Peggy Noonan

This is the big political story now: Both parties are rejecting their leaders, Donald Trump and Joe Biden. It’s a continuing tectonic shift and the story underlying every daily political story. It’s building and will only grow. Both parties are starting to scramble for what’s next, who’s next. Both are casting about.

I wrote last week about Mr. Trump’s position. Much will be made of the latest data, a small University of New Hampshire poll in the first-in-the-nation primary state. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is tied with Mr. Trump in a Republican primary and runs better against Mr. Biden than Mr. Trump does. Pertinent here: “Biden and Trump are increasingly unpopular in New Hampshire.” Only 62% of Republicans want Mr. Trump to run again and 54% of Democrats say the same of Mr. Biden. These results are consistent with what I hear from readers.

A distinction must be made between Trump voters and Trump supporters. Trump voters are the bigger group. They don’t love him, but made a considered judgment he was better than the Democratic alternative and don’t regret it. From my email I’d say they’re shopping—eagerly. Trump supporters, the smaller but still considerable group, are true enthusiasts. It’s about him. They will never not cheer him, especially when the cameras are around, and they will never turn their backs—but they are turning away. Quietly, in a way unacknowledged to their friends and maybe to themselves. But there’s a new hesitancy in their notes, or rather an absence of the previous tone of “I’m on the winning side.” And yes, both groups seem to like Mr. DeSantis, who is capturing the Republican imagination as tough and committed but not unstable or criminal.

Mr. Trump’s national polling numbers continue underwater, but the real test will be to see those numbers after the Jan. 6 hearings are over. I believe we’ll see Rep. Liz Cheney’s kamikaze mission hit its target, and the SS Trump will list. More on that further down.

As for Mr. Biden, his poll numbers continue to be historically dismal. The other day, watching him call for suspension of the federal gasoline tax, I had a sensation exactly like—well, even though we resist such comparisons here because history even when it doesn’t feel like it is always new, it felt like 1978. Nonstop crises and the president natters on. The news broadcast shows the price sticker on 2 pounds of ground beef in the local grocery store, and a shopper says, “Hard for families now,” and they cut to Washington and . . . the president natters. The next story it’s a close-up of the numbers on the gas pump in San Diego and they cut to Washington and . . . the president natters.

“Mush From the Wimp.”

And there’s a broad sense that Mr. Biden isn’t going through a rough patch or a tough year, that it’s not going to get better, that he has poor judgment and he’s about to hit 80 and it’s not going to change. Everyone sees this and it’s produced a sense of unease.

The 1/6 hearings are doing nothing to help Mr. Biden—some thought they would—but they are sinking Mr. Trump.

Something must be said about their uniqueness. They are real history. Two weeks in, the committee’s work is wholly new, a real break with how such things have previously been conducted. They are presenting a complicated yet coherent story that is fully documented, told through depositions, videotape, first-person witnesses and participants testifying under penalty of perjury.

They are telling a fascinating and devastating story: An American president tried to thwart the democracy that raised him high and to steal a presidential election he’d lost. And it almost worked. But good people stopped it. There was a sturdy infrastructure of still-moral elected officials and bureaucrats and political appointees. Against pressure, intimidation and mob rule they held. Many, most, were political conservatives, and many were people of deep religious faith. In explaining their motives and way of thinking on Jan. 6, they quoted Scripture. For Greg Jacobs, counsel to Mike Pence who was with the vice president in an undisclosed location on Jan. 6, it was the lion’s den: “Daniel 6 was where I went.” Chief of staff Marc Short at the end of the terrible day texted Mr. Pence 2 Timothy 4:7: “I fought the good fight, I finished the race, I have kept the faith.” Rusty Bowers, speaker of Arizona’s House, testified he believes the writers of the U.S. Constitution were inspired by God. “I took an oath” to that document, he said. And he wouldn’t break it.

The next time we spoof Bible thumpers and reduce them to caricature, we should remember that. (My goodness, there may be a public-interest component in debates concerning public funding of religious schools.)

There has been criticism that the 1/6 committee isn’t the Watergate hearings, which the entire country watched and which in the end turned public opinion. Totally true: We had an entire country that watched things together once.

But the Watergate story was often hard to piece together in those hearings. Not so here. The 1/6 committee has been knocked for hiring television producers, but that’s part of why it’s yielded a coherent story. They made it tight, not cheap.

And after they aired, the Watergate hearings disappeared, because there was no internet. The 1/6 hearings will be telling their story forever—on C-Span and YouTube and perhaps a government site. And they will be heavily viewed.

Many Trump supporters were honest in their belief that what the president told them was true and his election was stolen. But anyone with any intellectual integrity, or whose family and friends want to help along an intervention, can watch, and think. A lot of assumptions will be shaken.

An unanticipated benefit—almost all who testified were the unbroken leadership class that still remains in spite of the daily freak show of American life and politics. Media folk, including in this space, often call out the sickness of the Republican Party. But the hearings were about the health of it: “I took an oath.” At the same time the Democrats on the committee defied expectation and tradition by being serious, sober, grave—showing respect to the Republicans before them, not sloughing off their Bible reading. Rep. Adam Schiff wasn’t smarmy. It was like a re-enactment of the old Republican Party and the old Democratic Party. It was the return of the adults. They never fully left, did they? Maybe we should give them more attention. Let’s build on them.

I forgot to say the hearings were simply great television. In the language of Turner Classic Movies lovers, the hearings are the end of “On the Waterfront” where mob boss Johnny Friendly’s been exposed and ruined by a nobody named Terry Molloy: “I’m glad what I done today.” For John Ford fans, those Republicans who spoke under oath are the men who shot Liberty Valance.

This is one of the great stories. Mr. Trump won’t recover from it.

I think Republicans, including plenty of Trump people, are slowly but surely solving their party’s Trump problem. What I can’t figure out is how the Democrats solve their Biden problem. Is there a hearing for that?

This is what I tell Trump voters when they ask. It’s my general view on future paths.

I start with the obvious. I never meet Americans who love America more than Trump people do. They really love it—its history, what it means in the world, what it’s done. It has not always been a fully thought-through love but it’s generally fully felt, and at a time when not everybody bothers to feel such allegiance and gratitude it is admirable.

Six or seven years ago they had a piercing, bottom-line insight that smart people told them was crazy. It was that what was happening with America’s southern border couldn’t be solved by the two parties. They had 20 years; they failed. Democrats thought all the illegal immigrants would in time prove themselves Democrats. Republicans were terrified of being called racist and thought if they took moderate-seeming half-measures maybe they wouldn’t be seen as the enemy; maybe they’d get a piece of the Hispanic vote too. Nothing budged. Only some kind of human bulldozer could break through, some guy so intemperate and embarrassing in his language that he couldn’t backtrack, couldn’t change in office. There were other issues—maybe the businessman could do something about globalism, and China—but immigration was really it.

In 2016 Trump supporters called an audible, threw the long ball, and to the shock of all won.

There were things beyond country-love and insight in the Trumpian brew—the joy of social resentment, some jacked-up nihilism, the pleasure of suddenly having comrades and belonging to something, of suddenly having power and being able to rub your so-called superiors’ faces in it. But there was strategy, too.

Republicans can argue about Donald Trump’s single term. He was not strictly speaking a capable man, which surprised those who think the rich are. It’s not that he couldn’t make a deal; it’s that he never knew where the deal was, didn’t know who to go to because he didn’t understand Washington. The border is more overwhelmed than ever, the wall wasn’t built, China continues to loom. But there were no new wars, and conservative justices joined the high court.

Now we jump to this moment, to the Jan. 6 committee and the testimony—under oath—of Mr. Trump’s loyalists, who worked for him in the White House and led his 2020 re-election effort. What they said in essence—and again, under oath—is that the idea the election was stolen was all made up, pure fiction, a deliberate lie aimed at overturning the election.

This was an act against the Constitution, against the formal and informal arrangements and traditions better people had labored to maintain for more than two centuries.

The president’s people had told him he hadn’t won. On election night, according to one witness, everyone said so but an “inebriated” Rudy Giuliani. But a drunk Rudy wasn’t enough, so Mr. Trump looked around for kooks, crooks and freaks. He didn’t have to look far because America has lots of them, and Trumpworld more than most.

Their efforts were knocked down in the courts by Trump-appointed judges and rebuffed in the states by Republican officials. Mr. Trump tried to get his vice president to go along, but he refused. So he threw his most passionate supporters on the ground into it, and told them to march on the Capitol. “Be there, will be wild!”

Those poor stupid people did. From the testimony of those arrested: “Trump asked us to come,” said Robert Schornack. Eric Barber : “He personally asked us to come to D.C. that day . . . for everything he’s done for us, if this is the only thing he’s gonna ask of me, I’ll do it.” Daniel Herendeen understood Trump to be saying, “Come to D.C., big things are gonna happen.”

More than 800 people were arrested. Some have served painful time; there was at least one suicide.

There is no record of Mr. Trump visiting them in prison. There is no record of his paying their bills. No record of his taking responsibility for their actions and requesting mercy. No record they were shown a cent of the $250 million Mr. Trump’s small-donor fundraising operation took in after the election.

The 1/6 hearings have been a powerful indictment, well-documented and undeniable. It is wishful thinking on the part of Trump supporters to dismiss the hearings on the grounds that most Americans didn’t watch them. Everything said will filter out and down, seep into the general knowledge base, and come to be understood as “what happened.” It will further damage Mr. Trump’s standing.

The November election will be good for Republicans, how good we’ll see. The presidential cycle then begins. The Biden administration from Afghanistan through inflation denialism hasn’t been a success. The economy won’t get better in time for 2024. My guess is little will.

In this atmosphere a normal upstanding Republican or a normal accomplished conservative would beat whatever the Democratic ticket is.

It is only Mr. Trump who would surely lose.

He lost in 2020 by seven million votes with a growing economy and no inflation—and that was before the events of 1/6.

America isn’t going to elect him again. They’re not going to let that guy back in that house. Because everyone knows it: Let Donald Trump back there and he’ll do a 1/6 again. Because while his followers love America, he doesn’t. He likes it as far as it goes, appreciates it as the stage for his greatness, but beyond that . . .

Trump voters: Call an audible again. Look at the field and the facts, be strategic. Donald Trump, in the 2016 primaries, tended to win with about a third of the vote. In a field of 17 that was enough. It’s looking like the GOP field could be larger than expected in 2024, and of course Mr. Trump could run again and win the nomination again. It will be easier for him if past Trump voters fail to think strategically, and if donors big and small don’t move early to winnow the field.

Here is the Republican tragedy of the past seven years: In 2016 only Donald Trump could have beaten Hillary Clinton. And of all GOP primary candidates that year, only Mr. Trump couldn’t govern, because he had no interest in governance and is himself ruled by emotions and impulses as opposed to judgment. He is sort of a 1950s caricature of a woman. Actually I suppose I mean he’s colorfully masculine yet not at all manly—a screaming meemie instead of a steady bomber pilot. I say this not to be gratuitous but because his nature dictated his actions on 1/6 and before, and will again.

Why doesn’t the party get someone who can govern now? Why not try to know reputable power, right what needs righting, put competent people in charge?

Serious people will know to move more quickly this cycle than they have in the past.

So that’s what I tell Trump voters: Be serious. Move quickly. Let go of the anvil that, in the most buoyant waters imaginable, will sink you to the bottom of the sea.

San Francisco’s progressive District Attorney Chesa Boudin was recalled this week in a 60-40 landslide. Los Angeles saw a surge of support for a moderate mayoral candidate, Rick Caruso, who campaigned on crime, homelessness and social disorder. None of this necessarily marks a sea change; the people of both cities have long been happy to be liberal Democrats. What they won’t accept is being ruled by progressives. (San Francisco has made this clear twice; in February, when voters fired as many progressive members of the school board as they could, we called it the beginning of a serious rebuke.) An aspect that is potentially promising for the Republicans is that the shock and trauma of the past few years of misgovernment, and the recall fights, have, for the first time in at least a generation, reminded Democrats that there are options beyond their party and that on the issues of crime and public disorder, Republicans have demonstrated the greater wisdom. So yes, there could be long-term implications.

Early reports suggest, unsurprisingly, that minority voters backed the recall in greater numbers than college-educated whites. This is because they suffer more and have fewer protections when crime spikes and homeless encampments seize new ground.

This is what the foes of progressives are saying: We won’t let our city go down. We won’t accept the idea of steady deterioration. We will fight the imposition of abstract laws reflecting the abstract theories of people for whom life has always been abstract and theoretical. We can’t afford to be abstract and theoretical, we live real lives. We wish to be allowed to walk the streets unmolested and with confidence. This isn’t too much to ask. It is the bare minimum.

Progressive politicians have been around long enough running cities that some distinguishing characteristics can be noted. One is they don’t listen to anybody. To stop them you have to fire them. They’re not like normal politicians who have some give, who tack this way and that. Progressive politicians have no doubt, no self-correcting mechanism.

Another characteristic: They are more loyal to theory than to people. If the people don’t like the theories the progressives impose, that’s too bad; the theory is pre-eminent.

Progressives say: We are changing all rules on arrest and incarceration because they are bad for minority groups.

The minority groups say that sounds good in the abstract but let’s make sure it’s good in the particular.

It proves not to be. The minority groups say: Stop.

The progressive says: You have to like what we’re doing, it’s good for you! What are you, racist?

The minority groups say: We’re going to fire you.

No you’re not, don’t be ridiculous.

Watch.

And they fire him. And he’s shocked.

Here the third distinguishing characteristic: The progressive can’t understand why. He tells reporters the voters are “in a bad mood” because of inflation and housing costs.

A final characteristic of progressive politicians is that they tend to be high-IQ stupid people. They are bright and well-educated but can’t comprehend the implications of policy. They don’t understand that if an 18-year-old is repeatedly arrested for assaulting people on the street and repeatedly let go, his thought may not go in the direction of, “What a gracious and merciful society I live in, I will do more to live up to it.” It is more likely he will think, “I can assault anyone and get away with it. They are afraid of me.”

Criminals calculate. Normal people know this and anticipate it. It is a great eccentricity of progressive politicians that they can’t.

So I do think America is on a campaign to remove them, one by one. And this is good.

I jump to another crime-related issue, and that has to do with the national Republican Party and guns. At the basest level, where politicians tend to live, you’d think the GOP would be trying to situate itself as the party of wise adults to help summon those Democrats looking for a new home.

Congressional Republicans argue, compellingly, that there is a mental-health crisis in America, especially among young men. But do they listen to themselves when they say this? Because at the same time many are suggesting they will refuse to ban 18-year-olds, with their unsturdy emotions and unformed brains, from buying assault weapons such as AR-15s. Does that make any sense? It’s as if they’re saying, “We know you’ve been rendered mentally ill by the society and culture in which you’ve been raised. Therefore we’re going to make sure you can legally obtain super-weapons to kill people.”

This is proof of a mental-health crisis in the U.S. Senate. The opposition to red-flag laws is the same: We know there’s a pandemic of raw and violent instability, but it might potentially, theoretically and temporarily compromise someone’s rights if local cops, on being tipped you were displaying assault weapons on TikTok with the words, “Say hello to my little friends,” were allowed to check you out and, for a short time, confiscate your weapons. So we say no.

Don’t they know what time it is? This is a nation in all kinds of crises. You can’t let your theories and abstractions have sway at such a moment, you have to let common sense step in.

The lesson of this political moment: Don’t be radical, don’t be extreme. Our country is a tea kettle on high flame, at full boil. Wherever possible let the steam out, be part of a steady steam release before the kettle blows.

I finish with Justice Brett Kavanaugh and reports of the young man taken into custody in the middle of the night near his house with a gun, a knife and other gear. Police say he admitted he wanted to assassinate the justice.

The next night demonstrators were still being allowed at Justice Kavanaugh’s house. Shouldn’t the White House, the president, Congress and federal agencies be more fully in this and united against it?

The court is in a continuing crisis of trust and competence, and now of danger, after the leak of the draft of the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization opinion that would overturn Roe v. Wade.

NPR reported this week the clerks of the court are upset the investigation might harm their future prospects. A source tells Nina Totenberg, in her paraphrase: “The clerks are terrified that their whole professional lives could be blown up.” Wow—in all my worries about the court I forgot to worry about the mid-six-figure jobs jeopardized at Covington & Burling.

Two centuries of tradition broken and a draft decision leaked to the press, which was a disaster for the court operationally and reputationally. Demonstrations at justices’ houses, and now a guy with a gun.

The court should release the Dobbs decision—stop letting madmen think they can stop or affect it through violence. As for the clerks, yes, it’s generally, perhaps unjustly, assumed a clerk leaked it and hard to doubt it was a clerk for a liberal justice, with the motive of alarming, agitating and urging opponents to rise up.

Mission accomplished. Now the clerk should come forward, confess, and leave his or her fellow clerks professionally unharmed. If you were moral, you would want to protect the innocent. And let some steam out there, too.

The great sin in what happened in Texas is that an 18-year-old with murder in his heart walked into a public school and shot to death 19 kids and two teachers. The great shock is what the police did—their incompetence on the scene and apparent lies afterward. This aspect has rocked the American people.

Uvalde wasn’t an “apparent law-enforcement failure.” It is the biggest law-enforcement scandal since George Floyd, and therefore one of the biggest in U.S. history. Children, some already shot, some not, were trapped in adjoining classrooms. As many as 19 cops were gathered in the hall just outside. The Washington Post timeline has the killer roaming the classrooms: “The attack went for so long, witnesses said, that the gunman had time to taunt his victims before killing them, even putting on songs that one student described to CNN as ‘I-want-people-to-die music.’”

Students inside were calling 911 and begging for help. The officers failed to move for almost an hour.

Everyone in America knows the story. Finding out exactly how and why it happened is the urgent business of government. We can’t let it dribble away into the narrative void and settle for excuses. “People are still shaken up.” “Probes take time.” “We’re still burying the children.” We can’t let the idea settle in that this is how it is now, if bad trouble comes you’re on your own. It is too demoralizing.

We can’t let it settle in that the police can’t be relied on to be physically braver than other people. An implicit agreement in going into the profession is that you’re physically brave. I don’t understand those saying with nonjudgmental empathy, “I’m not sure I would have gone in.” It was their job to go in. If you can’t cut it, then don’t join and get the badge, the gun and the pension.

The most focused and intense investigating has to be done now, when it’s still fresh and raw—before the 19 cops and their commanders fully close ranks, if they haven’t already, and lawyer up.

Those officers—they know everything that happened while nothing was done for an hour. A lot of them would have had to override their own common sense to stand down under orders; most would have had to override a natural impulse toward compassion. Many would be angry now, or full of reproach or a need to explain.

Get them now.

Within moments of the massacre’s ending, the police were issuing strange claims. They said the shooter was confronted by a school guard and shots were exchanged. Not true. They said the shooter was wearing body armor. He wasn’t. They said he was “barricaded” inside the classroom. Is that the right word for a guy behind a single locked door? They said a teacher left open the door the shooter used to enter. Videotape showed otherwise. They didn’t admit what happened outside the school as parents pleaded with the police to do something and tried to fight past the cordon so at least they could do something. The Washington Post had a witness who heard parents tell the police, “Do your f— job!” The police said they were. A man yelled, “Get your f— rifles and handle business!” Those parents were patronized and pushed around.

Even accounting for the fog of war there’s something next-level about the spin and falsehoods that occurred in Uvalde.

The commander on scene, school district police chief Pete Arredondo, hasn’t given a public statement on what went wrong. Why is he allowed not to tell the public what happened? He didn’t take reporters’ questions until cornered Wednesday by CNN’s Shimon Prokupecz. Mr. Arredondo was evasive. Reports he’s stiff-arming investigators are wrong, he said; he’s in touch with them and he’ll have more to say but not now. Then, in fatherly tones: “We’re not going to release anything. We have people in our community being buried. So we’re going to be respectful.”

A better form of respect would have been stopping the guy who left them grieving their dead children.

What I fear is a final report issued in six months or a year that will hit all the smarmy rhetorical notes—“a day of epic tragedy for our brothers and sisters in a small Texas town”—but fail, utterly, to make clear who was responsible for the lost hour.

All this has made Gov. Greg Abbott look particularly bad. He gave the imprimatur of his office to early police fictions. In his first news conference following the massacre he was strangely insistent on their sterling valor: “They showed amazing courage by running toward gunfire.”

Only after videos of the parents being pushed around by the cops made their way to social media did he make an about-face. In a later news conference he talked of free funerals and mental health resources. Pressed finally on what was already becoming a police scandal, he said he’d been “misled” by authorities and was “livid.” Glad he talked about his emotions. We don’t do that enough in America.

But who misled him? Do they still have a job?

You wonder what his first briefing was like.

Governor: “I need the truth: What went down?”

Burly police official in Stetson: “Within minutes we stormed the school like Iwo Jima—took out the enemy under a hail of fire, carried the women and children to safety. Fixed bayonets. Knives in our teeth. Trust me.”

Governor: “Got it, thanks!”

There is only one way to handle such a mistake: know it won’t disappear. Lead a swift and brutal investigation, talk about it every day, keep the heat on. When people know you’re playing it straight, they’re generous. When they know you aren’t—there’s an election in November and they’ll let you know.

I close with a thought tugging around my brain. I think I am seeing a broad and general decline in professionalism in America, a deterioration of our pride in concepts like rigor and excellence. Jan. 6 comes and law enforcement agencies are weak and unprepared and the U.S. Capitol falls to a small army of mooks. Afghanistan and the departure that was really a collapse, all traceable to the incompetence of diplomatic and military leadership. It’s like everyone’s forgotten the mission.

I’m not saying, “Oh, America was once so wonderful and now it’s not.” I’m saying we are losing old habits of discipline and pride in expertise—of peerlessness. There was a kind of American gleam. If the world called on us—in business, the arts, the military, diplomacy, science—they knew they were going to get help. The grown-ups had arrived, with their deep competence.

America now feels more like people who took the Expedited Three Month Training Course and got the security badge and went to work and formed an affinity group to advocate for change. A people who love to talk, endlessly, about sensitivity, yet aren’t sensitive enough to save the children bleeding out on the other side of the door.

I fear that as a people we’re becoming not only increasingly unimpressive but increasingly unlovable.

My God, I’ve never seen a country so in need of a hero.

We’re out of words because we’re out of thoughts because we said them all and spent them all after Columbine and Sandy Hook and Parkland. The shock was the lack of shock you felt when you heard. You indicted yourself: My heart has gotten cold. No, it hasn’t, but the past quarter century it’s been numbing up.

We underestimate how demoralizing these shootings are. They hurt our faith in America (why can’t we handle this?) and the future (what will it be like if this continues?). And there’s the new part of the story that is disturbing, this sense—we’ve had it before—that the police reliably come to the scene but they’ve got some kind of process or procedure that keeps them from fighting their way to the actual site of the shooting. Parents were massing at the school in Uvalde and screaming, “Go in, go in!” They themselves would have, and were possibly stopped. This aspect of the story is not yet clear but you can’t see the emerging videos and not think something went very wrong.

I love cops because I love John Wayne. (Joan Didion: “John Wayne was supposed to give the orders. ‘Let’s ride,’ he said . . .  ‘Forward ho.’” ) If they’re not John Wayne—commonsensical, gutsy, quick, able to size up the situation—I don’t think I love them. I don’t think anyone else does, either.

*   *   *

Conservatives were quick to criticize President Joe Biden in his speech the night of the shootings, saying he didn’t “bring us together” and “heal the nation’s wounds.” But what exactly could he say, could any president say at this point, that will bring us together and heal the wounds? They were faulting him for the impossible. There isn’t a bag of magic-secret speechwriter words, you don’t pull them from a hat and throw the fairy dust on the listeners. A fair criticism is that Biden’s speech evoked a problem without offering a way through it.

He seems to have concluded the right response to the moment was to enact what he felt was the audience’s rage and indignation. So he emoted, demanding answers to questions. “When in God’s name are we going to stand up to the gun lobby?” He is “sick and tired.” “Where in God’s name is our backbone?”

But, if I can generalize, it is people of the left whose immediate response to the shootings at Uvalde was indignation and rage. Everyone else was feeling something different, depression and anxiety. Because they don’t see a way out, and they’re worried, and don’t have an illusion that attacking someone will make it better. When the president enacts what one part of the spectrum feels, which he also no doubt feels, everyone else will feel to some degree excluded.

He doesn’t mean to be divisive, he just doesn’t get the other guys anymore. “We have to do more.” What, exactly? What people needed that night was a kindly grownup plan from someone above the fray. And many would have wanted to be enleagued—marshal the troops unleashed by the trauma, let them be part of something that might make things better.

Normal Americans are not fixated on policy and don’t know the exact state of play on gun law. What bill might help?

Democrats should stop using the manipulative, scare-quote phrase “gun lobby.” The gun lobby is a ghost of itself, done in by internal and external forces, and everyone in Washington knows this. The problem is Americans who feel immediate aversion to gun control because they don’t trust those who would do the controlling. The challenge isn’t “standing up,” it’s persuading.

Pretty much everyone knows we have too many guns in America, more than we have people. Everyone knows too many are in sick hands. If deeper background checks and a longer waiting period after purchase might help, move. I don’t have to be persuaded, I’m for them, not because I think they will solve the problem but they might get us an inch on the yardstick, and that’s something. I suspect a lot of people would see it like that.

But persuade, do the work. It is always the hard work of politics. And yes, move to ban assault weapons again, those sinister killing-machine weapons of war. We have about 400 million guns in America, do we have to keep adding these? Why don’t we just stop.

Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas said Wednesday that Texas has a long history of letting 18-year-olds have long guns. That is true. He also said cops, after the shooting, told him they’re seeing a crisis in mental health in young people. That’s true too, it’s all around them, all around all of us.

But Mr. Abbott should listen to himself more closely. It is one thing to let an 18-year-old have a rifle to shoot rattlers in 1962. It is another thing to allow an 18-year-old in the middle of a mental-health crisis to buy an AR-15, which is what the sick Uvalde shooter bought on his 18th birthday.

Republicans, you are saying every day that there’s a mental-health crisis and, at the same time, that we shouldn’t stop putting long guns in the hands of young men. Policies must evolve to meet circumstances. You must evolve.

I end here.

I continue in a kind of puzzled awe at my friends who proceed through life without faith, who get up and go forward without it. How do you do that? I tell the young: I have been alive for some years and this is the only true thing, that there is a God and he is good and you are here to know him, love him and show your feeling through your work and how you live. That it is the whole mysterious point. And the ridiculous story, the father, the virgin, the husband, the baby—it is all, amazingly, true, and the only true thing.

Uvalde is a town of about 16,000 people and if I’m counting right about 40 places of Christian worship, all kinds, Evangelical, Catholic, Mainline. I keep seeing the pictures—a group of four middle-aged men in jeans and T-shirts, standing near the school, arms around each other, heads bent in prayer. And the women sitting on the curb near the school and sobbing, a minister in a gray suit hunched down with them, ministering. And the local Catholic church the night of the shootings—people came that night, especially women, because they know it’s the only true thing and they know they are loved, regarded, part of something, not alone. I don’t mean here “the consolations of faith,” I mean the truth is its own support. Consolation is not why you believe but is a fact of belief and helps all who have it live in the world and withstand it. I am so glad for the people of Uvalde this weekend for only one thing, that so many have that.

Once I saw a painting—outsider art, crude, acrylic, made by some madman. There were splayed bodies and ghost-blots above each body, which depicted their souls. They were shooting upward—happy, free of gravity, rising toward Heaven.

Haven’t seen the painting since, think of it a lot, want it to be how it was in that classroom, all the children’s souls free to go home.

The most heartening thing for Republicans in the past few weeks’ primaries, what carries the most long-term significance, was pointed out by the political scientist Yascha Mounk : A clear majority of GOP primary voters in Pennsylvania supported either a Muslim (Mehmet Oz, who has 31%) or a black woman (Kathy Barnette, 25%). The Republican Party “is surprisingly good at building a multi-faith and multi-racial coalition,” Mr. Mounk tweeted. Democrats had best take note.

I’m not sure it’s the party that’s building the coalitions and I’m not sure they’re coalitions exactly, but something new is being built, and it involves the widening of the Republican Party in terms of who wants to join and whom its voters will support. This shift began in 2016 and appears to be accelerating.

A second encouraging aspect is turnout. Henry Olsen in the Washington Post reports that in the 10 states that have held primaries, GOP turnout was substantially up from the last comparable year, while Democratic turnout was down in five and up only slightly in most others.

Donald Trump’s endorsements yielded, famously, mixed success. Nebraska gubernatorial candidate Charles Herbster, for whom Mr. Trump rallied, lost. Idaho Gov. Brad Little trounced his Trumpian challenger. But J.D. Vance broke through and won in Ohio because of Mr. Trump’s endorsement. If Mr. Trump had picked David McCormick in Pennsylvania, we wouldn’t be in recount territory; he would have won comfortably. Yet Mr. Trump’s backing couldn’t save the strange and hapless Rep. Madison Cawthorn of North Carolina.

Mr. Trump has real influence but it is not determinative.

I think the real headlines are elsewhere. Last August I argued that Mr. Trump is actually afraid of his base, the only entity in American politics he fears. That dynamic could be seen throughout this primary season. When you look at his endorsements you realize he was just trying to figure out where the base was going and get there first. Oz? He’s a TV celebrity—they love him! He was following, not leading, and they could tell. There were exceptions. Mr. Trump targeted Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp for reasons of personal spleen. Mr. Kemp refused to bend to the then-president’s pressure to falsify state results of the 2020 election, so he had to be squished. Mr. Kemp, ahead 32 points in a new Fox News poll, is expected to emerge fully unsquished next week.

Maggie Haberman and Michael Bender in the New York Times have it right: “Mr. Trump increasingly appears to be chasing his supporters as much as marshaling them.” They quote Ken Spain, a GOP strategist formerly of the Republican National Committee. “The so-called MAGA movement is a bottom-up movement,” he told them, “not one to be dictated from the top down.”

But there’s another, larger mood shift going on, and to me it’s the real headline. Something is changing among Trump supporters. It’s a kind of psychological moving forward that is not quite a break, not an abandonment but an acknowledgment of a new era. In Florida recently, talking with Trump supporters, what I picked up is a new distance. They won’t tell pollsters, they may not even tell neighbors, but there was a real sense of: We need Trump’s policies, but we don’t need him. They expressed affection for him, and when not defensive about him they were protective. But as a major backer and donor told me, it’s time to think of the future. Mr. Trump brings “chaos.”

They don’t want him to run again. If he does, they’ll vote for him against a Democrat. But as one said, wouldn’t it be good to have someone like Ron DeSantis?

I stress: These are passionate Trump supporters.

Here’s a sign of the evolution, the most important words spoken in the 2022 election cycle. When Ms. Barnette was asked in debate why, if she’s so Trumpy, Mr. Trump endorsed one of her competitors, she said, “MAGA does not belong to President Trump. . . . Our values never, never shifted to President Trump’s values. It was President Trump who shifted and aligned with our values.”

That was more than a clever response, it was a declaration of autonomy.

Ms. Haberman and Mr. Bender quote Diante Johnson, founder and president of the Black Conservative Federation, at Ms. Barnette’s election-night party: “The knife came to her and she didn’t back up,” she said. “Every Trump establishment individual that came after her, she stood there and fought.”

Trump establishment? That’s the sound of something shifting.

In the Washington Post, Marianna Sotomayor and Cory Vaillancourt quoted an elderly North Carolina Trump voter: “I think Trump is very busy, and I think he relies too much on his handlers to give him the scoop. . . . They didn’t give him the scoop on Madison Cawthorn.” The voter let Mr. Trump off the hook but with an excuse that dinged him. One hears that kind of thing a lot.

Endorsements aside, Mr. Trump has obviously changed the party’s culture, its understanding and presentation of itself. An unanswered question is what this means for policy. Mr. Trump never talks about it. For him, once, it came down to slogans (“America first”) and now it’s all grievance (“stop the steal”) Beyond that it’s—what?

It seems to me at least two-thirds of the base is in agreement on traditional Republican policy—taxes should be lower rather than higher, regulation too. Spending? The general view is “Hold where we are or cut but don’t go crazy.” They are for cultural normality and stability as opposed to lability and extremism. They want these things advanced through the party. They are serious about policy.

But the third or so of the base that is Trumpist, they’re a mix. Some don’t care about policy or party. They’re about attitude—politics is a blood sport and this era is the most fun they ever had.

Regular Republicans know they can’t win general elections without Trump supporters. Some not-insignificant number of Trump supporters don’t care if they lose without non-Trumpers. Because winning isn’t the point, because policy isn’t the point. Attitude is all.

What will be interesting as this evolves is what proportion of Trump supporters really do want to win for serious reasons and will make the compromises victory entails.

One Florida Republican hypothesized something my imagination hadn’t gotten to. It is that Mr. Trump will announce after November that he is running in ’24 and then do nothing. He’ll give some interviews, hold a few rallies, but not mount a full campaign. He’ll just talk. And freeze the field, keeping all other aspirants for the presidency pawing the ground and out of the show.

Week after week as rumors build that this is just another Trumpian stunt, past supporters will have to figure out what to do.

He will cause maximum chaos for as long as he can. At that point his biggest supporters would have to decide: move against him or jump on the golf cart and go along for the ride?

The unserious will go for the ride. The serious will start to push back. How? In what way? Backing whom? That would get really interesting.

This goes under the heading “Wouldn’t it be nice.”

When I’m on the road the biggest thing I hear about is the frustration of voters. The exact subject matter has evolved over the years (“When will they stop the wars?”) but I detect now a theme that Washington operates with a view only to itself, not us. It has its own internal conversations and exigencies, its own psychodramas. (Joe Biden’s domestic agenda was driven by his desire for a legacy: He must go big and be understood as a second FDR! Kevin McCarthy went to Mar-a-Lago and resurrected Donald Trump shortly after the Capitol riot because Kevin desires to be speaker!) It’s about political figures and their needs; everything else (is this good for the country?) seems like an afterthought. It has always been so, but it seems more so now.

All this gets distilled, among regular, intelligent, more or less centrist people on the ground, into a question: Is the next presidential election really going to be Trump vs. Biden again? Donald Trump will be 78 on Election Day 2024, Mr. Biden 81. Is this the best we can do? They’re old and they’re them; can’t we move beyond them and the worlds they represent?

There have been some good political histories and memoirs of the past few years, and the best speak to this sense of stuckness.

Most of those who worked with Mr. Trump have been unsparing: He was harebrained, selfish, knew nothing of history and didn’t feel enough respect for our institutions and arrangements to bother learning. These aren’t books that say Mr. Trump is “crass” or “uses the wrong fork,” or is “brash” or “uncouth.” They say he was wild and menacing. Former Defense Secretary Mike Esper, in “A Sacred Oath,” says Mr. Trump wanted to attack Mexican drug cartels with missiles, and then deny the missiles came from us.

None of these books seem to register because those who oppose Mr. Trump, already familiar with the principle (he’s mad), don’t need to hear of its numerous applications. Those who support him won’t listen or care. Their narrative is that fancy people will never understand Mr. Trump and criticize him only because he threatened their power and standing. What opponents dismiss as ignorance was originality and boldness, a search for breakthrough solutions to chronic problems. If he broke the establishment’s china shop, fine—the china was junk anyway.

But one recent history makes different points and has larger themes. “This Will Not Pass” by Jonathan Martin and Alex Burns captures the insularity of Washington and the closed-off nature of the conversations that consume it. It is deeply reported, with sourcing from both parties and criticisms of both, which is refreshing. It also captures both parties’ refusal to be honest with their own voters.

On the Republican side it revolves around Mr. Trump. Party leaders, officeholders, operatives and donors despise what he represents: the deterioration of everything. They say so in private, not public. They don’t try to persuade anyone, or say, “Try to see it my way”; they hunker down and hope it will pass. Mr. Trump has a hold on about a third of the party: You win or lose with that third. The Republican Party as an entity, and a solid portion of its own voters, is utterly divided.

On the Democratic side, what can’t be discussed is what the progressive movement is doing to the party and its prospects. Messrs. Martin and Burns report on a series of memos from Mr. Biden’s pollster during his first year. Early on the pollster sounds the alarm on what the administration is getting wrong, from illegal immigration to crime. No one pays him mind. They don’t want to upset party progressives, who are a small but significant part of the base.

The Republicans are afraid of the Trumpers. The Democrats are afraid of the progressives. Both parties fear large parts of their base. So they lie to them—“I’m with you!”—or mislead. This is self-corrupting and leaves a frozen field in which not enough gets done. Why compromise with Republicans if you’re trying to assure progressives you hate them? Why compromise with Democrats if it opens you to suspicion with the Trumpist part of the base?

And so, the “Wouldn’t it be nice” part.

Both parties would benefit in the long term from facing the issues they’re dodging. They must stop fearing their supporters and saying nothing. They should start trying to persuade.

I suggest the ridiculous, a series of Lincoln-Douglas-type debates that are tied not to an upcoming election but to the idea of the meaning of things.

For Republicans the subject would be: Let’s talk about Trump.

For Democrats: Let’s talk about the progressive movement.

Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas conducted seven debates in 1858, each about three hours long. They were intensely covered in national newspapers because they were talking about the meaning of the great issue then facing the country, slavery, and what to do about it. Also both Lincoln and Douglas were brilliant, Lincoln actually a genius, so it wouldn’t be dull.

Today’s politicians aren’t as gifted and eloquent as Lincoln or Douglas, but all parties have brilliant folk, so a few of them could do it.

Imagine an anti-Trump person speaking with eloquence and reason, in good faith, with good nature. Imagine someone who would concede what can honorably be conceded about policy achievements in the Trump era but also speak of why the former president, with his nature, doesn’t and can’t fit the future. “Let’s talk about what the GOP establishment did that left their own voters so eager to sweep them away. Let’s talk about what was good about that. Let’s talk about what was built in its wake, and what now must be reconstructed.” Address everything, including conspiracism, and explain why it is just another way of quitting, of choosing an alternative world to get lost in. “Make this world better.”

And then hear a thoughtful reply.

Democrats: Speak honestly of what your progressives are doing to your party and its reputation. Everything—socialist economic policy, woke cultural extremism. What are they getting right, and what wrong? What would progressives change and what preserve? Should the party detach itself from alignment with people who insist mothers don’t exist but “birthing persons” do, that women don’t exist but “cervix havers” do? Why is it that progressive solutions often seem to emerge from a keyboard as opposed to lived experience? Is life really so abstract? Why does progressive feeling always seem cold, lacking in feeling toward those with whom you share a nation?

Challenge the progressives directly: Do you love America? Why? Why don’t you talk about this? Do you approach the vulnerable with a feeling of protectiveness? Is there some discrepancy between your claims of higher sensitivity and your tendency to push people around? Why should you gain control of one of America’s two great parties?

Neither party has such conversations. But I have never met a human being yet who was completely impervious—completely—to a sincere, respectful appeal to reason.

And anyway it’s good, always, to talk about the meaning of things.

This is what C-Span is for.

Let’s start with true anger and end with honest hope. The alarm many felt at the leaking of an entire draft Supreme Court decision shouldn’t be allowed to dissipate as time passes. Such a thing has never happened. Justice Samuel Alito’s preliminary opinion being taken from the court, without permission or right, and given to the press was an act of sabotage by a vandal. It hardly matters whether the leaker was of the left or right. It reflected the same spirit as the Jan. 6 Capitol riot—irresponsible destructiveness. As the book has been thrown at the rioters, it should be thrown at the leaker.

The justices can’t sit around and say oh no, we’re just another victim of the age. If they have to break some teacups to find who did it, break them. Chief Justice John Roberts worries, rightly, about the court’s standing. This is the biggest threat to it since he joined. At the very least it might be good if the justices would issue a joint statement that they are appalled by the publication of the decision, don’t accept it, won’t countenance it.

Apart from the leaker, here is what I always want to say when the issue is abortion. The vast majority of human beings on both sides are utterly sincere and operating out of their best understanding of life. Yes, there were plenty of people the past 50 years who used “the issue” to accrue money and power. But this long life tells me the overwhelming majority of people held their views for serious reasons. They sincerely saw the prohibition of abortion as a sin against women; they sincerely saw abortion on demand as a sin against life.

And you have to respect that as a wound, the Roe v. Wade decision never healed, never could. Josh Prager, in his stupendous history of that decision, “The Family Roe,” noted the singular fact of this ruling: Other high court decisions that liberalized the social order—desegregation of schools, elimination of prayer in the schools, interracial marriage, gay marriage—were followed by public acceptance, even when the rulings were very unpopular. Most came to have overwhelming support. But not Roe. That was the exception. It never stopped roiling America. Mr. Prager: “Opposition to Roe became more hostile after its issuance.”

Why? Because all the other decisions were about how to live, and Roe was about death. Justice Alito seems to echo this thought in his draft opinion, which would turn the questions of legality and illegality over to each state. This is not a solution to the issue, it is a way of managing it—democratically.

Some states, New York and California for instance, have already passed their own liberal abortion laws. Some states, such as Texas and Utah, will ban most or all abortions within their boundaries. It will be uneven, a jumble. But the liberal states will have their liberal decision, the conservative states their conservative ones, and that is as close to resolving the dilemma as we, as human beings in a huge and varied nation, will get.

I respect and agree with the Alito draft, didn’t think Roe was correct or even logical, and came to see the decision as largely a product of human vanity. Of all the liberal jurists who have faulted it, the one who sticks in the mind was Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who after questioning Roe’s reasoning said, in 1985, that it appeared “to have provoked, not resolved, conflict.” It did.

I am pro-life for the most essential reason: That’s a baby in there, a human child. We cannot accept as a society—we really can’t bear the weight of this fact, which is why we keep fighting—that we have decided that we can extinguish the lives of our young. Another reason, and maybe it veers on mysticism, is that I believe the fact of abortion, that it exists throughout the country, that we endlessly talk about it, that the children grow up hearing this and absorbing it and thinking, “We end the life within the mother here,” “It’s just some cells”—that all of this has released a kind of poison into the air, that we breathed it in for 50 years and it damaged everything. Including of course our politics.

It left both parties less healthy. The Democrats locked into abortion as party orthodoxy, let dissenters know they were unwelcome, pushed ever more extreme measures to please their activists, and survived on huge campaign donations from the abortion industry itself. Republican politicians were often insincere on the issue, and when sincere almost never tried to explain their thinking and persuade anyone. They took for granted and secretly disrespected their pro-life groups, which consultants regularly shook down for campaign cash. They ticked off the “I’m pro-life” box in speeches, got applause and went on to talk about the deficit. They were forgiven a great deal because of their so-called stand, and this contributed, the past 25 years, to the party’s drift.

Abortion distorted both parties.

Advice now, especially for Republican men, if Roe indeed is struck down: Do not be your ignorant selves. Do not, as large dumb misogynists, start waxing on about how if a woman gets an illegal abortion she can be jailed. Don’t fail to embrace compromise because you can make money on keeping the abortion issue alive. I want to say “Just shut your mouths,” but my assignment is more rigorous. It is to have a heart. Use the moment to come forward as human beings who care about women and want to give families the help they need. Align with national legislation that helps single mothers to survive. Support women, including with child-care credits that come in cash and don’t immediately go to child care, to help mothers stay at home with babies. Shelters, classes in parenting skills and life skills. All these exist in various forms: make them better, broader, bigger.

This is an opportunity to change your party’s reputation.

Democrats too. You have been given a gift and don’t know it. You think, “Yes, we get a hot new issue for 2022!” But you always aggress more than you think. The gift is that if, as a national matter, the abortion issue is removed, you could be a normal party again. You have no idea, because you don’t respect outsiders, how many people would feel free to join your party with the poison cloud dispersed. You could be something like the party you were before Roe: liberal on spending and taxation, self-consciously the champion of working men and women, for peace and not war. As you were in 1970.

Or, absent the emotionally cohering issue of abortion, you can choose to further align with extremes within the culture, and remain abnormal.

But the end of Roe could be a historic gift for both parties, a chance to become their better selves.

And if Roe is indeed overturned, God bless our country that can make such a terrible, coldhearted mistake and yet, half a century later, redress it, right it, turn it around. Only a thinking nation could do that. Only a feeling nation could do that. We’re not dead yet, there are still big things going on here.

Sometimes a thing keeps nagging around your brain and though you’ve said it before you have to say it again. We factor in but do not sufficiently appreciate the real possibility of nuclear-weapon use by Russia in Ukraine. This is the key and crucial historic possibility in the drama, and it really could come to pass.

And once it starts, it doesn’t stop. Once the taboo that has held since 1945 is broken, it’s broken. The door has been pushed open and we step through to the new age. We don’t want to step into that age.

The war is in its third month. Diplomatic solutions are less likely than ever; war crimes and atrocities have hardened the Ukrainians, and in any case they’re winning and the world is on their side. British intelligence this week reported Russia has lost around 15,000 troops, 2,000 armored vehicles and 60 aircraft. The ground invasion force has lost an estimated 25% of its combat strength. Russia is grinding through a disaster.

We aren’t worried enough about Russian nuclear use in part because we imagine such a thing as huge missiles with huge warheads launched from another continent and speeding through space. We think: That won’t happen! It has never happened! But the more likely use would be not of big strategic nuclear weapons but smaller tactical ones on the battlefield. Such weapons have a shorter range and carry lower-yield warheads. America and Russia have rough parity in the number of strategic nuclear weapons, but Russia has an estimated 10 times as many tactical nuclear weapons as the U.S. and delivery systems that range from artillery shells to aircraft.

Why would Vladimir Putin use tactical nuclear weapons? Why would he make such a madman move?

To change the story. To shock and destabilize his adversaries. To scare the people of North Atlantic Treaty Organization countries so they’ll force their leaders to back away. To remind the world—and Russians—that he does have military power. To avoid a massive and public military defeat. To win.

Mr. Putin talks about nuclear weapons a lot. He did it again Wednesday: In a meeting with politicians in St. Petersburg, he said if anyone intervenes in Ukraine and “creates unacceptable threats for us that are strategic in nature,” the Russian response will be “lightning fast.” He said: “We have all the tools for this that no one else can boast of having. We won’t boast about it, we’ll use them, if needed.”

He’s talked like this since the invasion. It’s a tactic: He’s trying to scare everybody. That doesn’t mean the threat is empty.

There are signs the Russians are deliberately creating a historical paper trail, as if to say they warned us. On Monday Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said the risk of nuclear conflict is “serious” and “should not be underestimated.” Earlier, Anatoly Antonov, Russia’s ambassador to Washington, sent a formal diplomatic note to the U.S. saying it was inflaming the conflict. The Washington Post got a copy. It said shipments of the “most sensitive” weapons systems to Ukraine were “adding fuel” to the conflict and could bring “unpredictable consequences.”

The U.S. at the same time has become rhetorically bolder. This month President Biden referred to Mr. Putin as a war criminal. In March Mr. Biden called for regime change; the White House walked it back. This week Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin told reporters the U.S. aim in Ukraine: “We want to see Russia weakened to the degree it can’t do the kinds of things it’s done in Ukraine.” The original American aim was to protect Ukraine’s sovereignty and independence. Has the U.S. strategy changed, or has its officials’ talk simply become looser? What larger strategic vision is the administration acting on?

In my experience with American diplomats, they are aware of but don’t always grasp the full implications of their opponents’ histories. Mr. Putin was a KGB spy who in 1991 saw the Soviet system in which he’d risen crash all around him. He called the fall of the Soviet Union a catastrophe because it left his country weakened, humiliated and stripped of dominance and hegemony in Eastern Europe. He is a walking, talking cauldron of resentments, which he deploys for maximum manipulation. He isn’t secretive about his grievances. In his 2007 speech to the Munich Security Conference he accused the U.S. of arrogance, hypocrisy and having created a “unipolar world” with “one center of authority, one center of force, one center of decision making,” headed by “one master, one sovereign.” As for NATO, “we have the right to ask: Against whom is this expansion intended?”

Antagonism to the West has been the central intellectual organizing principle of his life. America is an object of his life’s obsession.

So let me make an argument for my anxieties: For this man, Russia can’t lose to the West. Ukraine isn’t the Mideast, a side show; it is the main event. I read him as someone who will do anything not to lose.

In October he will turn 70, and whatever his physical and mental health his life is in its fourth act. I am dubious that he will accept the idea that the signal fact of its end will be his defeat by the West. He can’t, his psychology will not allow it.

It seems to me he has become more careless, operating with a different historical consciousness. He launched a world-historic military invasion that, whatever his geostrategic aims, was shambolic—fully aggressive and confident, yet not realistically thought through. His army wasn’t up to the task. It seemed thrown together, almost haphazard, certainly not professional.

Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, often notes that Mr. Putin has killed all the institutions in his country, sucked the strength, independence and respectability from them, as dictators do. They take out power centers that might threaten them but might also warn them of weaknesses in their own governments. All dictatorships are ultimately self-weakening in that way. But this means Mr. Putin has no collective leadership in Russia. It’s all him. And he’s Vladimir Putin.

When I look at him I see a new nihilistic edge, not the calculating and somewhat reptilian person of the past.

People who have known Mr. Putin have told me I am wrong in my concern about his potential nuclear use in that he knows if he makes one move with such a weapon, Moscow will in turn be reduced to a smoking ruin. But I am reading Mr. Putin as someone who’s grown bored of that threat, who believes he can more than match it, who maybe doesn’t even believe it anymore. In any case the Americans would not respond disproportionately.

No one since 1945, in spite of all the wars, has used nuclear weapons. We are in the habit, no matter what we acknowledge as a hypothetical possibility, of thinking: It still won’t happen, history will proceed as it has in the past.

But maybe not. History is full of swerves, of impossibilities that become inevitabilities.

For the administration’s leaders this should be front of mind every day. They should return to the admirable terseness of the early days of the invasion. They should wake up every day thinking: What can we do to lower the odds?

Think more, talk less. And when you think, think dark.

I want to talk about Joe Biden and his unique problems presenting his presidency. You’re aware of his political position and the polls. The latest from CNN has him at 39% approval. Public admiration began to plummet during the Afghanistan withdrawal. That disaster came as it was becoming clear the president was handing his party’s progressive caucus functional control of his domestic agenda, which fell apart and never recovered.

James Carville the other night on MSNBC amusingly and almost persuasively said Democrats in the 2022 congressional elections should hit Republicans hard on their weirdo content—candidates who are both extreme and inane, conspiracists in the base. But the Democrats too have their weirdo quotient—extreme culture warriors, members of the Squad—and last summer the president appeared to have thrown in with them. That and Afghanistan were fateful for his position, and then came inflation.

But what struck me this week was a little-noticed poll from the New Hampshire Journal. It’s always interesting to know what’s going on in the first presidential primary state, but the Journal itself seemed startled by the answer to its question: If the 2024 election were held today and the candidates were Joe Biden vs. Republican Gov. Chris Sununu, who would you back? Mr. Sununu trounced the president 53% to 36%. Mr. Sununu is popular and that unusual thing, a vigorous moderate conservative who appears to have actual intellectual commitments. But Mr. Biden carried New Hampshire in 2020 with 53%. He’s cratering.

All politics grows from policies, and policies are announced and argued for through presentation, including, crucially, speeches. Joe Biden has a presentation problem. This is worthy of note because his entire career has been about presentation, specifically representing a mood. In 50 years he has cycled through Dashing Youth, the Next JFK, Middle-Class Joe and Late-Life Finder of His Inner Progressive. But the mood he represents now isn’t a good one. It’s there in the New Hampshire poll. Asked if they thought Biden was “physically and mentally up to the job” if there’s a crisis, “not very/not at all” got 54% and “very/somewhat” 42%. Here we all use euphemisms: “slowing down,” “not at the top of his game.” If Mr. Biden’s policies were popular, nobody would mind that he seems to be slowing. But they aren’t.

So to the presentation problem. Here are some difficulties when he speaks.

When he stands at a podium and reads from a teleprompter, his mind seems to wander quickly from the meaning of what he’s saying to the impression he’s making. You can sort of see this, that he’s always wondering how he’s coming across. When he catches himself he tends to compensate by enacting emotion.

But the emotion he seems most publicly comfortable with is indignation. An example is his answer to a reporter’s question in November about the administration’s plans to compensate illegal-immigrant parents who’d been separated from their children at the border. Suddenly he was angry-faced; he raised his voice, increased his tempo, and started jabbing the air. “You lost your child. It’s gone! You deserve some kind of compensation, no matter what the circumstances.” Then, catching himself, he added mildly, “What that will be, I have no idea.” He was trying to show presentness, engagement. But there’s often an “angry old man yelling at clouds” aspect to this.

There are small tics that worked long ago. He often speaks as if we are fascinated by the family he came from and that formed him. Thus he speaks of the old neighborhood and lessons. And my mother told me, Joey, don’t comb your hair with buttered toast. This was great for a Knights of Columbus pancake breakfast in Rehoboth Beach, Del., but not now. For all the mystique of the presidency, people hired you to do a job and want you to be clear and have a plan. They aren’t obsessed with your family, they’re obsessed with their family.

Mr. Biden tends to be extremely self referential: “I’ll give it to you straight, as I promised that I always would.” Because I’m such a straight shooter. It’s better to shoot straight and not always be bragging. He should lose “Lemme say that again.” When you speak to America you don’t have to repeat yourself for the slow. I don’t think he’s aware he often seems to be talking down. People will tolerate this from a politician when they think he’s their moral or intellectual superior, but they push back when they don’t, as in the polls.

The larger problem for the president is that in his most important prepared speeches there’s a lot of extremely boring faux-eloquence, big chunks of smooth roundedness, and nothing sticks. Last April to a joint session of Congress: “America is on the move again, turning peril into possibility, crisis into opportunity, setback into strength.” This sounds as if it means something—it has the rhythm and sound of good thought—but it doesn’t, really. It’s the language of the 60-second advertising spot, and America tunes it out. Not from malice but from Alice. It’s the sound of the past 40 or 50 years, meaning it’s had its day.

Mr. Biden has an opportunity to do something new, reinvent his rhetorical approach. Why not, nothing else has worked. He should commit, when speaking, to Be Here Now. He should be straightforward and modest.

When I think of what is needed at this moment in history, my mind goes to the brisk factuality, the lack of emotionalism, of Oct. 22, 1962. John F. Kennedy from his desk in the Oval Office offering 18 minutes of fact and thought. “Good evening, my fellow citizens. This government, as promised, has maintained the closest surveillance of the Soviet military buildup on the island on Cuba. Within the past week, unmistakable evidence has established the fact that a series of offensive missile sites is now in preparation on that imprisoned island. . . . Having now confirmed and completed our evaluation of the evidence and our decision on a course of action, this government feels obliged to report this new crisis to you in fullest detail.”

It was down to the bone, stark and completely compelling. The military response he explained was persuasive because it was based in fact and clearly put interpretation. He provided complicated information: “The characteristics of these new missile sites indicate two distinct types of installations.” You talk only to the intelligent this way; his listeners were aware of the compliment. He didn’t stoop to them but assumed they’d reach to him.

He wasn’t self-referential: He didn’t say “as I promised,” but “as promised,” because putting himself in the forefront would be vulgar. It was “this government,” not “my government.” He said, “This nation is opposed to war. We are also true to our word.” He was declaring the American position while putting the virtue of it on America, not himself.

You say: Well, that was a crisis, you cut to the chase in crisis. But our political moment is pretty much nonstop crises, and there are more than enough national platforms for emotionalism.

All politicians could learn from this approach. They have no idea how refreshing it would sound, how gratefully it would be received: “I’m not being patronized by my inferiors!” How people might listen again.