Peggy Noonan

I’ve been meaning for the longest time to write about Jimmy Carter’s “malaise” speech, long derided by history and cited to explain his landslide drubbing by Ronald Reagan 16 months later.

It was, in fact, a good speech—brave, original and pertinent to the moment. It failed because he was exactly the man who couldn’t give it, and he gave it at exactly the moment it couldn’t be heard.

The backdrop was an air of crisis. Summer 1979: The oil crisis, inflation entering double digits, interest rates rising, unemployment too. There was widespread fear America had lost its economic mojo, perhaps forever. “Running out of gas,” John Updike’s Rabbit Angstrom thought as he surveyed the landscape in “Rabbit Is Rich.” The traffic on Pennsylvania’s Route 111 was “thin and scared compared to what it used to be.” “The people out there are getting frantic, they know the great American ride is ending.”

Into it came the president and his speech. He never used the word malaise—that’s the word people used to damningly describe it. He spoke, in slow tempo, for 33 minutes, from the Oval Office on the evening of July 15.

A speech planned for 10 days before had been canceled because he meant to talk about the energy crisis but had come to think his real subject was why we couldn’t work together to solve it. Our “true problems” were deeper than gasoline lines.

He’d been meeting at Camp David with thinkers from “every segment of society” and wanted to share what they’d said. A southern governor had told him: “Mr. President, you are not leading this nation—you’re just managing the government.” A citizen had urged him to change tack: “Don’t talk to us about politics or the mechanics of government, but about an understanding of our common good.” It was remarkable to hear an American president critique himself in this way, through the words of others.

He’d concluded America was suffering “a crisis of confidence,” and “all the legislation in the world” couldn’t resolve it. “We can see this crisis in the growing doubt about the meaning of our own lives and in the loss of a unity of purpose for our nation.” We used to be a confident country; we breathed it in the air. That confidence “supported everything else—public institutions and private enterprise, our own families, and the very Constitution of the United States.”

Our nature as a people was changing. “Too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption. Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns.” But owning things won’t satisfy “our longing for meaning.” We’re voting less, producing less, saving less. We’ve grown pessimistic, and disrespectful of our institutions.

It didn’t happen overnight. It came gradually, “over the last generation” with its shocks and tragedy—the assassinations of the Kennedys and Martin Luther King, Vietnam, Watergate. “These wounds are still very deep. They have never been healed.”

Our people see the federal government as an incompetent “island,” apart from the main. Congress is “twisted and pulled” by well-financed “special interests.” Extreme positions are “defended to the last vote, almost to the last breath by one unyielding group or another.”

Watching in a radio studio as a young writer at CBS News, I thought: That is true. As I watched again this week I thought: That was prescient. Our worry is about hatred and polarization; he was describing the demoralization that preceded it.

We have to remember who we are, he said. We are the heirs of those who faced world wars and the Great Depression. We have that in us as “the same Americans who just 10 years ago put a man on the moon.” We’ve come together to fight for racial equality. Our choice is “fragmentation and self-interest” or “common purpose and the restoration of American values.”

At the end, poignantly: “Whenever you have a chance, say something good about our country.”

Redrawn and reconceived, that speech would have made a good farewell address. I suppose in its way it was. Soon after the hostages were taken in Iran, and that was that. But Mr. Carter had captured some hard truths about his era and put them forth in a daring way.

Here is why the speech didn’t succeed. He thought America was suffering a crisis of confidence. It was. But the more immediate problem was that it was losing confidence in him. Two and a half years into his presidency, people were beginning to doubt his ability to lead. They didn’t see him as appropriately pondering events; they thought he’d lost control of events. In the summer of ’79 they didn’t want sensitive dilating on the quandary. They thought: Save that for when the crisis passes.

Here is a thing in politics, and in life, that is very important, crucial as you go forward. From the Scots-language poet Robert Burns: “O wad some Pow’r the giftie gie us / To see oursels as others see us!”

What a boon and help in life to have an accurate sense of how the world perceives you. You see yourself as struggling to be heard; the world perhaps sees you as always interrupting. You see yourself as beset and erect strategies to counter this; the world sees you as combative.

This is especially true in politics in a democracy. Jimmy Carter justly had pride in his personal talents—a logical mind, first-rate scientific and mathematical abilities. But he saw himself as politically astute in ways he wasn’t.

It can’t be said of any man who reaches the American presidency that he isn’t good at politics. But Mr. Carter lacked talents that might have ensured his political longevity. One was understanding his exact position with the public. It had been evolving. He was elected in 1976 on a wave of idealism—he wanted a government as good as the people, he located the cynicism that had captured Washington during Watergate. “I will never lie to you,” he said. He was clean, a small-town Baptist Sunday-school teacher—sincere, provincial in the best sense. He had a big smile. He wore it so often there was a newspaper cartoon—a bedroom at night, complete darkness lit only by brilliant teeth locked in a grin. “Jimmy stop it,” says his wife, Rosalynn.

But once in the White House, with problems piled high, people wanted not a mood or sentiment but a plan—a philosophically coherent outline of what to do. There he struggled.

“All political careers end in failure.” Yet his didn’t. After the White House he went home to his plain house in Plains, Ga. He didn’t swan around Martha’s Vineyard, didn’t issue occasional pronouncements while really focusing on amassing great personal wealth. He would be a citizen. He set himself to doing good—building houses for the homeless, mediating disputes, curing infectious diseases. He taught Sunday school.

He had felt called to the presidency. His true calling was to be an ex-president, one of the most constructive and inspiring in our history.

What a good man who tried so hard to understand America and help the world.

This is about how we present ourselves and our thoughts these days.

On Wednesday Nikki Haley announced her presidential campaign in Charleston, S.C. I found myself thinking not about her candidacy but about the launch itself, which was creepily stuck in the past. A horrible, blaring song from a Sylvester Stallone sequel pumped her in as she strode out in the white suit and there were adoring fans on the rafters behind her, with whom she briefly interacted before turning toward the audience and doing the point—standing there and pointing to individual members of the cheering audience as if she knew them and was being natural. An introducer said she will “lead us into the future”; she added, “America is falling behind.” It was all so tired, clichéd, and phony. It was national politics as it has been done circa 1990-2023.

Why did she do it this way? It’s not good enough to say everyone does it this way. Someone needs to make it new, to drill down into deeper meaning. As the first Republican to enter the race and challenge Donald Trump, she was in a position to do something at least nonidiotic. This seemed a decision not to.

She is an intelligent, attractive person with a good record—strong two-term South Carolina governor, presentable United Nations ambassador. Diplomats who served with her speak highly of her off the record. She navigated the Trump era smoothly if somewhat weirdly.

In her speech she said some nice things: “Take it from me, the first female minority governor in history: America is not a racist country.” Everyone who scrambles over our border knows that; it is good when elites say it.

But I really don’t like it when people brag that they’re “tough as nails.” It may be true, but it’s embarrassing when men and women talk this way, and it doesn’t convey strength. Tough people don’t go on about it; they just smile and crush you like a bug. “I’ve been shaking up the status quo my entire life.” Why do they do this? Why can’t anyone running for office be modest anymore? That is an honest question.

She said something that can’t be said enough: “We’ve lost the popular vote in seven of the last eight presidential elections.” Preach, sister. “We have failed to win the confidence of a majority of Americans.”

But—closing point—Ms. Haley, later that night on “Hannity,” said the answer is for the Republican Party to talk in a way that “brings people in.” This was the language of the famous GOP “autopsy” in 2013: The GOP must do a better job “messaging.” But what does that even mean? That there are magic words and they must find them? There are no magic words.

This is communicating about the need to communicate. It is empty, circular, goes nowhere. The only thing in politics is strong, clear, honest stands on issues of great import. The American people know what they are, and declare them every four years.

*   *   *

Connected to this, the second part of our column, on last weekend’s Super Bowl ads. What do we discern from them about how the nation’s ad makers see their country? That we’re a nation of morons, a people with fractured concentration, a people with no ability to follow even a 60-second spot, a people who need loud noises and obsess on media and respond only to movie stars playing movie stars spoofing movie stars. The feeling was one of exhaustion, of a culture folding in on itself.

I have been watching these ads closely for 40 years, for fun but also to hear the inner dialogue, the sound of a nation talking to itself as it sells things to itself, which, in America, has always been about as intimate an act as there is. You remember them. Joe Greene throwing the kid the jersey in heart-on-your-sleeve 1979, “Wassup” in merry 2000, the farmer who raised the Budweiser Clydesdale and let him go only to see him again, in 2013.

This year’s ads were jittery, rather cruel and cynical—Super Bowl ads for a nation of losers.

There were a few sweet moments—the new dog in the plastic kennel, the young couple at home and she’s on the phone on hold and they comically begin to dance to the canned music. But one spot said it all. Google Pixel offered 22 seconds of serenity and honest sentiment, and then the music shifted, screamed, and the mood became discordance.

The ad makers must have asked themselves: What does America want? And answered: dumb, loud, depthless and broken. I’m here to say I’ve met America and that’s not what they want. What they want is “Help me live, help my kids live, help me feel something true.”

To those who made the commercials and pay for them: Advertising is a great and honorable craft, at its best even an art. But you can’t do it well if you have no regard for and barely even know your audience, which is your country. Why don’t you go into another line of work? Why not go to a nonprofit and dislike America from there? Or go into politics.

*   *   *

Finally, the Academy Awards are next month. At the Oscar lunch this week the Academy made clear it wasn’t over the Will Smith slap. Good. It was a big moment. The head of the Academy said its response had been inadequate. It was.

Here is how to turn that moment into something helpful. It doesn’t involve “image rehab.” It involves constructive honesty. Will Smith should walk in and say this:

“It is painful in life when you embarrass yourself. It is horrifying when you do it in front of tens of millions of people. Last year I did something bad to a guy who was just doing his job, and I am here to acknowledge it from the same stage—to admit that in attempting to humiliate him, I humiliated myself. I showed a number of things, including sheer bad judgment.

“I volunteered to be here tonight, I wasn’t asked. I formally apologize to Chris Rock, who did nothing to deserve my actions, and to all of you. As a public figure, I delivered exactly the wrong message and put forward exactly the wrong example. What we do in public matters, especially for the young. If we smoke, they’ll think it’s cool to smoke. If we use bullets and guns, they’ll be inspired to go in that direction. We all know this. I knew it in the abstract. I forgot it—unforgettably!—in the particular.

“And I’m sorry. I have paid a high price the past year in opportunities and relationships. I can’t say this was unjust. I will never speak of it again. Chris is free to, but I’ve said my piece. I’m going to continue to work on myself, and I ask you, as I close, not to applaud, if you were going to. After all the furor, let’s end it quietly and with thought. Thank you.”

Then cut straight to commercial. A peaceful, calm one with a little heart. And then come back and continue the show.

Need a little wisdom, call a veteran of the old wars. Stuart Spencer, 96 next week, ran Ronald Reagan’s campaigns for California governor in 1966 and 1970, and his presidential campaigns in ’80 and ’84. He was sort of the first political guru and good at his job.

Give me a read on things, I asked. He was on the phone from his Palm Desert home.

“Biden’s got a lot of problems but I thought he did well,” Mr. Spencer said of the State of the Union address. “He answered the questions of age and health. He was vigorous, almost feisty. The number one problem he has is his age, but he did a masterful job of showing his energy.”

He does not see Biden facing a presidential primary challenger.

“Their problem is Kamala Harris. She’s an absolute, total lightweight. She doesn’t have the touch.” The touch is that indefinable thing that makes people like you, root for you, sense some magic in you. “Some people have it and some people don’t.” California politicos in both parties, he says, were shocked when Biden chose her as vice president in 2020.

What to do about Ms. Harris? “It’s a real problem. Biden has to show leadership on it and let the party know what he wants—and enforce it. It’s a messy situation but Biden has to be involved in it. He’s gonna have to decide.”

As for the Republicans, “They’re not in a good position. As long as Trump is the reality, it hurts us. He has a personal following, not a party following.” Mr. Spencer has opposed Donald Trump since the beginning. This year he thinks Mr. Trump will face primary opposition. Potential Republican aspirants once feared him. Not now.

“They’re not afraid of Trump. They think he can be had. I don’t think Trump has the strength he had last time. He was unbeatable in 2016. He’s not unbeatable now.”

The party must watch who it replaces him with. A threat is “the Trump imitators.” “To be a demagogue” in America, “is not difficult,” Mr. Spencer says. “You get a lot of action.”

“A demagogue politically is someone who takes any given issue and beats it to death, and the facts aren’t important, it’s all positioning themselves. It’s all Johnny One Note.” “The key to their success is anger, and they call on your anger. And people are angry these days about a lot of things.”

My read on Biden’s speech:

It was the most effective of his presidency and for interesting reasons. Its first purpose was to demonstrate to his party that he’s in charge and formidable. He did that. The second, in my read, was to present himself in a new way to voters, especially those in the middle, and especially old Democratic constituencies. I think he did himself some good there.

Some are saying they heard a lot of Bernie Sanders in the speech. I don’t think that’s the headline. The first hour, which contained the parts Mr. Biden’s people wanted the audience to pay attention to, was Trumpian. There was little in it Donald Trump wouldn’t have been happy to say.

Mr. Biden opened with a portrait of decades of economic ruin. The “hollowed out” middle class lost “good paying manufacturing jobs.” “Factories closed down.” “Once thriving cities and towns . . . became shadows of what they used to be.” He evoked the “forgotten,” the “invisible” left behind by 40 years of globalism. “Remember the jobs that went away. You remember them, don’t you? The folks at home remember them.”

This was classic American carnage.

“Where is it written that America can’t lead the world in manufacturing?” “For too many decades we . . . exported jobs.” He’s offering “a blue collar blueprint to rebuild America.” “We’re going to buy American.” “American roads, bridges and American highways are going to be made with American products.”

On it went. Merrily, to those Republicans who didn’t vote for his infrastructure bill but now request funding, “I promised I’d be a president for all Americans. . . . And I’ll see you at the groundbreaking.”

This was great stuff. You can say Mr. Biden fibbed, misled and exaggerated, and you wouldn’t be wrong, but in rope-a-doping Republicans on Medicare and Social Security he showed real mastery. “Some Republicans—some Republicans—want Medicare and Social Security to sunset. I’m not saying it’s the majority.” When they catcalled and booed he said he was glad to see it—“I enjoy conversion.”

I don’t care how planned that line was, it was good.

“So folks, as we all apparently agree, Social Security and Medicare is off the books now, right?” He meant off the table. “All right. We’ve got unanimity.”

The Republicans, as we all know, made a mistake in taking his bait. They should have laughed. Instead, when he painted them as dogs they barked and snarled. Much has been made of Marjorie Taylor Greene and her grimacing and jeering. In her flamboyant fur-collared jacket she was compared, on social media, with Cruella de Vil and late-stage Sharon Stone in “Casino.” That was unkind. She seemed to me more like the colorful Belle Watling, although without the kindness and dignity.

The screaming Republicans are a problem for the party because few national voters feel safe transferring power into their enraged hands. They hurt their own causes but they help themselves. In being portrayed as at the center of the drama they seem important and are mistaken as sincere, which helps them raise money from the small donors they gull in internet solicitations.

They’re not going away any time soon. Mr. Biden seemed to enjoy toying with them. Future Democratic presidents will, too.

Only after all that, as the speech entered a second hour, did Mr. Biden get to the things he didn’t really want to talk about. These topics included illegal immigration, on which he was disingenuous and removed from reality, China, on which he repeated policy without saying the word balloon, abortion, on which he was rote and trite, and “transgender young people” on which he said something no one will remember because no one was listening.

There was never any suggestion that progressive policies exist, or that the woke wars continue.

In terms of personal positioning I felt he was trying to beat back against some rising perceptions that he’s rather a more fancy fellow than he pretends. In her recent memoir, his former daughter-in-law pointed out his Greenville, Del., house had a ballroom. A subliminal note of the speech seemed to be establishing something like this: “Hey, buddy, I’m not a sleazeball hack with mysterious mansions, I’m not ‘the big guy’ in Hunter’s emails, I’m a regular fella.” I imagined him saying, “As my father always told me, ‘Joey, never let them see your socks are silk.’ Wait, I got that wrong. He told me, ‘Son, never look down on the little guy, and never be one, either.’ Sorry, my father used to tell me, ‘Joey, work hard and trust the Lord.’ ”

There were clichés—“we’re writing the next chapter in the great American story,” “to restore the soul of this nation”—but they had the effect of making the speech sound more sincere.

It was more deft, more merry, and more up for the game than we’ve seen him. We’ll see if it lasts. But he had a good night, and it will likely have some effect on how 2024 shakes out.

A look, from 30,000 feet, at both parties:

The Democrats are making a historic mistake. With the fraught issue of abortion devolving to the states and moving, in the next few years, toward local settlement, the national party is free to understand itself, and present itself to the public, in a different way. For half a century Democrats enjoyed the electoral and political benefits of their pro-choice stand—they were for women’s rights, reproductive freedom. But that stand also came with a stigma—it was the party of heartless absolutism, of slippery-slope support for late-term abortion. There could be no gradations, every demand was maximalist. This stopped a lot of people from feeling they could join the party or support it, because support felt like complicity.

Now, in a national sense, the great agitating question is being taken off the board. The Democrats are free to be a normal party again, standing for things that are the normal concerns of parties (economics, war and peace). More voters would feel free to join.

Instead of seeing this they’ve replaced one stigma with another. Since at least 2020 they have aligned with or allowed themselves to be associated with another deeply agitating cultural question, the identity politics-wokeness regime. (It’s amazing we still don’t have an agreed upon word or phrase that fully captures this program.) Michael Lind, in a piece in the Tablet, sees it as composed of three parts, all falsely presented. The “Quota Project” uses anti-racism to pursue “social reconstruction.” The “Androgyny Project” goes beyond civil rights and ignores gay rights to “redefine all male and female human beings as generic, androgynous humanoids whose sex is a matter of subjective self-definition.” The “Green Project” uses climate change as an excuse to “radically restructure the society of the U.S. and other advanced industrial democracies.”

These movements are of, from and driven by the left. The Democrats are the party of the left. Progressive pathologies morph into Democratic ideologies, tagging the party as radical. Why do the Democrats allow this to continue? Why don’t they push back, hard—as a party? Most of their elected officials aren’t really on board with this stuff; many hate it. They know it limits their political prospects. America as it is currently constituted will never accept the regime, never be at peace with it, because Americans see it as a threat to their children and an insult to their sense of reality and fairness.

Arguments over wokeness—in the schools, in legislation, in our public life as a nation—will continue a long time. Democrats are on the wrong side, and making a historic mistake in not publicly and regularly beating back their fringe.

The Republicans—where to start? They’re riven by policy disagreements, some of which stem from philosophical disagreements regarding what conservatism is and must be in the 21st century. Weirdly, since politics is a word business, their Washington leadership can’t find the words to talk about this. They don’t know how to talk about public policy. In the debt-ceiling debate, if that’s the right word, they’re allowing themselves to be tagged as the Axe the Entitlements party, or at least as people who’d secretly like to do it but can’t admit it, but when they’re in power they’ll try.

If they do that they will never win national power, or at least presidential power, again. Which they kind of know. But they do it anyway. Because they haven’t decided if they’re a “limited government” party or a party that accepts, as it should, that the federal government will never be small in our lifetimes, and being mature means seeing that and turning the party’s focus toward the pursuit of more conservative ends, such as . . . helping families? Police the government, don’t spend like nuts, aim for growth, encourage dynamism, think long term.

In any case they should stop saying “limited” government. People think the federal government is already limited, as in slow and stupid. They’d like it to be able and efficient. Maybe lean into a government that doesn’t push us around, demanding more than it’s due. Everybody wants that.

From 30,000 feet it’s obvious that an attendant problem is that the GOP hasn’t been able, on the national level, to present itself as a governing party—a serious political entity into whose steady hands the American people can entrust their government. We saw this on the floor of the House during the vote for Speaker.

Both parties are missing something big. For the Democrats it’s an inability to accept a gift from history and become a normal party again. For the Republicans, it’s an inability to agree on what they stand for in this century, and an inability to talk about the meaning of things.

*   *   *

I want to finish with George Santos. Really, in every way I want us to finish with him. History will notice his little story.

Again: It is a mistake to let him be a member of Congress. Speaker Kevin McCarthy says the people have spoken. He repeated it Tuesday: “The voters have elected him. He’ll have a voice here in Congress,” while investigations play out.

This is deeply stupid.

George Santos was never elected to Congress. No one in New York’s Third Congressional District voted for him.

This is who they voted for: A nice young man, 34-years old, a conservative who’d struggled against the odds—the son of immigrants, born in some want, an ethnic minority whose grandparents fled the Holocaust. He rose to be educated at one of New York’s greatest private schools, to be a star athlete at a great college, earned a masters in business administration, forged on to become an impressive figure in finance, with positions at Goldman Sachs and Citigroup. He came to own mansions on Long Island. Only in America. But it wasn’t all material success, the guy had a heart: He devoted his private time to animal rescue. And he’d suffered: His mother died on 9/11.

That’s who was elected. That’s who won by 8 points.

But that man didn’t exist.

This is who existed: A guy lately going by George Santos who previously went by aliases, who once worked for what the SEC says became a ponzi scheme, never went to the schools, never worked at the banks, and no one fled the holocaust or died in the Twin Towers. He allegedly shook down smalltime investors in what one target told the Washington Post was like a scene in “Goodfellas.” He was wanted in Brazil for fraud. The animal rescue? An impoverished veteran says Mr. Santos ran off with money he claimed to be raising for the man’s sick dog, who later died. (Mr. Santos denies this.)

He’s not some pathetic, fabulist mook. Did you see the interview this week on One America News Network? Interviewer Caitlin Sinclair noted he seemed angry, not remorseful. “I’ve said I was sorry many times. I’ve behaved as if I’m sorry,” he said. “If you want to compare emotions, people show emotions differently.” He painted himself as an object of sympathy. Of the “abject poverty” he faced as a child in Queens, “People like me aren’t supposed to do big things in life and when we do it disrupts the system.” He’s Meghan Markle now.

He’s a street-wise conman whose latest mark was NY-3. Where, a Newsday/Siena College poll out this week tells us, almost 80% of the voters want him thrown out of Congress.

Congress, show a little respect for his victims. And for yourselves.

It is a scandal that has intermittently consumed the attention of the press, and I think of a lot of regular people too, because they immediately apprehend the meaning of words like “unlawfully possessed top secret documents.” But people don’t quite know what to make of it. Everything gets so politicized so fast.

You don’t know what level of alarm to feel about the security breaches because you don’t know the documents’ exact contents. Are we talking about a scribbled note on an old Group of 20 schedule, or are we talking about nuclear codes? Is it an amusingly phrased section from an old intelligence report saying the Danish foreign secretary’s husband is said to be romantically involved with a hairdresser whose social-media posts suggest neo-Nazi ties? Or is there a paper in there revealing the names of U.S. intelligence assets in Iran?

Because you don’t know the content, you can’t infer the motive. Why might a government official illegally bring home and keep classified documents? What did he intend to do with them? “I thought I’d need it for my memoirs.” “I must admit I thought it an unimportant document to anyone but me—it was inappropriately classified because the default mode of clerks is to say, ‘Classify it.’ So I harmlessly declassified.” Or, “Heck, there was no motive because there was no crime! In the last day at the White House my aides scooped the papers off the top of my desk, saw no markings, plopped them in a box with other papers, sent the box to my house where they put them in my basement, and we never knew there were any secret papers in there because we never opened the box!”

There could be other motives. Here’s one that’s too sweet, but early on it’s where my mind went. I thought of the psychology of it.

This may not sound true but I’ve seen it. People who were once in power—people who ran the world and then retired, or stepped down to do something else—as time passes and the years go on they can’t believe it happened to them. They can’t believe they had the pope on hold. They gesture to the silver framed picture on the table in the bedroom: “That’s us and the shah.” When they were running the world they took it in stride, but afterward they’re sort of concussed. And maybe they take something sensitive as a memento, as a souvenir of their greatness. I think they know they’re going to want to prove to others, and themselves, that it really happened. “See? We went to Robben Island for a ceremony with Mandela.” Because as years pass you can never believe you were at the center of everything. And you kind of want to show yourself you were.

That probably doesn’t have anything to do with all the secret-document stories. Which probably in their essence have more to do with entitlement and arrogance. The rules are for little people. Also laziness. A former White House official noted to me, “People bring things home to read because they don’t want to stay at the office any more that day. They think, ‘No one will see it,’ ‘It’s in my custody.’ Wrong, and illegal.”

In the case of Donald Trump, we still don’t know exactly what the government seized at Mar-a-Lago. He knew documents were there and refused requests to turn them over. The Federal Bureau of Investigation removed a reported 33 boxes of papers, including those whose classification ranged from confidential to top secret.

In Joe Biden’s case, documents were found in November at the Penn Biden Center in Washington. Others were later found in his home in Wilmington, Del., some famously stored in the garage near his Corvette. Another few documents were found in Wilmington in mid-January, and more after that. CNN has reported, citing anonymous sources, that included were “10 classified documents including US intelligence memos and briefing materials that covered topics including Ukraine, Iran and the United Kingdom.” Some files bore the classification used for highly sensitive information obtained from intelligence sources.

Some of the Biden documents hail back to his days in the U.S. Senate, which makes him look like a serial absconder. The White House has said the material was inadvertently misplaced. Mr. Biden himself said on Jan. 10 that he was “surprised to learn” that there were any documents at the Penn office and doesn’t know their contents. It’s been noted he didn’t say anything about the documents in Wilmington. And the White House didn’t disclose the discovery of the original documents in November, or even when more were found in December. Mr. Biden also said “I think the American people know” he’d be serious about the handling of documents, and it struck me as soon as he said it: I don’t think they know that.

Here is a hypothesis from a sophisticated acquaintance with broad governmental experience: Joe Biden is “deeply sensitive about his reputation,” and having been proven wrong on various stands he’s taken in the past, he just might have decided to have documentation around him that showed his thinking was based on advice and insight from various government agencies, such as the intelligence community. Why not have nearby some documentation that might be used to buttress his past position? And that you might show around a bit, as needed and off the record.

That is conjecture. But the nature of these cases makes you want to guess what was really going on.

Special counsels have been appointed in the cases of Messrs. Trump and Biden. In the Mike Pence case, one doesn’t imagine another will be, because his assertion that the documents were taken inadvertently seems believable.

It’s funny how Mr. Trump figures in here, because he enjoys a special benefit. No one really ponders his motives because he’s . . . Donald Trump. There have been reports in the past that he sometimes took secret documents, tore them up and flushed them down the toilet. It was easy to assume after the FBI conducted its raid that Mr. Trump just wanted, in his screwball way, to show members of the Mar-a-Lago Club Kim Jong Un’s handwriting. He wanted to show them how much Mr. Kim loved him because everyone loved him and the world worked when he was in charge.

In any case it’s bad to be showing the world that U.S. leaders can be so derelict in their handling of top secret information. It makes the processes of our government look unprofessional, chaotic, ad hoc.

Congress is right to want to know exactly what’s in all those documents, what danger their cavalier handling posed, and how they wound up where they wound up. They should also look at the classification process itself. Do we overclassify or underclassify things?

As scandals go this is a worthy one—it’s not blown up nonsense over nothing. It won’t likely go away soon and may have serious political implications. It’s not bad to be showing the selfish, abusive or slovenly that if they break the laws on classified documents they will pay a price.

Prince Harry’s book is odd. There’s even something half-mad about it.

He opens with a dramatic meeting at Frogmore, his former mansion on the grounds of Windsor. It is just after the death of Prince Philip, Harry’s paternal grandfather. For months Harry has been estranged from his father, Charles, and his brother, William—a “full-scale public rupture.” Harry has flown in from America and requested a meeting. The day is overcast, chilly. Charles and William arrive late looking “grim, almost menacing,” and “tightly aligned.” “They’d come ready for a fight.” Harry is tongue-tied, vulnerable, leaves heartbroken. “I wanted peace. I wanted it more than anything.”

You feel such sympathy. What could have driven them so far apart? Why are Charles and William so cold? Then you realize, wait—Philip died just a month after the Oprah interview in which Harry rather coolly portrayed his family as remote and hapless puppets and implied they were racist.

Harry forgets, in the opening, to tell us that part. But you can see how it might have left Charles and William a little indignant.

This is the book’s great flaw, that Harry doesn’t always play it straight, that he thinks “my truth” is as good as the truth. There are other flaws, and they grate. There’s a heightened-ness to his language—he never leaves a place; he flees it “in fear for our sanity and physical safety.” He often finds his wife “sobbing uncontrollably” on the floor and the stairs, mostly over what he fails to realize are trivial things. He is grandiose: “My mother was a princess, named after a goddess.” “How would I be remembered by history? For the headlines? Or for who I actually was?” Lord, he was an attractive man fifth in line for a largely ceremonial European throne; it would hardly remember him at all. (Unless he wrote a scalding book and destabilized the monarchy!) He repeatedly points out that he’s a Windsor and of royal blood. His title means a lot to him. He is exhibitionistic: “My penis was oscillating between extremely sensitive and borderline traumatized.” (Frostbite.)

There are gaps in his knowledge-base that wouldn’t be irritating if he weren’t intent on establishing that he’s giving you the high-class rarefied inside dope. “Never complain, never explain” has been an expression of the old American upper class since forever, and I’m sure the British one too. It isn’t special to the Windsors. “An heir and a spare” is old Fleet Street tabloidese. It doesn’t mean, as he suggested on book tour, he was bred for body parts.

Famous families often have internal communication problems. The children of those families learn much of what they know from the many books written about the clan. They internalize and repeat observations and stories that aren’t quite right but are now given their insider imprimatur.

Harry’s anecdotes tend to undermine the institution of the monarchy. When he was a teenager Britain’s biggest tabloid told the palace it had evidence he was doing drugs. In fact, as Harry tells us candidly, he did do drugs when he was young. The palace, no doubt knowing this, opted to “play ball” with the newspaper and not deny all aspects of the story. This made Harry feel thrown under the bus.

His father, he believes, used him as a “sacrifice,” to appease a powerful editor and bolster his own sagging reputation. “No more the unfaithful husband, Pa would now be presented to the world as the harried single dad coping with a drug-addled child.” He reports Charles and his wife, Camilla, were jealous of William and Kate’s “drawing attention away from them.” His stories of jealousy sound like projection. But they also make the book feel less like “Clown Turns on Circus” than something more deadly, especially just before Charles’s coronation this May.

Harry accuses the tabloids of violating his privacy, and no doubt they often did. What is almost unbelievable is that he is so unmoored and destabilized by this inevitable aspect of fame, especially royal fame. He implies he left Britain primarily because of the newspapers and their criticism of his wife.

But the odd, half-mad thing about this book is that in it he violates his own privacy, and that of others, more than Fleet Street ever could.

He is careful throughout to say he is telling his story in order to help others, those who’ve struggled with mental illness or been traumatized by war. It is hard to know another person’s motives; it can be hard to know your own. But I don’t think this book is about others. I think it’s about his own very human desire for revenge, to hurt those who’ve hurt him. And to become secure in a certain amount of wealth. And to show his family and Fleet Street that their favorite ginger-haired flake could make his own way, set up his own palace, break free, fly his own standard, become the duke of Netflix. This book is classic Fredo: “I can handle things. I’m smart. Not like everybody says, like dumb, I’m smart and I want respect!”

It is all so contradictory. He says he wants reconciliation but writes things that alienate, he says he reveres the monarchy and isn’t trying to bring it down but he has gone beyond removing bricks from the facade and seems to be going at the bearing walls.

I close with a thought on privacy. Prince Harry violates his own. He tells us too much about himself and others.

Once there was a reigning personal style of public reticence about private pain. You didn’t share it with everybody, and you didn’t use it for advantage or as a weapon: I have known pain, you must bow before me. The forces of modernity have washed away the old boundary between public and private. It isn’t good. It’s making us less human even as we claim to be more sensitive.

But fully mature people still have a sense of their own privacy, they keep to themselves what is properly kept to oneself. Privacy isn’t some relic of the pre-tech past, as I said once, it is connected to personhood. It has to do with intimate things—the inner workings of your head and heart, of your soul. You don’t just give those things away. Your deepest thoughts and experiences are yours, held by you; they are part of your history. They are part of your dignity. You share them as a mark of trust. This is true intimacy, not phony intimacy but the real thing.

If you tell all the strangers your secrets what do you tell your intimates?

A friend said the other day: “Most of the forces in the world are pushing toward exhibitionism and calling it honesty. The assumption is if you keep things to yourself you have something to hide.” But you aren’t reserved out of shame, you are reserved out of a sense of your own value and self-respect. And it doesn’t leave you alone; it means you are part of something larger, a whole world of distinct souls.

You shouldn’t violate your own privacy, not for attention or admiration, and not for money. It’s a mistake. And it won’t heal you.

Two stories. I suppose they have to do with navigating one’s professional life, though they could apply personally too. One stayed with me for decades, the other is recent; either might be helpful to a reader as the new year begins.

The first is about David Letterman. In 1992 he was famously passed over to succeed Johnny Carson as host of “The Tonight Show” in favor of Jay Leno. Months passed, Mr. Leno’s ratings wobbled, NBC offered Mr. Letterman a second chance. And even though he was now fielding better offers from other networks and syndicators, he still had to have Carson—it was his dream from childhood to succeed that brilliant performer, have that show. He couldn’t give it up.

His advisers, in the crunch, told him a truth that is said to have released him from his idée fixe. There is no Johnny Carson show anymore, they said, it’s gone. It’s the Jay Leno show now, and you never wanted to inherit that.

Soon after, Mr. Letterman accepted the CBS show where he finally became what he wanted to be, No. 1 in late night.

Sometimes you have to realize a dream is a fixation, its object no longer achievable because it doesn’t exist.

The other story involves Norman Lear, who produced many of the greatest television comedies of the latter half of the 20th century, the television century. At a recent 100th birthday party, he shared wisdom with friends. He said there are two words we don’t honor enough. One is “over” and the other is “next.” There’s a kind of hammock between the two and it is right now, this moment we’re sharing. He was saying: Be present. But as he talked, I heard embedded within his words a layer of advice: That it’s actually a key skill to be able to see when something’s over, when it’s the past, not the future; that you have to have eyes that can find the next area of constructiveness, which may take time; and in the time between, the hammock, you must maintain your peace and poise.

So—here we sigh—I’ve been thinking of this because of what happened in the House this week. It was a bit of a disaster, bad for America (they’ve lost their gift for self-government) and its conservative party (they don’t even know who they are anymore). Some of the spectacle connects in my mind to the fact that Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy had a longtime idea that he must be speaker, and would do anything for it, and left his colleagues thinking eh, he just wants to be speaker—he’s two-faced, believes in little, blows with the wind. So they enjoyed torturing him. And in the end he made the kind of concessions that make a speakership hardly worth having. (A single member can force a vote to remove him?)

If you cede the power of the job to get the job, the job has no point. The job itself is diminished.

As this is written, the balloting will continue into a fourth day. I guess Mr. McCarthy’s strategy is simply to wear his foes down. However it ends, a better path would have been for him to protect the speakership, and himself, by saying: I can’t be speaker under the conditions you ask, because that office can’t function with much of its authority sacrificed. So I will take myself out of the race. With so much tension and division I must be part of the cause, anyway, so I’ll remove myself from the drama and help you resolve it.

How modest this would be. The chaos that would follow could hardly be worse than the chaos we’ve seen. And if no new leader emerged, they might come back begging: Please, get back in! But to play that cool game you’ve gotta be a cool cat. Instead we’re in classic when-you-want-it-bad-you-get-it-bad territory.

It must be said of his foes that a lot of them, maybe all, have never been part of a functioning institution. Congress hasn’t worked as a governing body in a long time. Many of their frustrations are justified.

Beyond that this is the old House Freedom Caucus reasserting itself. They are Trumpian but preceded Donald Trump, and showed this Wednesday when he publicly called on them to back off and support Mr. McCarthy. None did; they picked up a vote. They aren’t afraid of Mr. Trump anymore, which means they know their voters won’t punish them for defying him.

The problem with the Freedom Caucus people is and always has been that they do not have the numbers to win, to dominate. America, a big, broad place, doesn’t like them. They represent a tendency within the party in which they are seceding from “the establishment,” “the swamp.” They think throwing snares and making Congress ungovernable is progress. It isn’t progress but nihilism, and it is connected to the endless loop of performance art that has taken over our politics. Once, you had to be a legislator and pass bills. Now you just have to play a legislator on media. You do TV hits, enact indignation, show you’re the kind of tough person who gets things done. You don’t have to do anything. If that is your business model—and these people are in business, and fundraising off this week’s spectacle—it isn’t bad for you if Republican leadership flounders (they’re squishes anyway) or the Democrats take over (you get to be the fiery opposition.) They tell themselves they are speaking truth to power, but real conservatism involves an ability to see and respect reality and to move constructively within it, nudging it in desirable directions.

Many of them are stupid and highly emotional, especially the men. Most have no historical depth. If they have little respect for institutions, it’s because they have no idea how institutions help us live as a nation, and they’ve never helped build one.

They aren’t serious and don’t have a plan, only an attitude and a talking point. They present themselves as freedom fighters, but that isn’t what they are. I would actually like Rep. Lauren Boebert if just once she would identify herself during roll call as the member from Late Weimar. Or Rep. Matt Gaetz insisted his name be recorded as The Devil’s Flying Monkey.

This fight has been going on since 2015, that epochal year when Mr. Trump rode down the elevator and, three months later, Mr. Boehner stepped down as speaker, his leadership made impossible by the Freedom Caucus.

Someone is going to have to win this fight.

A hard-core group of 20 have so far stopped Mr. McCarthy, but 10 times that number supported him, including moderates, centrists, old- and new-style conservatives. The 200 have to find a way to re-establish their power and face down the fringe. They are being pushed around by a small minority, which once again is being painted as the face of the party, and the 200 need to push back, with or without Mr. McCarthy.

Flood the airwaves, take to the floor, go for broke. For eight years you’ve tried to humor and mollify. It hasn’t worked. Show America what normal, serious Republicans look like. It’s your party too. Normies, arise.

What do we learn from the George Santos story? Samuel Johnson observed that men more frequently need to be reminded than informed. The Santos story reminds us that the integrity with which we conduct our lives matters.

At first the lies of the newly elected congressman from Long Island, revealed in the New York Times, seemed comic. He sounded like Jon Lovitz’s “Saturday Night Live” character Tommy Flanagan, a member of Pathological Liars Anonymous. “Then my cousin died—Joe Louis. And I took it hard, maybe too hard. I tried to kill myself. Yeah, I did kill myself. I was medically dead for a week and a half. And then it was a woman that brought me out of it—Indira Gandhi.”

But as the story played out I realized Mr. Santos is Sam Bankman-Fried. He is Elizabeth Holmes. He is a 21st-century state-of-the-art fraudster—a stone cold liar who effectively committed election fraud, a calculating political actor who took advantage of voters’ trust. He wasn’t driven by inadequacy but entitlement. He’s less Tommy Flanagan than Patricia Highsmith’s Talented Mr. Ripley.

You can Google “Santos lies,” though you’re likely already familiar with them. He didn’t attend the schools he claimed or work at the prestigious firms he said employed him, didn’t own what he said he owned, do what he said he’d done. He said he was Jewish when he wasn’t. He tweeted in July 2021 that “9/11 claimed my mother’s life” and five months later that she died in December 2016.

The only good thing about what appears to be his reliably compulsive lying, the one good thing that would come of his being seated in the House, is this: When a vote is close and the conference ends and the congressmen spill out into the hall, the press gaggle will surround him and say, “Congressman Santos, who will you vote for?” And he’ll say, “I’m a yes—I’ll stand with Kevin,” and reporters will know immediately that they can run through the halls screaming, “Santos is a no, McCarthy’s margin is shrinking!” I admit this will contribute to the joy of nations.

It is interesting that most of his lies were tied up with money and status. He didn’t go to just any high school, he went to the tony Horace Mann. The real estate he owned wasn’t in Lodi, N.J., but Nantucket. He didn’t work in some dreary insurance brokerage in Hempstead, N.Y., but at Goldman Sachs. This is all Tom Ripley territory, and it tells you what he values.

Mr. Santos’s main answer to the accusations is what he told the New York Post: “My sins here are embellishing my résumé.”

They appear to go beyond that. Where did he get the $700,000 he loaned his campaign? When he ran unsuccessfully in 2020, he disclosed no assets and claimed a salary of $55,000 from a development firm. In the years leading up to 2020 he hadn’t been rising at Goldman; he’d reportedly been working at a call center in Queens. His 2022 filings, however, showed sudden wealth. He claimed he made between $3.5 million and $11.5 million at a company he founded in 2021. He told reporter Kadia Goba of Semafor that he did “deal building,” with “high-net-worth individuals.” If a client wanted to sell a plane or boat, Mr. Santos would go to his extensive Rolodex “and be like, ‘Hey, are you looking for a plane?’ ” He claimed a network of about 15,000 people and “institutions.” He quickly “landed a couple of million-dollar contracts.” He didn’t respond to Semafor’s request for names of clients.

It is to the credit of Tulsi Gabbard, sitting in for Tucker Carlson on his show Tuesday night, that she didn’t cover the Santos story as another act in the freak show of American politics. Grilling him in his first television interview since the accusations surfaced, she drilled straight down into meaning.

She asked what the word “integrity” means to him. Mr. Santos replied it was “very important” but suggested his lies were mere “embellishments.” Ms. Gabbard pressed: The meaning of the word integrity “actually matters in practice.” Mr. Santos said integrity “means to carry yourself in an honorable way,” then said, “I made a mistake. . . . We all make mistakes.”

Then his self-pity kicked in: “I’m having to admit this on national television for the whole country to see.” Then pride: “I have the courage to do so because I believe that in order to . . . be an effective member of Congress, I have to face my mistakes.” Then the self-pity returned: “I worked damn hard to work where I got my entire life. Life wasn’t easy. . . . I come from abject poverty.”

Ms. Gabbard wasn’t having any of it. Integrity, she said, includes “telling the truth.” Mr. Santos’s falsehoods weren’t “one little lie or one little embellishment, these are blatant lies. My question is, do you have no shame?”

Mr. Santos pivoted: He’s no bigger liar than the Democrats. “Look at Joe Biden. Biden’s been lying to the American people for 49 years. . . . Democrats resoundingly support him. Do they have no shame?”

Ms. Gabbard cut him off. “This is not about the Democratic Party, though. This is about your relationships” with voters who put their faith in him. She cited specific lies. He said, “Everybody wants to nitpick at me.”

Ms. Gabbard said his sincerity about policy is “called into question when you tell blatant lies.” One of the biggest concerns is that “you don’t really seem to be taking this seriously.” Blatant lies aren’t “an embellishment on a résumé. . . . It calls into question how your constituents and the American people can believe anything that you may say when you were standing on the floor of the House of Representatives supposedly fighting for them.”

Mr. Santos said his accusers can “debate my résumé.”

Ms. Gabbard: “Is it debatable or is it just false?”

Then Mr. Santos did make a mistake. His résumé, he said, is “very debatable. . . . I can sit down and explain to you what you can do in private equity . . . and we can have this discussion that’s going to go way above the American people’s head.”

“Wow,” Ms. Gabbard said. “You’re saying that this discussion will go way above the heads of the American people, basically insulting their intelligence.” Mr. Santos ended by saying, “Everybody just wants to push me and call me a liar.” Ms. Gabbard wound it up: She’d given him all this time because she felt it was owed to the people of his district: “It’s hard to imagine how they could possibly trust your explanations when you’re not really even willing to admit the depth of your deception to them.”

George Santos should step down, cooperate with all investigations and come clean about his past. Assuming that won’t happen, his local party should disavow him and call for a special election. Republicans in the House should end their silence, formally oppose his entry and close their conference to him.

They have a close margin in the House and believe they can’t afford to lose even one. But Mr. Santos will be the focus of investigations from day one and will be used to pummel the GOP each day for looking past his fraud. They can’t afford to keep him. He is a bridge too far. He is an embarrassment.

There is a sense in which last month’s election can be seen as America trying to return itself to its previous settings. The outcome was inherently moderate, and those who seemed extreme didn’t prosper.

One way the country could return to normalcy is not to have a repeat of Biden vs. Trump in 2024. Nobody wants that. It’s a race that would depress the whole country. There’s so much hunger to turn the page, begin a new era. Could we?

It is certain that Donald Trump will never again be president. The American people won’t have it. This was demonstrated in November: Independents and moderate Republicans rejected GOP candidates who supported him, not trusting them to be responsible in power. It is possible Mr. Trump will get the presidential nomination, but it’s no longer likely.

He’s on the kind of losing strain that shows we’re at the ending of the story. Next summer it will be eight years since he went down the escalator. Time moves—what was crisp and new becomes frayed and soft. His polls continue their downward drift. He is under intense legal pressures. This week the Jan. 6 committee put more daggers in: Only the willfully blind see him as guiltless in the Capitol riot. He will be 78 in 2024 and is surrounded by naïfs, suck-ups, grifters and operators. That was always true but now they are fourth-rate, not second- or third-rate.

He has lost his touch. Remember when you couldn’t not watch him in 2015 and 2016? Now you hear his voice and give it a second before lowering the volume. At his occasional rallies supporters wait for him to pause so they can cheer; they aren’t really listening to the words. Video of the crowd that gathered at Mar-a-Lago to hear him announce showed them trying to leave before he’d finished. There are streaks and slumps in politics as in life, but Mr. Trump’s slump won’t end, because it’s not a slump; it’s a losing season.

The party he’s left on the ground seems to be trying to regain its equipoise. November’s results will speed the process. The GOP in Congress is a mixed bag. There are more than a handful in the House who try to out-Trump Mr. Trump, and they will no doubt continue to batter the party’s reputation. In the Senate only two members really try to out-Trump Mr. Trump, Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz. The top-ranking Republican in Washington, Mitch McConnell, on Jan. 3 surpasses Mike Mansfield as the longest-running Senate party leader. (Mansfield, a Montana Democrat, was majority leader for 16 years, 1961-77; Mr. McConnell has been minority or majority leader since 2007.) On Jan. 6, 2021, he went at Mr. Trump sharply and publicly. He has since demonstrated that you can survive Mr. Trump’s verbal assaults and be understood to stand against him, without letting the subject dominate the daily conversation.

We’re watching the Trump story end before our eyes and can hardly believe it because we thought it was ending before and it wasn’t. But it is now.

As for Joe Biden, all indications are he will run for re-election. He likes being president, thinks he’s good at it, and apparently doesn’t think he’s slipping with age.

But the brilliant move would be to surprise the world and not run again. Second terms are always worse, fraught and full of pain; even your own party starts jockeying to take your place. He’s showing age and it will only get worse, and he will become more ridiculous, when he’s deeper into his 80s.

He’s freezing his party in a way that will likely hurt it. When Democrats were sure Mr. Trump would get the Republican nomination, it justified a Biden run, no matter how frustrated they were. He had beaten Mr. Trump before and would do it again. But a great many Democrats believe that if Mr. Trump isn’t the Republican nominee—and they are starting to think he won’t be—then that nominee will go forward without Mr. Trump’s deficits, and may even be a normal Republican, which will mean he or she will squish the eternally underwater Mr. Biden like a peanut.

They want him to step aside.

A trusted Biden intimate with an eye on the party’s fortunes would be wise to urge the boss to rethink things dramatically:

Mr. President, you have a perfect opening to cement a stunning legacy. You kept every promise you made to the party in 2020. You got rid of Donald Trump. You got us out of Afghanistan. You passed huge FDR-level bills that transformed the social safety net. History threw you a curve with Ukraine, but you warned it would happen, defined the struggle, built the coalition, and defended the rule of international law.

Boss, what a triumph! You did your job in history. You fulfilled your role.

And now you should go out an inspiration. Don’t stick around, it will never be this good again. Do the brave, hard thing and relinquish power. Tell the party, “I always said I would be a bridge. And friends, the past four years we built that bridge. It is big, strong and can carry all traffic. Now, with complete faith in my party, I am declaring the bridge open. The past year I’ve come to have faith that my Republican friends won’t nominate that bad and unpatriotic man. And I’ll be frank, I will turn 82 in 2024, and though I can still take you in arm-wrestling, that is, I admit, an advanced age. We need the leadership of minds forged and matured in the 21st century. So I will not run for re-election. Nor will I put myself behind any one candidate. Let the party decide. We have a good bench. I will watch this process with confidence.”

My God, what people would say. “What a great man.” Your reputation will be raised high forever—you actually walked away from the limelight in order to ensure that power stay in the party that stands for the better things. What a legacy.

Could he do this? Yes. Should he? Yes. Will he? Well. He likes being president. He likes the whole thing, the house, the salutes, the state dinners, the centrality to all events, the cynosure of all eyes, being taken seriously after a career of being considered a cornball glad-handing pol, a guy who wasn’t that bright but had a huge ego . . .

People tend not to leave what they like. And it’s hard to imagine a Biden intimate telling him his age is a factor and he should leave. They surely saw that aging in 2019 and 2020. But they too wanted the White House. They wanted power, they wanted the glamour and importance. They thought they could make it work, while saving the party from Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.

All signs are Mr. Biden will stay and run again. The coming year will be interesting in part because we’re going to see the central realities of 2024 arrange themselves, the election line itself up.

Georgia’s Republican Gov. Brian Kemp won re-election last month by 7.5 points. Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger won re-election by 9.2. Republican Senate candidate Herschel Walker lost his Tuesday runoff by 2.7. Neither Mr. Kemp nor Mr. Raffensperger was a Donald Trump ally; both resisted his demands to alter the state’s 2020 election tally. Mr. Walker was handpicked by Mr. Trump, and all in on his issues.

The GOP is strong in the Peach Tree State; its turnout in November was high. But the party is full of Republicans and conservatives who won’t back strange and unqualified candidates simply because they have the Trump imprimatur. Some were repelled by that imprimatur.

Mr. Trump has looked bad since his weak and formless presidential announcement last month—dining with anti-Semites and white supremacists, meeting with Q supporters, calling for the Constitution to be waived to return him to office. He appears to be deliberately marginalizing himself. There is a debate whether we are witnessing the end of Mr. Trump. But here is the truth: Only the voters can crush Mr. Trump.

It’s good if senators come forward and deplore his latest antics, if party operatives cast doubt on his viability and writers and thinkers on the right deplore him. But it doesn’t really matter. What matters is that voters on the ground turn away from him. That is how it ends. Any other way and he says the swamp did him in. Voters have to show no, it was us, and we’re not the swamp.

In a populist movement especially, it’s the populace that has to turn.

In 2024 Mr. Trump will have to be crushed in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina and on Super Tuesday, if that is still the Republican schedule. If that happens, he is revealed as without clout or muscle, and disappears as a force.

For those who wish the continuance of the Republican Party there are two big jobs ahead.

For party elders, to the extent they still exist, and for donors and operatives and professionals, that means doing everything you can to make sure the 2024 primary field isn’t a crowded one. In 2016, there were 17 candidates for the GOP presidential nomination. In early contests Mr. Trump consistently won with about a third of the vote, more than enough to dominate a field that size. He won New Hampshire with 35%, Vermont with 33%, Virginia with 35%. He had a tight moment in Iowa, with 24% to Ted Cruz’s 28%. But not until April did Mr. Trump get to 50% in any state’s primary.

A year ago, Mr. Trump still scared people out of the field. Now he doesn’t. They’re starting to line up. Responsible candidates should come forward only if they satisfy two requirements. One is that they have a real shot, a significant base of support. The other is that they are saying something so singular, so necessary to the debate, so pertinent to the moment that their absence would be a form of dereliction.

Candidates for president are notoriously bad at judging their own motives and prospects. They’re gamblers looking to win; gamblers tell themselves stories. “They start with belief and end with hunger,” the veteran New York political strategist David Garth said to me once of politicians. Donors, however, can be cooler. This year they should function as clear-eyed political cops and not let a crowd form.

The job of state and local party leaders is to persuade Trump supporters on the ground to turn their energy toward candidates who can win. Trump supporters are proud people who are protective of their despised champion, but they are by definition politically engaged, and the vast majority love their country. The party divide between Trump and not-Trump is a human problem and must be solved by humans.

Tact never hurts in a tight spot. Local leaders should go, regularly, to Trump people—asking for their time, conceding they are a significant part of the base, emphasizing areas of policy agreement.

The spirit should be “acknowledge, don’t avoid.” Republicans can’t win on their issues if they don’t do it together. The independents of America, the suburbs, the moderates by thinking and temperament—they won’t vote for Mr. Trump again, if they ever did. His numbers are sinking; he can’t put wins on the board. If both sides don’t drop their anger and resentment, they’ll wind up living together in Loserville, like the Hatfields and McCoys spending all their time shooting at each other from behind boulders while the Democratic Party thrives.

Mr. Trump undid a party establishment nobody liked, stomped it and threw it out the window. Acknowledge that. The Democrats and Republicans together played with illegal immigration as an issue, while Mr. Trump treated it with respect, at least up to a point. He appointed conservative judges. Twenty sixteen can fairly be called a policy breakthrough time, but now the party is gearing up for a presidential election that is eight years beyond it. History moves only forward. If you want progress on the border, you can get it—by voting for the person who succeeds Mr. Trump. Trump supporters need to hear they can be a constituent group within a party, or they can be a death cult hurtling down a highway in the dark.

The conversation needs to be had and the above doesn’t begin to cover it. It will be a long, person-by-person, group-by-group slog, precinct to precinct, internet site to internet site. Not-Trump party officials have to speak the truth as they see it, and explicitly speak the logic of unity. They should take all questions and comers and laugh when they make fun of you, which they will.

But it’s a necessary slog.

I end with the observation that it is still a matter of belief among Mr. Trump’s followers that he was a transformational figure in the Reagan mold. Of the differences between them—fidelity to the Constitution, seriousness about and knowledge of the issues, and personal dignity among them—the most obvious is this: Reagan transformed the party without splitting it. He changed its nature while uniting it. He took a party that had grown vague and formless and, to put it in broadest terms, split between New England Yankees and Southern California right-wingers and blended them together.

He made what endured for two generations: a united conservative party. He didn’t kill the liberal New Englanders; he blended them in. He didn’t kill the Birchers; he allowed them to blend in as if they had no recourse but to join him. He did this in part through temperamental moderation—he was a person you could cut deals with, who’d understand your starting principles. But he did it primarily through electoral force—two historic landslides, including a 49-state sweep. Every politician realized: You better jump aboard the Reagan Express because your own voters already have.

Mr. Trump had no interest in unifying, never saw its purpose—never won a landslide or attracted broad public support. He broke the party with an adolescent glee. See what I destroyed! But he never built anything that would last in its place.

The next two years is about rebuilding.