Peggy Noonan

I want to talk about three separate things that to me aren’t separate.

We are in a crisis on the southern border. It is a disaster. El Paso, Texas, is the latest city to be overwhelmed. This Monday, from the New York Times: “After nightfall on Sunday, hundreds of migrants stepped across the Rio Grande . . . a caravan of people mainly from Nicaragua whose crossing was among the largest in recent years along the West Texas border.” More than 50,000 illegal immigrants from Central and South America came in October alone. Some are sent to detention centers or shelters for a short time; most are released to disappear into America. In Del Rio, Texas, last year, 9,000 illegal immigrants, mostly from Haiti, camped under a bridge. Rural counties are declaring a “local state of disaster.”

It’s all so dangerous. The fentanyl the drug cartels are bringing over the border is killing more Americans each year than we lost in Vietnam. Anyone can cross. In the year ending Sept. 30, Border Patrol has stopped 98 people on the southern border who were on the U.S. terrorist watch list. How many were missed?

We’re on a holiday from history again.

The Democratic Party is committed to doing nothing. The party made its position clear in the 2020 presidential primaries, when candidates ignored border security and debated only who would guarantee broader social services for migrants. The Biden administration has shown energy in only one area, changing the subject.

The Republican Party is at least rhetorically committed to stopping what’s happening at the border, but do they mean it? Are they serious? If they were they’d be trying to win support in America for broad, coherent action, right?

Here we jump to Manhattan, to the already famous Saturday night dinner of the New York Young Republican Club. Gowns, tuxedos, important national speakers, a special night. Donald Trump Jr. said Republicans must finally investigate Hunter Biden. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, in the prime speaking spot, received the club’s Richard M. Nixon Award, “given to a citizen who exemplifies the fundamental ideals of Americanism.” She spoke of the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol: “I want to tell you something, if Steven Bannon and I had organized that, we would have won. Not to mention we would’ve been armed.” She took other strange turns—“defund the FBI,” Kamala Harris dresses in boring colors. Not a “single penny” should go to “a country called Ukraine whose borders are far away and most of you couldn’t find it on a map.” She charged, “You can pick up a butt plug or a dildo at Target nowadays.” I’ve never noticed that at Target. I guess it depends on what you’re looking for.

My point isn’t that she’s an idiot, though that appears to be true—she once called Hitler’s secret police “the gazpacho”—or that the audience, which laughed and applauded, were idiots. It is that you don’t talk like this and applaud if you are trying to win anyone over to your side. And if you are serious about making America better, you try to win people over to your side.

If the speakers at that dinner were even a little sincere about controlling the border, they wouldn’t be swanning about or beating their chests like chimps but reaching out to those who share their alarm but aren’t Trumpist. Instead, they stick with their own club, one that, at least in this instance, involves comparative wealth, a certain conception of glamour, and an insider feel. They seem to proceed as if they are all on the winning side, the side of what they all call the base. But they haven’t won a big election since 2016.

There is one way in which they very much are winners—they changed the policies and attitudes of a great party, making it more populist in domestic and foreign affairs. This was a huge win!

But they couldn’t absorb it intellectually or consolidate it politically. If you are a Trump candidate, you would do this by showing voters—not only Republicans but Democrats, independents, centrists, moderates—that a vote for you isn’t a concession that they have grown radical or extreme or drawn to peripheral issues. No, a vote for you is a vote for a regular normal person of intelligence and good faith. A vote for you is a vote to address the issues that bedevil us, in a truthful and constructive way. A vote for you is a reassertion of a preference for normality.

The Trump wing of the party can’t seem to do that. Maybe because they don’t want to win, really; they just want to feel good and have parties and say outrageous things and feel like truer Americans.

And my third item, which the New York dinner left me thinking about. It has to do with the old Republican Party of New York. I saw that party up close in the early 1990s. I would go to events at its clubs, sign books, sometimes speak. I did this because I felt sympathy for them and a tug of old loyalty. In one club the demographic skewed older and female. The women wore hats and they knew Rocky and Happy and they’d been friends with Jack Javits, and time had passed them by. They were 1960s moderate liberals who had been replaced and supplanted by people like me—Reaganites, Kempites.

Someone’s always being replaced and supplanted in politics, but those old ladies in hats—in their time they had shown some guts, swimming against the tide, not becoming Democrats in a Democratic city, an increasingly left-wing city, but staying true to their basic principles. And you have to be human, even in politics, and show respect. The Trump forces took over by about 2017 and they were brutal in their triumph—graceless, rubbing their foes’ faces in it. Some of the old ladies joined them. Some just disappeared into the city. It was all very French Revolution, a thousand Marats and Dantons overwhelming 10,000 weak and ridiculous aristos. It was also Manhattan losing to the forces of the outer boroughs and the suburbs—a whole rising wave of scrappy, comparatively less sophisticated voters who felt they’d been ignored (they had) and excluded (they had) and would now take over (they did).

But unlike those old ladies in hats, they have no idea what is important to independents, moderates, centrists and non-Republicans, and no idea how to talk to them. So they can’t win a thing statewide.

And they don’t seem to care. Because they have great parties and they’re right and they’re the real people, not big phonies in hats.

The old ladies in hats were practical. Their entire project was driven by the simple insight that politics is a game of addition. You have to reach out and persuade. They didn’t always know how to reach out; they were awkward in 10 different ways; but they knew reaching out was necessary. They weren’t dizzy and glamorous, they had dignity and were serious. And when they lost their fights within the party, they didn’t bolt, they stayed and joined the younger conservatives.

They didn’t seem it, but they were tough, and they knew how to win. Those who’ve replaced them, much less so.

It is my impression we’re making more psychopaths. I can’t back this up with statistics because doctors don’t write “total psycho” on the diagnosis line. Psychopathy isn’t a diagnostic category and is largely viewed as part of a cluster of antisocial personality disorders. But doctors commonly use the term and it has defined characteristics. The American Psychological Association calls it a chronic disposition to disregard the rights of others. Manifestations include a tendency to exploit, to be deceitful, to disregard norms and laws, to be impulsive and reckless, and, most important, to lack guilt, remorse and empathy. The APA has reported 15% to 25% of prison inmates show characteristics of psychopathology, far more than in the general adult population.

But that’s where I see growth. Subtle psychopaths, the kind who don’t stab you, are often intelligent, charming and accomplished. I believe two are currently in the news. (I confine myself to the business sphere, leaving out the equally rich field of politics.)

Elizabeth Holmes was just sentenced to 11 years in federal prison for defrauding investors in her famous Theranos scam. People used to ask why she did it. By now that’s clear. She did it to be important. She wanted to be admired. She wished to be thought a genius, a pioneer. She no doubt wanted money, though part of her con was to live relatively modestly—she wore the same black turtleneck and trousers most days. She wanted status, then and now as Tom Wolfe said the great subject of American life. And she seemed to think she deserved these things—that she merited them, simply by walking in. One thing you pick up as you read John Carreyrou’s great reporting, in these pages and his book, is that she seemed not at all concerned with the negative effects of her actions on others. She didn’t seem to care that investors lost hundreds of millions, people lost jobs, the great men she invited on her board were humiliated.

Sam Bankman-Fried’s cryptocurrency-trading firm, FTX, collapsed last month. We’re still in the why-did-he-do-it phase—Was it deliberate deception? Untidy bookkeeping? Visionaries often leave the details to others! We make mysteries where there aren’t any. He had a great life while it worked! He made himself famous, rich, admired—friend of presidents and prime ministers, the darling of a major political party. To the Democrats he was the biggest thing since George Soros.

But somehow a valuation of $32 billion was, in a matter of weeks, turned into, or revealed as, nothing. FTX filed for bankruptcy on Nov. 11, and FTX’s new CEO, John Ray, said he believed gross negligence was involved and a “substantial portion” of FTX customers’ assets may be “missing or stolen.” Soon after, the crypto firm BlockFi filed for bankruptcy in New Jersey and Bermuda.

A peculiarity of subtle psychopaths is that while they don’t seem to feel shame, they are preoccupied with being thought of as highly moral. Ms. Holmes was simply trying to help sick people get their blood tested more easily. This was part of her origin myth—a relative’s illness made her sensitive to the needs of the suffering. Mr. Bankman-Fried gave away millions and became the public face of a movement called effective altruism. He was just trying to help the less fortunate live better lives! And he was so modest about it, eschewing material things, clad in rough sandals, a thin T-shirt, shorts. Like the young St. Francis, stripping himself naked that his robes might be sold for the poor.

I don’t know if Elon Musk fits in this category. I hope he’s an eccentric genius with a moral core and not a psychopath. We’ll find out! It’s good he’s in space. His buying Twitter has excited lots of people, frightened others. If he merely changes that public square from an entity of the left to an open entity, good. We’ll see how content moderation goes. But many conservatives see him as a kind of savior. Is he? Saviors by definition save others.

Does he strike you as preoccupied by the needs of other people? Evince an old-fashioned interest in the public weal? He offers to buy the site, changes his mind, tries to back out, is forced to honor his agreement, takes over. In the ensuing chaos he tweets out memes of a whore tempting a monk, to illustrate, strangely, his invitation to Donald Trump to rejoin the site. He tweets out photos of his bedside table—two life-size handgun replicas and scattered cans of Diet Coke. It looked as if a school shooter lived there.

“He stands for free speech.” Mr. Bankman-Fried stood for selflessness and “responsible” regulation of crypto. Ms. Holmes stood for thinking outside the box and breaking through false limits. They all believe in something.

My fear with Mr. Musk is that if a scientific paper came out saying eating baby parts will add half a century to your life, he’d tweet: We can grow the babies in discarded ship containers and eat them—for the squeamish, God didn’t make them, I did so there’s no soul or anything.

But again, most interesting in psychopaths is the lack of remorse. They don’t like being caught—that upsets them—but they don’t mind causing others harm. It’s their superpower. They’re not hemmed in by what limits you.

Which is a conscience. People often refer to their consciences—they say things like “My conscience is clear.” It’s not an unknown entity to them. But they seem to think it’s something they were born with, like a sense of smell. When actually a conscience has to be formed and developed or it doesn’t work.

Every major faith in the world has thoughts here. In Catholic teaching, says Father Roger Landry, Columbia University’s Catholic chaplain, the traditional definition of conscience is “a judgment of the practical reason applying moral principles to concrete circumstances leading to the conclusion to do or not do something.”

“Many people today confuse their conscience with their opinion or even with their feelings about what is the right thing to do or avoid,” he said in an email. “Many think that if their intentions were good, and they desired a good outcome, then the action would be morally fine. But, as is obvious, sometimes we will feel good about doing something wrong (‘I stole, but he was rich’; ‘I insulted her, but she deserved it.’)” A conscience must be informed “with the truth that comes from God—the Ten Commandments, the Beatitudes, corporal and spiritual works of mercy, other passages in Sacred Scripture, the moral teachings of the Church.” These things “illumine our eyes so that we may see things more clearly.”

“Conscience can make erroneous judgments, either because it identifies wrong principles (e.g., personal autonomy as the supreme value), or has the right principles in a disordered rank (prioritizing not hurting others’ feelings over helping the person give up drugs.)” But to form a conscience we have a duty “to tune into God’s frequency rather than our own echo chamber, or the confused noise that can come from culture.”

We need better consciences. If we got them, we’d have fewer psychopaths.

From a speech last month at the Al Smith Dinner at the Park Avenue Armory in New York.

Words of thanks to someone I knew well as a child:

I had an old great-aunt. She was my grandfather’s sister. Her name was Mary Jane Byrne but we called her Jane Jane. When I first encountered her, in the 1950s, I was a little child and she was ancient—about 60.

She lived in New York and went to a local parish, St. Vincent Ferrer. When I was little she told me it was the pennies of immigrants that made that great church. I asked why they did that. She said, “To show love for God. And to show the Protestants we’re here, and we have real estate too.”

She came to America about 1915, an Irish immigrant girl of around 20 from a rocky little patch in the west of Ireland. She came by herself, landed at Ellis Island and went to Brooklyn like everyone else. She settled in a neighborhood near the old Navy Yard, where relatives put her up on the couch.

She dropped her bags and went straight to Manhattan, where the jobs were, and became a maid for a family on Park Avenue. She lived in a little room on the side. In time she became a ladies’ maid, learning to care for a wardrobe and jewelry and brush the lady’s hair. She respected her work and came to love the finer things. When they got thrown away she’d bring them home and we’d have them. I remember a cracked hairbrush, made from real tortoiseshell, with beige bristles.

On days off she’d visit us in Brooklyn, and later on Long Island, in Massapequa, where my family moved and I went to public school. She’d sleep on the couch in our living room. As is often true with immigrant families, ours was somewhat turbulent, but Jane Jane was peaceful and orderly. If we were together on a Sunday, she took me to Mass. I loved it. They had bells and candles and smoke and shadows and they sang. The church changed that a bit over the years, but we lost a lot when we lost the showbiz. Because, of course, it wasn’t only showbiz. To a child’s eyes, my eyes, it looked as if either you go to church because you’re nice or you go and it makes you nice but either way it’s good.

Jane Jane carried Mass cards and rosary beads—the Sacred Heart of Jesus, the Blessed Mother, the saints. She’d put the cards on a mirror, hang the rosary beads on a bedstead. I look back and think, wherever she went she was creating an altar. To this day when I am in the home of newcomers to America, when I see cards, statues and Jesus candles, I think: I’m home.

She didn’t think life was plain and flat and material, she thought it had dimensions we don’t see, that there were souls and spirits and mysteries.

She came from rough people but she had a natural love for poetry, history, and politics. She wasn’t ideological—ardent Catholics don’t need an ideology, they’ve already got the essential facts. But she was, like all the Irish and Italian Catholics and European Jews of Brooklyn, a Democrat. I don’t think they ever met a Republican. I think they thought Republicans were like Englishmen with monocles.

But the poetry—she’d walk around day and night declaiming, with a rich Irish accent, popular poems she’d read in the newspapers. The one I remember best was a poem written in 1909 called “America for Me.” It’s about seeing the great cities of the world but knowing where you really belong. Its refrain: “So it’s home again, and home again, America for me!”

She loved Franklin D. Roosevelt, but most of all she loved Woodrow Wilson and the Fourteen Points, his principles for the world after the Great War. She would walk around reciting them: “Freedom of the seas! An end to armaments! Sovereign nations living in peace!”

I’ve never known anyone like her. Sometimes life overwhelmed her. She’d disappear for a while, I’d hear she’d been hospitalized, she’d come back joking about doctors. There’s a lot of turbulence in any life, in all families, but for recent immigrants I think it can be hard in ways we don’t see. Because they let go of a lot when they left, and there was no one to keep them there, which can make it harder to gain purchase in the new place.

She passed away when I was a teenager, unchanged, the same mystical force. But what she did for me—she gave me a sense of the romance of life, the romance of politics and history, the sense that history’s a big thing and has glory in it. Great causes, acts of valor. And she was in love with America because it could be the stage of the love and the valor. America reminds you: Life is dynamic, not static, it moves, and there’s something magical in this.

Years later, when I was grown and a speechwriter in the Reagan White House, the president was coming back from a foreign trip and had to give brief remarks on returning to U.S. soil at an air base in Alaska. I got the assignment. I was new and nervous, but as I worked an old memory tugged at my mind, and I knew what Reagan would say. He’d say “And it’s home again and home again, America for me.”

And so he did. And that was my tip of the hat to Mary Jane Byrne of County Donegal and Park Avenue.

She would have loved being here tonight, loved being with you. She would have looked at the dais—the men in white tie and tails, the women in flowing gowns. She’d want to brush your hair with a tortoiseshell brush. She would have been awed to be in the same room with a prince of the church, and awed when I said, “Jane Jane, this is my friend Cardinal Tim.”

We’ve all got great stories, everyone in this room, and it’s good to keep in mind the romance of it. All of you here have responsibilities in a world very far from Jane Jane’s. A lot of what you carry is a great burden. Whatever your pressures—whether it’s trying to safeguard the investments that people have made with you, or to maintain the trust of those who voted for you, or to raise the funds for the charity that depends on you, or to keep the faith of those who have prayed with you—whatever the pressure, I think she’d hope that you not become jaded, that you maintain a sense of the mystery of it all, the unseen things, the feats of love and valor.

A few weeks ago Aaron Judge hits 61 and stands on the field to make eye contact with Roger Maris’s family, and my son texts me: “How can you not be romantic about baseball?” Jane Jane steals into me for a moment and I think: How can you not be romantic about life?

Chris Christie got a standing ovation from the Republican Governors Association this week after delivering fiery words that captured the inner views of audience members, including GOP officeholders from 50 states, donors, party figures and operatives. The former New Jersey governor told them voters in the midterms “rejected crazy.”

We spoke by phone after Donald Trump’s announcement Tuesday that he would run for the Republican presidential nomination.

Mr. Christie said the midterms were an actual change point in the history of the party: that its central struggle can no longer be avoided. That struggle is how and why to put Mr. Trump in the rearview mirror.

It can’t be dodged and can no longer be the problem that dare not speak its name: “We can’t lead and convince Trump folks if we’re unwilling to stick our necks out and say his name.” Over the next 18 months, leaders will have to take a side and go to Trump supporters to make the case against him. “There needs to be a fight out loud, in public. The only way it becomes a winning argument is transparent and public.”

The strongest argument: Mr. Trump can’t win, and if you truly seek to win you must disengage from him.

“This is a baseball country,” Mr. Christie said. “It’s always three strikes and you’re out.” Mr. Trump struck out in 2018, 2020 and 2022. He never came close to a plurality of the popular vote. When Mr. Christie ended his tenure as chairman of the RGA, in 2014, there were 31 Republican governors. Next year there will be 26. The reason, he said, is that Mr. Trump weighs the party down and picks candidates based not on issues or electability but personal loyalty. It is an electoral narcissism that is killing the party.

How to convince Trump supporters? “Give him credit for what he’s gotten done . . . but they need to be told again and again: A vote for Donald Trump is a vote for a Democratic president.”

In his announcement speech, Mr. Trump “called himself a victim. In the past his people saw him as a master, not a victim. It was the biggest moment of the speech. Republicans don’t vote for victims, they vote for leaders.” (Mr. Trump’s words: “I am a victim, I will tell you. I am a victim.” He was referring to the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Steele dossier.)

Mr. Christie offered another argument: “Look, everything you hate about what Biden has done is ultimately Trump’s fault, and it will continue because he can’t win an election. You want eight years of Biden? Is that a risk you want to take?” Trump voters have always had a personal connection with him. “But in the end he put the people they feared the most in charge of the country—Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, Biden.”

Mr. Christie sees the midterms as “a rejection of chaos: ‘Please, no more tumult.’ ” Democrats won independent voters by 2 points. That wasn’t expected in this year and these conditions. “That’s a plea of the people who say enough already, it’s about calm.” The country, he says, has been “traumatized,” not only politically but by the pandemic and its attendant struggles, tensions and loss.

Can the party hold together? “There’s gonna be some very tough fighting before there is a coming together.” But there are two reasons to think it can. “We are generally united behind a set of policy principles, and we are genuinely opposed to what the Democrats are doing. So that gives us the potential. But we have to have the internal family argument about the nature and character of our leadership.”

Afterward I thought there is another way of thinking about the Trump question. It is that countries make mistakes, sometimes big ones, and political parties do too. It’s not shocking, they’re conglomerations of people, forests full of crooked timber. But if you keep making the same one, it’s not the mistake you made, it’s who you are. After Jan. 6, 2021, this question became a deeper and more painful one, with broader dimensions and bigger implications.
In the next 18 months, the Republican Party will have to decide if Mr. Trump is the mistake it made or who it is. Complicating the answer, people don’t like to view their actions as mistakes. They think to renounce their previous, passionately held position is to renounce themselves. But most people do want to move on after debacles, and most, once they see something as a debacle, are open to arguments, facts and thinking it through.

As to Mr. Trump’s speech, it was a wan, deflated enterprise. But something in the media coverage was interesting. No broadcast network carried it, none of the major cable-news networks stuck with it to the end, and one didn’t take it at all. All covered the announcement or reported it, but it wasn’t treated as an epic event, only a news event. This suggests that this time the media will be judging Mr. Trump by normal candidate standards, not Special Phenomenon standards. But when you don’t treat Mr. Trump like he’s special, you marginalize him. I don’t think the cable networks will be giving him the oxygen they fed him so freely in 2016, in part because none of their executives want to be accused of what Jeff Zucker was accused of that year: giving him unlimited airtime to get ratings, and making him president.

Worse for Mr. Trump, those executives may simply doubt his audience is still a huge one.

For Republicans, the most deeply embittering break point was the storming of the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Without that moment, the pro- and anti-Trump split would exist and endure, but less passionately. Mike Pence writes it in his recent book: “I was angry at . . . how it desecrated the seat of our democracy and dishonored the patriotism of millions of our supporters, who would never do such a thing here or anywhere else.” Republicans of all kinds felt slimed by 1/6.

In the coming 18 months of the big argument, Trump supporters can fairly be asked to consider a thought experiment.

What if it had been Barack Obama in 2012 who refused to accept a democratic outcome to a presidential election? What if we later found out he probably knew he’d lost but didn’t want to accept it so he incited the Obamaites with accusations and false claims and made speeches insisting the election was stolen? What if he’d made a big outdoor speech and sent his forces, including some antifa chapters, to storm the Capitol in an attempt to thwart the Constitution and stop the counting of electoral votes? What if he refused to stop them once he saw on TV what they were doing?

What if Democrats had done that? Republicans would feel righteous rage. They would never forgive Mr. Obama, who’d have shown the worst of himself and his movement. He and his actions would make you feel democracy itself was in the balance, and you would pledge to never let him enter the White House as president again.

You’d feel as Liz Cheney does now: This must end.

It is rude of Arizona and Nevada to keep the country waiting to know the composition of its Senate. Why, days after the election, don’t we know which party controls the House? Why can’t the late-reporting states get their act together on vote counting? It’s the increase in mail-in ballots? So what? You roll with life and adapt. Florida, which spans two time zones, reports its tallies with professionalism and dispatch.

States have two jobs in this area. One is to create the conditions by which people can vote—polling places, machines that work, correctly worded ballots. The second is to count the votes. It’s not rocket science. Leaders keep saying we have to be patient. Why? How about doing your job? Get the mail-in ballots, count them, hold them in a vault until the polls close, and announce the numbers, along with the Election Day vote, that night.

Long counts are not only sloppy, they are abusive. It is in the delay between polls closed and outcome announced that the mischief begins. It’s where conspiracism takes hold. They stole the boxes with the ballots last Thursday—my cousin’s friend saw it.

It is looking for trouble. America isn’t a place where you need to look for trouble.

On the outcome as we know it: The MAGA movement and Donald Trump took it right in the face. Normal conservatives and Republicans fared well. Trump-endorsed candidates went down. Everyone knows the famous examples—Doug Mastriano in Pennsylvania, Don Bolduc in New Hampshire, Tudor Dixon, who lost by 10 points in Michigan. All embraced Mr. Trump, some sincerely, many opportunistically, all consistently. A Hollywood director once said of pragmatic choices, and we paraphrase, that it’s one thing to temporarily reside up someone’s organ of elimination but it’s wrong to build a condo up there, people will notice and get a poor impression. That’s sort of what happened.

Less noticed so far: In Michigan, Democrats flipped both chambers of the Legislature. Republicans lost the state Senate for the first time in almost 40 years. Trump-backed candidates lost big races. The nonpartisan Bridge Michigan said the election should be “a wake-up call for the GOP to move on from Donald Trump’s obsessive quest to re-litigate his 2020 loss.” Jason Roe, a former head of the state party, said the GOP can continue to tilt at windmills or win elections, and if it does the former, “it’s gonna be a rough decade ahead of us.”

Ronna McDaniel, head of the Republican National Committee, lives in Michigan. Think she noticed?

On the other hand Team Normie pretty much flourished east to west. Gov. Chris Sununu in New Hampshire won by 15 points, Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia by more than 7, and of course Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida by nearly 20.

The weirdness of the Trump candidates—their inexperience and fixations, their air of constant yet meaningless conflict, their sheer abnormality—asked too much of voters, who said no.

On Mr. Trump himself, everything has been said, including in this space for a long time. An esteemed Tory political figure summed it up succinctly in London in August: “Donald Trump ruined the Republican Party’s brand.”

It will now stick with him or not. It will live free or die.

If, in 2024, Republicans aren’t serious about policy—about what they claim to stand for—they will pick him as their nominee. And warm themselves in the glow of the fire as he goes down in flames. If they’re serious about the things they claim to care about—crime, wokeness, etc.—they’ll choose someone else and likely win.

The night before the election I watched Mr. Trump’s rally in Ohio. It was the usual until the end, when, as he spoke, some “Phantom of the Opera”-ish music came from out of nowhere. It was like some deformed giant named Igor was playing an organ as the sound track of the speech. It was like going back to the eerie weird zone of 2015-20, only darker, weirder and less competent. Mr. Trump didn’t know how to coordinate his words with the music, and the words were all dark—America in decline, grrr grrr. There was a deep darkness behind him, and beyond that his big plane. When Gov. Mike DeWine was asked to speak, he mumbled approximately 3.5 words and scrammed. Trump invited another statewide candidate to the podium and he shook him off: No, that’s OK.

I watched and thought: What I am seeing is the end of something. I am seeing yesterday. This is a busted jalopy that runs on yesteryear’s resentments. A second term of this would be catastrophic, with him more bitter, less competent, surrounded by collapsed guardrails. He and his people once tried to stop the constitutionally mandated electoral vote certification by violently overrunning the U.S. Capitol. If America lets him back, he will do worse. And America knows.

The policy positions of Trumpism always had constructive elements. He helped bust the party from its mindless establishment rut, broke the party from its recent always-up-for-a-war impulse and from the condescension of its political strategists toward the working class.

But the man himself poisons his own movement. That’s what became obvious this week.

For almost seven years my email has been full of Republicans who disapprove of Mr. Trump, support many of his policies, see no wisdom in the policies of the left, and are stuck with him.

But they are no longer stuck. This week’s epic loss—a landscape of pro-Republican issues and a repudiation of Republican candidates—should jar them loose. He is nowhere near the only game in town. It’s time for a jailbreak.

There will be other candidates for president, including Mr. DeSantis, who turned Florida red. If Mr. Trump goes forward and Mr. DeSantis does too, it will be one of the great political brawls. Mr. Trump is already essentially trying to blackmail the governor—“I know more about him than anybody other than perhaps his wife.” Mr. DeSantis has wisely refrained from responding.

He should continue holding his fire, not try to laugh it off or respond in kind. He should concentrate on governing and reaching out. If he decides to run, at that point he should answer—in a cool and deadly way, not a personal way. A way that acknowledges Mr. Trump was a breakthrough figure, changed the party in some healthy ways, but got lost in obsessions and bitterness, in petty feuds—in an All About Me-ness that came at the expense of policy and party. All About Me is a losing game, because politics is all about us.

Trump supporters will say, “Well, Trump’s been insulting him a long time, he’s got a right to answer. He’s got a right to insult back, and he didn’t.” Many of them will hear. They’ll think.

Meantime there’s a gift for Republicans in what happened this week. “Every victory carries within it the seeds of defeat, every defeat the seeds of victory.” If Republicans had just won, they never would have learned a thing.

They can learn now. The old saying is there’s no education in the second kick of a mule. This is the third kick, after 2018 and 2020. Maybe they will learn now.

William F. Buckley once received a postelection letter from an elderly liberal saying that she wished it were not only the number of votes counted but the weight and worthiness of each. Surely the votes of the thoughtful and informed should be counted more heavily than those of the frivolous and knee-jerk. If we did it that way, she said, the Democrats would have just won in a sweep and not gone down to defeat. Buckley replied that he too wished the votes of the more knowledgeable were given greater weight as this would ensure conservative victories for generations. My goodness they joked around in those days.

My modest hope as Tuesday approaches is that all ballots be cast only after much thought. It’s almost touching to talk this way, to want the quality of each vote to be high, but every time I hear “Vote!” or “If you don’t vote you don’t get the sticker that says you voted,” I realize that the pressure to vote is high, especially among the young. We say that voting is our right and duty and it certainly is our right, enshrined in that old Constitution, but our duty is to take a serious interest in our country, state and city, and be part of an informed citizenry. And then vote.

Maybe you feel pressure to vote, maybe your friends or associates will tease or embarrass you if you don’t, but I don’t know. If at this point in your life, for whatever reason, you don’t care that much and haven’t bothered to learn much and get a sense of the candidates—if in your heart you know you’re not as committed and informed as the neighbors, who are always going out to meetings and helping local groups—then I say it would be honorable to hold off and spend the next few years studying. This would be an act of humility. Democracies can’t continue without at least someone being humble.

So if you’re serious and take our political life seriously, please go Tuesday to the polls. And if not, admit it to yourself and try to become a better citizen so you can vote in good conscience next time.

May Serious Person turnout be historically high.

I wrote last week of where I think we’re going, and why: a very good night for Republicans, with both houses of Congress won and some surprising governorships taken. The wave we are in has been building since the spring and summer of 2020 and the protests and riots sparked by the killing of George Floyd. That period has never been fully appreciated as the time of trauma and disorder it was, with small businesses going up in flames and some downtowns turning into war zones. It was just about that point the Democratic Party made it obvious they’d gone far left on issues of crime and punishment. Then Afghanistan, illegal immigration, inflation and wokeness in the schools. Those things would leave voters turning against a ruling party, and taking from it some of its power. It should be remembered in all the excitement that Congress will still likely be close in both houses, that neither party will have an overwhelming majority. America is still divided.

On Wednesday evening the president made his hastily called closing argument. It was aggressive and sloppily divisive. Immediately at the beginning he painted the attack on Paul Pelosi, then went to 1/6 and Donald Trump’s Big Lie. All these things were and are terrible and deserve continued thought and attention. But Joe Biden deployed them politically, as a dodge to keep the mind from issues working against the Democrats. His speeches seem tired and pre-masticated. He never seems to think aloud seriously or follow any particular line of logic. He just describes things over and over in what he thinks moving language that will break through. It doesn’t because it isn’t moving. The path to most hearts is through the brain.

His strategy, I suppose, was to light a fire under the Democratic base. A broader strategy would have been better: Talk to the American people candidly, acknowledge what’s not working, don’t treat crime and inflation like a third rail you can’t touch. At least say, “I hear you, the problems you are facing are real, and I am asking for the right to turn them around.”

Would that have worked? No! Nothing will work right now, it’s a midterm and voters are mad. So just be as constructive and realistic as you can. There’s nothing wrong with seeming beleaguered when you are, or asking for help when you need it.

Here is what is coming: The dread Democratic circular firing squad. Everyone in the party fighting about whose fault it was.

Progressives mostly stayed off the national trail because voters noticed their policies were a large part of the problem. Those policies and their promoters will face some internal fire. So will individual campaigns, and faulty candidates. If, against such odds, a Republican wins the New York governorship for the first time in 20 years, Democrats will accuse the state party of complacency and blindness.

But after a few days most of their wrath will be turned on Mr. Biden, first in sharp, hot not-for-attribution quotes and then very-much-for-attribution quotes. In the coming weeks and months it will become clear the 2024 presidential cycle has begun, and the party’s attempt to replace its incumbent. All those Democratic Senate candidates who wouldn’t answer the question: Do you want him to run again? They knew what’s coming.

Final point: California Gov. Gavin Newsom has it exactly wrong about his party’s problem right now. He insisted this week that the Democrats’ problem is they got their communications and messaging wrong. “We’re getting crushed on narrative.” No, you’re getting crushed on facts. You’re getting crushed by unpopular policies. The answer is to change them, not how you talk about them. How you communicate your feelings about the facts isn’t the issue—suburban women don’t care about your feelings. They care about real-world things. If you don’t understand this you won’t be able to dig your way out.

And here a small thought on what we are doing Tuesday, which is choosing political leaders. Politics is a profession, a serious one for serious people, and, for its successful practitioners, one closer to art than we know. Artists try to apprehend the big picture quickly and, at the same time, get to the heart of it. My fear of current leaders now, many of them, is that they came to full adulthood in the past 30 years, in the internet age, and are more about the picture and the video than the book. They are strategic but not reflective. They don’t read. They see feeling as more important than thinking. They Instagram their breakfast. They go to the gym a lot and are buff in their skinny suits.

Those serious, thoughtful voters I pine for? I hope those elected next week are worthy of them.

I think we all have a sense of where this is going.

People are alarmed at the cost of things. They are afraid of crime. They don’t like what they see of the schools. These are personal, intimate issues. They have to do with how you live your life. You don’t want to be the parents who can’t buy the kids what they need and the other kids make fun of them. You don’t want the emotional mood of your house dictated by your fear that you can’t make rent. You don’t want to be hit on the head on the way to the store—what would you do if you were carjacked, what’s the right way to act?—and you don’t want to be constantly doubting your kids are safe. And the schools are swept by weirdness of all kinds. Just teach them math and history so they can go on and get a good job and not always be afraid of the rent.

These three things, plus illegal immigration, will defeat a lot of Democrats on Nov. 8, as will one other factor: The Democrats don’t have a plan. This leaves voters thinking: We can’t turn it around with them. Their party is committed to ideologies that are causing or contributing to these problems, and they’re afraid to break free of those commitments because the leftward edges of their base won’t vote for them if they do. So they’re stuck talking doubletalk.

With the Republicans, maybe their plans will work, maybe not, but at least they’re talking about what you’re thinking about, at least there’s a possibility they’ll come through.

I want to talk about crime and New York. The other day this newspaper ran an editorial recalling some recent mayhem. A 62-year-old grandfather was punched in the head at a Bronx subway station and propelled onto the tracks. Last week a man was pushed onto the tracks in Brooklyn, and another onto the tracks in the Bronx. In September, a father of two was fatally stabbed on a Brooklyn train. The suspect was a homeless man who’d been arrested for a subway stabbing last year and was out on “supervised release.” As if we supervise them.

The New York Post reported an 18-year-old woman was stabbed in the hip on Wednesday by a “deranged stranger” at 10 a.m. on a Brooklyn street. A police source told the Post: “It looks like an EDP”—an emotionally disturbed person.

Democrats have long replied that crime statistics are in fact lower than they were decades ago. But decades ago New York was in a sustained crime wave and trying to crawl its way out. The trend lines now are going the wrong way. So when Democrats respond this way, it sounds like, “Who you gonna believe, me or your lying eyes?”

Professional criminals and gang members know they have the upper hand: changes in procedure mean they likely won’t be charged; revisions in bail law mean if they are, they’ll be out by lunch.

And there are the mentally ill, who are pretty much dumped on the streets in America. Back in the 1960s and ’70s the forces of modern thinking argued not only that mental hospitals were scandalously run and often Dickensian, but that we had it all wrong: Society itself is so crazy that a “crazy” response was a hallmark of a kind of higher sanity. The insane were our thought leaders. It is true that institutionalization was usually terrible, but the answer can’t be that the insane are left to roam the streets and build tent cities on sidewalks. The answer is to devote more resources to broadening and improving institutionalization. Most politicians know this but feel they can’t turn the ship around, so they ignore the issue and just do press conferences where they say moving things about the little girl who was murdered.

Meanwhile, the mentally ill often go off their meds when they’re in the mood. Manic depressives miss the high of the manic episodes, schizophrenics miss their visions. So they go off, and go crazy, and grandpa winds up on the subway tracks.

You can calculate what a street criminal will do, and factor it in. Don’t walk on the empty street at night; don’t wear the gold Rolex when dining at an outside restaurant, the scooter gangs will get you. It’s harder to predict what an insane person will do, which is why everyone feels at their mercy.

People have no confidence—none—that “the authorities” will do anything to make the situation better. The district attorneys’ offices are in the grip of a legal ideology that views inequity and racism as the primary and essential problem, and once we solve them we can then focus on street crime.

This ideology owns Twitter, the Slack channels of major media companies and the departments of all major universities and their law schools. So it is formidable. It has been winning since the 2010s. But in sheer numbers its advocates punch way above their weight. What anticrime voters need to realize is they have mass. They are the overwhelming majority—in both parties. They can fight back. This Election Day I think they will.

That is the context of New York’s startling gubernatorial race, with Republican Rep. Lee Zeldin up against incumbent Democrat Kathy Hochul. Ms. Hochul held a comfortable lead in a state where Democratic registration is twice that of Republicans, and Mr. Zeldin long ago wrapped himself around Donald Trump’s engine and voted not to certify Joe Biden’s 2020 electoral votes. This was in line with feeling in his district but not the state, which Mr. Trump lost by 23 points.

Yet suddenly it’s a real race, and the reason is crime. In the debate this week, Mr. Zeldin talked about it as if he cared. When Ms. Hochul mentioned gun control, Mr. Zeldin lit up. No, he said, it’s not only guns: “You have people who are afraid of being pushed in front of oncoming subway cars, they’re being stabbed, beaten to death on the street with hammers. Go talk to the Asian-American community and how it’s impacted them with the loss of lives. . . . We need to be talking about all of these other crimes, but instead Kathy Hochul is too busy patting herself on the back, ‘Job well done.’”

He said he’d declare a crime emergency from day one, as we did with Covid, and remove progressive district attorneys.

It was electric. Watch that race.

There was nothing endearing about Mr. Zeldin, who is deliberately growly and grim. He has this in common with a lot of the male post-Trump-presidency generation of GOP politicians: There is a sense of unease in them, something at once aggressive and furtive. They glower and simmer, grrr grrr, as if it’s a concession to your fancy ideas of civilization to be personable. Here an angry conservative will say, “Our country’s a dumpster fire and you want charm? You want winsome?”

No, I’d like normal. Politics is a game of addition. Attract those who don’t equate a glower with wisdom. What does good nature cost you?

Half a century ago William F. Buckley wrote a small gem of a book called “Cruising Speed,” about a single action-packed week in his life as an editor and writer. I’ve just had a Buckley-like week—at Purdue University in Indiana to speak with students, then back to New York to interview Henry Kissinger for the White House Historical Association, and then on to make the main speech to the Al Smith Dinner, the Archdiocese of New York’s big annual bipartisan charitable fundraiser. In all these venues the same theme emerged. People are worried about America and the world.

Purdue has a strong sense of community and its students are quick, affable and penetrating. I met with about 70 of them Monday for questions and answers in a political-science class at Beering Hall, and almost all their questions betrayed a perplexity about America. They were worried that our political polarization might prove fatal, that we might lose our democracy. They see signs of it. A student asked how Trump supporters can believe, after all the investigations and judicial decisions, that Joe Biden lost and he won. I said there are a lot of parts to that. Americans have always loved conspiracism, it’s in our DNA. When I was a kid it was the CIA killed JFK, Dwight Eisenhower is a communist, fluoride in the water is a plot. In our time this tendency has been magnified and weaponized by the internet, where there’s always a portal to provide you proof.

Part of it is American orneriness—people enjoy picking a fight, holding a grudge, being the only person who really gets what’s going on. Part of it is the sheer cussed fun of being obstinate. Some of it is committed and sincere—an ineradicable belief that established powers like to pull the wool over our eyes, a belief made more stubborn because sometimes they do. In the case of politicians it can be a mystery how sincere they are and how much is opportunism. If the locals say Trump won and I’m running for office, then Trump won! The only thing I could think of to help was keeping lines of communication up and the conversation going.

Later, in a “fireside chat” with Purdue’s president, Mitch Daniels, a student asked about something I’d written years ago—that presidential nominees always look alone up there on stage, like lone cowboys acting out some kind of personal destiny. I said yes, it had been a while since a candidate looked as if he had an ideological movement behind him, a fully thought-through political philosophy that propelled supporters. Such a movement implies mass, a force that came up from the people. Mr. Daniels said movements get things done; they will political change into being. He threw up a quote from my first book, 32 years ago, that said liberals in the media don’t dislike conservatives.

That was true when I wrote it, I said, but it seems less true now. In the seven years since Donald Trump came down the escalator, mainstream media has changed its nature. I understand why they thought they had to stop Mr. Trump—our big media come largely from New York, which had known him for more than 30 years and saw him not as the commanding presence on “The Apprentice” but as a con man who always seemed to operate one step ahead of the law. They felt they had to oppose him, but that very opposition left them not “reporting” but becoming what only some of them wanted to be, openly activist and of the left. This too contributed to polarization: people who more or less used to trust them to throw the ball straight no longer do, and find other news sources, some of which are specious indeed.

I went home to New York and, on Wednesday night, to interview Mr. Kissinger. With a book out and crises brewing he’s on the scene and, at 99, treated as what he is, a legend. I think here Henry’s friend Bill Buckley might have fun and call him the biggest thing since Bismarck. Mr. Kissinger is grave about the current moment. The evening was informally off the record, but I don’t think he’d mind my saying I asked him about broad feelings of anxiety about the world. Is it unrealistic to be experiencing this moment as uniquely dangerous? During his answer—no, he doesn’t think it unrealistic—he reflected that he’s been thinking a lot about World War I and how the leaders of the nations engaged in that conflict had no idea, at the beginning, the magnitude of the losses coming, that they just stumbled in and stumbled on.

His advice seemed to echo what we discussed at Purdue: In tough times, keep all lines of communication up and operating. You never know what might come in on the wires. Keep the conversation going.

On Thursday night, I gave the main speech at the Al Smith Dinner. A little more than 600 people gathered in the Park Avenue Armory, every politician of note in the state and city, and business figures and philanthropists, many on the broad dais in white tie and tails or gowns. The trick at the dinner is to be funny as possible while training your fire equally on both parties. The assumption is everyone’s better when they’re laughing. I did my best. Chuck Schumer’s been in Congress so long that medically he’s considered a pre-existing condition. Kevin McCarthy told me at the last national prayer breakfast that Jesus loves America best, that’s why the Bible is in English.

Will President Biden run for re-election? He’s showing telltale signs of aging. Held a state dinner and insisted it start at 5 p.m. so he could get the early-bird special. Afterward he invited the visiting prime minister to go upstairs and watch “Hogan’s Heroes.” Then he spent a half hour trying to rewind Netflix. A month from now he turns 80 but the White House has been playing down any celebrations. Internal memos about it have such a high security classification that copies have been found at Mar-a-Lago. But personally I prefer age to some of the younger congressmen and -women, who are, basically, airheads. I’ve interviewed them. They think Machiavelli is a clothing designer. They think bilateral and trilateral are muscles you work in the gym.

And there’s Ted Cruz. When Ted ran for president, he called me and asked me for advice. I said, “Ted, just be yourself.” That was mean of me.

Then there’s Mike Pence, a good man. But hearing him give a speech is proof that the dead are trying to contact us.

And so my Buckley-like week: the questioning young at Purdue, the wisdom of a great statesman in New York, and on to the Park Avenue Armory for the Catholic Church raising money for kids and immigrants by teasing itself and others. A good thing in life is not to get jaded but to see that even in a world of trouble life is moving, stimulating, even splendid, that you’re lucky to be here and doing what you’re doing. I think Bill Buckley would have enjoyed himself.

Public pronouncements aren’t commensurate with the gravity of the Ukraine situation. They’ve gotten too informal, off-the-cuff and shallow.

Russia continues its missile barrage against Ukrainian cities. The Crimean bridge was daringly taken out, delivering Vladimir Putin a real blow, and within hours Ukraine was tauntingly unveiling a postage stamp depicting the ruined span. The Nord Stream pipeline has been sabotaged. Each side blames the other, but either way Europe is braced for a long dark winter. And both sides are either threatening or speculating aloud about the use of nuclear weapons.

President Biden has taken to publicly comparing the current moment to the Cuban Missile Crisis. From reported remarks at a New York City Democratic fundraiser: “We have a direct threat of the use of the nuclear weapon if in fact things continue down the path they are going. . . . We have not faced the prospect of Armageddon since Kennedy.” Vladimir Putin is “not joking.”

If we’re facing Armageddon, that should be taking up all the president’s time. JFK wasn’t at fundraisers in October 1962, and when he spoke it was in a studied, careful way, and to the entire nation.

Since the tanks first moved in February, one of this column’s preoccupations has been the tone, volume and swiftness of the declarations, tweets, one-liners and ad libs that followed. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, at the beginning, had to establish that he and his country would fight: “I need ammunition, not a ride.” The West in turn had to make clear it would resist this brute violation of international law, the violent invasion of a sovereign nation. If it didn’t, it would be accepting the idea that the law counts for nothing; the world is a jungle where the feral have the upper hand.

Since then, and as the stakes got higher, leaders have become all too casual—unserious and sloppy. Part of it is social media, on which the whole world is hooked. Ambassadors launch taunting tweets like rockets and get high-fives instead of irradiated craters. I can’t get the phrases “possible nuclear war” and “let’s do snark” to go together in my head. Many others can.

What’s needed is a serious, weighty, textured document that reflects the gravity of the moment we’re in, a full Oval Office address that doesn’t emote but speaks rationally to a nation of thoughtful people. A big definitional statement. Where are we? Are we communicating with the Kremlin? How should the American people be thinking about all this?

There are times in life and diplomacy when silence must be maintained as circumstances evolve and new options emerge. But we’re not maintaining silence. As for the efficacy of thoughtfulness, sometimes it can cool things down or slow them down. If we’re traveling toward Armageddon the slow route is best.

Here I jump to Mr. Putin himself. It’s hard to imagine a peaceful resolution while he retains power. It is possible conversations have begun among members of the institutions that might most effectively move against him—the state intelligence apparatus, the military, even the cabinet. If they are talking, it would be going like this: Mr. Putin himself drove the war, which was a bad idea badly executed; it likely can’t be won by conventional means; the use of nuclear or chemical weapons would create a physical danger to, and reputational disaster for, Russia; the Ukraine adventure has stressed the Russian economy and strained its political stability; the people don’t want it—not the elites seeing their worlds constrict, the middle seeing their aspirations disrupted, the hinterland folks whose sons are being sacrificed.

A veteran observer this week said Mr. Putin is a strongman who is now a weak man. That sort, he implied, can’t continue.

When Nikita Khrushchev was deposed in October 1964, his adult son, Sergei, was keeping a diary. Twenty-four years later, when the diaries were published, Sergei spoke to Felicity Barringer of the New York Times.

Khrushchev, who was 70 in 1964, had embarrassed the Kremlin in the Cuban Missile Crisis, when his aggression and bluster were followed by retreat. He first caught wind of a plot when a bodyguard for a former Politburo member phoned and warned Sergei that the bodyguard’s boss, the head of the KGB, the communist party secretary and two current Politburo members were planning a coup. Nikita Khrushchev didn’t believe it but asked that his friend President Anastas Mikoyan be told. Later, at his dacha on the Black Sea, he received a call: There would be an emergency meeting in Moscow, his presence was necessary. Khrushchev suddenly realized he’d been seeing odd things—a ship hovering near his beach, bodyguards outside his usual detail.

At the Politburo meeting the coup leaders accused him of mismanagement, nepotism and tactlessness. He admitted he was rude but disputed the other points. At a second meeting he accepted his fate. The official news agency Tass reported he was retiring due to poor health and advanced age. He lived out his life gardening, airbrushed from historical photos, and died in 1971. In time, almost perversely, he told Mikoyan what happened was proof of the progress he’d instituted. Would anyone have dared tell Stalin to resign? “There wouldn’t be anything left of us.”

More recently, in August 1991, was the coup attempt against Mikhail Gorbachev. He was at his Black Sea house when his communications were cut off and he was placed under arrest. The Warsaw Pact countries were starting to break free. The KGB and the military didn’t like Gorbachev’s approach and said they feared the Soviet Union was next. They rolled tanks into Moscow, seized state television and announced Gorbachev was leaving for health reasons. Massive crowds gathered in the streets opposing the coup, and the pro-democracy figure Boris Yeltsin took to the top of a tank to urge resistance. The army broke, the KGB backed down, and Gorbachev returned to Moscow. But Moscow was Yeltsin’s now. A few months later, on Christmas Day, Gorbachev stepped down. Yeltsin declared the Soviet Union over. It would be Russia now, Russia again.

In his farewell speech Gorbachev said he opposed the “dismembering” of what had been the previous Soviet state, and warned of danger ahead for the countries carved away. Six years later Yeltsin appointed a new head of the domestic arm of the intelligence service, a young man named Vladimir Putin.

Mr. Putin has dismantled or defanged some of the institutions that might go up against him. He likely has things pretty tightly wired. Unlike the KGB when it faced the protests of the Gorbachev coup, he wouldn’t likely shrink from bloodshed. Khrushchev was a fully rational actor, as was Gorbachev, as apparently were those who opposed them. We cannot be certain Mr. Putin is.

And Mr. Putin has the benefit of knowing how the two previous coup attempts ended. He’s probably made a deep study of both. And of course he lived through Gorbachev in 1991, as a KGB officer, though later he insisted he resigned when it began.

We’ll be helping dissidents only if we show now seriousness and sobriety and gravity, and repeat again the old Cold War distinction: We are against the Russian government’s actions but feel only respect and regard for the people of Russia, with whom we only want peace.

If you have been observing the Georgia U.S. Senate campaign closely and you are unusually straightforward and eloquent you would say of Herschel Walker what John Ellis said Wednesday in his newsletter:

“Walker shouldn’t be a candidate for the United States Senate. He’s not qualified. He won’t know what to do when (and if) he gets to Washington. He’s only on the ticket because former President Trump endorsed him. The moment he becomes a liability for Trump, Trump will cut him loose. So will everyone else. No one cares about Herschel Walker in GOP circles. . . . If Georgia Republicans could replace him on the ballot today, they would do so in a nano-second. They can’t. It’s too late.”

Mr. Ellis believes, however, that Mr. Walker could still win: energy prices up, inflation untamed, an out-of-control southern border, and a federal debt that this week reached a historic and somewhat harrowing $31 trillion. People fear recession. They won’t want to back the current cast of political characters, they’ll want to throw them out.

I’d add that voters don’t expect much. They’ve had their own imperfect lives, and they long ago lost any assumption that political leaders were more upstanding than they. We are in the postheroic era of American politics. What voters want is someone who sees the major issues as they do. Conservatives especially see America’s deep cultural sickness and wonder if the country is cratering before our eyes. In such circumstances personal histories don’t count as once they did.

But I see the Walker story differently and expect a different outcome.

Here I must tell you what you know, that the avowedly pro-life Senate candidate is accused of paying for the abortion of a former girlfriend, whose identity has not been revealed but who provided the Daily Beast substantiating evidence. Mr. Walker denied it, said he doesn’t know the woman and he sends checks to lots of people. The woman soon after came forward and said he should remember me, I gave birth to one of his children.

Explosive. But I think Republican strategists misunderstand the scandal, or miss the heart of it. It isn’t really about abortion or hypocrisy. It is about children born and the father says to the mother: You can raise it by yourself or you can abort it but I won’t help you raise it and act as a father. That is the story, that Walker is accused of abandoning his little kids, and it came from his son, Christian, 23, a conservative activist, who made the furious videos that blew the story up. That is the aspect Christian focused on: “My father . . . had all these random kids across the country, none of whom he raised. . . . Family values people: He has four kids—four different women—wasn’t in the house raising one of them. He was out having sex with other women. . . . You have no idea what me and my mom have survived.”

Voters who would easily forgive abortion or running around or bad breakups or divorce are less likely to give a pass on that, on four children left alone by their father, the rich handsome former football star and candidate for Senate. Christian Walker’s pain is a common one. The U.S. Census Bureau found in 2021 that 25% of American children are raised in households without their father. In Georgia there are more than 261,000 households with children under 18, a female head and no spouse or partner present.

That’s a lot of people. All of them would likely take this part of the story more to heart.

Republicans can say it’s an October surprise, a well-timed oppo drop. Mr. Walker himself says it shows how desperate Democrats are to hold the seat, they’ll smear you with anything. His supporters note the incumbent, Sen. Raphael Warnock, has had his own personal embarrassments, with an ex-wife who accused him of trying to run over her foot in an argument. He’s just a “great actor,” she says. But that’s the kind of thing that impresses people who want to stick with you anyway. I’m not sure it moves anyone else.

Donald Trump is the reason Herschel Walker won the primary, but the Republican establishment in Washington was part of it. They looked at Mr. Walker and thought: fame, football star. He’ll raise tons of money. He will need a lot of help—he’s a political neophyte—but that will mean more jobs for high-priced consultants. Nothing wrong with that! And there were the maybes. Maybe he could help heal the Trump rift in the party. Maybe establishment support itself helps heal the rift. Maybe Mr. Walker could become the candidate who can seal the deal with minority voters, a guy who says by his very presence, “You have a home in this party.” Republicans actually do want to reach out, to include, to expand their base. But in this case it made them insane, it made them ignore what was obvious. Only a year ago the Associated Press was reporting Walker’s ex-wife Cindy Grossman, Christian’s mother, feared that he’d kill her and had to get a protective order against him. He had been accused of stalking and making violent threats against ex-girlfriends. Ms. Grossman said he’d held a gun to her head and threatened to blow her brains out. All this was known when everyone decided to back him.

Mr. Walker has spoken and written of his mental-health struggles, and he deserves sympathy. No one takes a sarcastic tone when noting that football-related brain injuries may have played a role in his adult life.

The Washington Post reported this week that national GOP leaders are behind Mr. Walker, but local leaders in Georgia feel “unease.” He gave a rousing speech for Mr. Trump at the 2020 GOP convention and maybe it took some guts, because it’s never been easy to be black and conservative. But he is a wholly untested newcomer to professional politics. The Post quoted former DeKalb County GOP Chairman Lane Flynn, who bottom-lined it: “The question going forward is how transactional is the average voter going to be?” If you’re sincerely pro-life, how does the Walker story reflect on the pro-life movement?

Seth Weathers, a longtime Georgia GOP strategist and state director of Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign, said, “I warned everyone I knew that this was a dumb idea,” referring to Mr. Walker’s nomination. Then, poignantly, “We could have had Gary Black.” Mr. Black was the state’s veteran agriculture commissioner, and before the Senate primary he mostly won landslides. He was a farmer, and he backed Mr. Trump. But he wasn’t the exciting choice, he wouldn’t blow up the money machine, and there was nothing dramatic about him. Why not throw the long ball?

It was political malfeasance all the way down. I understand why Republicans want to win back the Senate, and I hope they do. But they need to learn, again, that you need to be more serious than this, you can’t be so lacking in gravity when it comes to someone who may help decide Ukraine policy. You can’t be so frivolous and lacking in weight.

My hunch is they’re about to learn a lesson. Maybe it’s ultimately better that they learn it, again, and unmistakably.