about them, listening to them, watching their interviews and not understand they’re half mad. Bill Gates, who treats his own banalities with such awe and who shares all the books he reads to help you, poor dope, understand the world—who one suspects never in his life met a normal person except by accident, and who is always discovering things because deep down he’s never known anything. Dead-eyed Mark Zuckerberg, who also buys the world with his huge and highly distinctive philanthropy so we don’t see the scheming, sweating God-replacer within. Google itself, whose founding motto was “Don’t Be Evil,” and which couldn’t meet even that modest aspiration.

The men and women of Silicon Valley have demonstrated extreme geniuslike brilliance in one part of life, inventing tech. Because they are human and vain, they think it extends to all parts. It doesn’t. They aren’t especially wise, they aren’t deep and as I’ve said their consciences seem unevenly developed.

This new world cannot be left in their hands.

And since every conversation in which I say AI must be curbed or stopped reverts immediately to China, it is no good to say, “But we can’t stop—we can’t let China get there first! We’ve got to beat them!” If China kills people and harvests their organs for transplant, would you say well then, we have to start doing the same? (Well, there are people here who’d say yes, and more than a few would be in Silicon Valley, but that’s just another reason they can’t be allowed to develop AI unimpeded.)

No one wants to be a Luddite, no one wants to be called an enemy of progress, no one wants to be labeled fearful or accused of always seeing the downside.

We can’t let those fears stop us from admitting we’re afraid. And if you have an imagination, especially a moral imagination, you are. And should be.