Peggy Noonan

Everything is about to change. It won’t stay stuck.

We don’t know exactly how the change will come but it will come, because what we have now can’t continue. Joe Biden can’t sustain a demanding campaign and is incapable of functioning for 4½ more years as the American president. We all know this. Only three people don’t know it. They think they can tough it out. But reality doesn’t care how tough you are, reality will have its way.

When things move, they’ll move fast. What should the Democratic Party do?

Sometimes in life the romantic route is the realistic one. That is true in this case.

The realists wish to accept and anoint. The realist says Mr. Biden is a problem but you can’t remove him, so hunker down and try to survive the down-ballot drag as the old man hands Donald Trump the presidency, and likely Congress, and, uh oh, the next president may get two seats to fill on the Supreme Court so let’s cement Mr. Trump into the judiciary too. But this isn’t “realistic,” it isn’t “sophisticated,” it’s suicidal, and the suicide of dullards, too. The realist route, if Mr. Biden ultimately steps aside, is to limit debate, forestall trouble and anoint Kamala Harris as the new nominee.

The romantic route is to take personal responsibility and push the president to step aside. What follows is the Hail Mary pass: Say a prayer, throw the long ball and see who catches it. Devise a process—mini-primaries, open convention, figure it out—that lets the people of the party decide. Devise a formula whereby delegates can choose from five or six candidates. But open this thing up, anoint no one.

Elected officials, operatives and donors can’t in some grand cabal choose Ms. Harris as the directed heir. The country won’t respect it. Many in the party will resent it. They think she’ll lose. In four years she has, according to consistent polling, left most of the nation unimpressed. The Democratic establishment, such as it is, lost credibility by previously insisting on Mr. Biden when they could see he was impaired, and by blocking primary challenges. They can’t block all challengers again.

The vice president is never just “given” the presidency when he or she runs. They have always had to fight for it.

“It’s Kamala or chaos.” Then take chaos: Have the fight you fear. “We’ll have an intraparty war.” Then have it. “But Jeffrey Katzenberg says—” Whatever he says, do the opposite.

Ms. Harris deserves to be in the pool of candidates. Beyond that she can fight like everyone else.

The romantics are right and are seeing the situation clearly. They aren’t innocent: They understand the chaos that will ensue. But they know what U.S. forces in Afghanistan and Iraq used to say: “Embrace the suck.” Open this up, take a chance. You may electrify America.

Here is a story of a party that was a mess—destroyed, riven and without hope. The Democratic Party of 1948 was a train wreck wrapped in a dumpster fire encased in the Marconi Room of the Titanic. Its left wing split and formed the Progressive Party, whose leader, Henry Wallace, became the presidential candidate. The right wing, the mighty Southern segregationists, stormed out during the party convention and decided to run their own presidential candidate, Strom Thurmond. The New Deal coalition that lasted 16 years had fallen apart.

President Harry S. Truman, 64 and at the peak of his powers, was at the bottom of the polls. Party leaders couldn’t help him make his convention a success because they were too busy trying to draft Dwight Eisenhower to take his place.

The convention opened on July 12 in Philadelphia during an oppressive heat wave. The huge crowds that were expected didn’t come. David McCullough, in his biography “Truman,” noted local cab drivers complained they had the wrong rigs: “They shoulda given us hearses.” Floor fights broke out, the Dixiecrats marched, the convention was “pathetically bogged down in its own gloom.” Speeches were long and windy, the balloting long. Truman arrived at 9:15 p.m. for his acceptance speech. He didn’t go on until almost 2:00 in the morning.

To make matters worse, before he spoke the convention had to watch a former senator’s sister unveil a special treat: a 6-foot-tall “Liberty Bell” she’d constructed, containing 48 pigeons designated as “doves of peace.” They would fly majestically through the air as the band struck up “Hail to the Chief.” But they’d been cooped up in the heat for hours, and when the bell opened some of them dropped out dead. The rest, distraught, flew wildly through the hall, smashing into television lights, rafters and drapes. Historian David Pietrusza writes: “They dive-bombed delegates. Men and women shouted, ‘Watch your clothes!’ ” Some pigeons went for the podium. Convention chairman Sam Rayburn “frantically shushed them away. One nearly landed on his glistening, bald head. Another headed straight for the blades of a thirty-six-inch electric fan, saved from filleting only by Rayburn’s quick action. ‘Get those damned pigeons out of here!’ he screamed over live radio and TV.”

Truman hadn’t prepared a formal speech, and went from bullet points. The crowd loved it. I judge it the worst of his career—snotty, militant, more than a little demagogic.

But up against it he showed plenty of fight. McCullough: “Critics on the left and the right found themselves grudgingly moved by such nerve and audacity in the face of the odds.”

Lovers of political history, the real romantics, know how the story ends. A long journey by rail, the famous whistle-stop tour. “I want to see the people,” said Truman, whose own idea McCullough says it was. He crossed the country, then through the Midwest, then up and down the cities of the East, town after town. And something started to happen. “No president in history had ever gone so far in quest of support from the people,” McCullough wrote.

People started arriving in the morning for an afternoon speech. In Detroit on Labor Day 100,000 people filled Cadillac Square. Labor muscle put them there, reporters said, and they were right. But 90,000 showed up in Des Moines, Iowa. At Gilmore Stadium in Los Angeles Truman was met by Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall and introduced by New Dealer Ronald Reagan. Truman was blunt: communists were “guiding and using” the Progressives.

But he could be humble too. He liked that people wanted to talk about “the welfare of the country.” He said, “You don’t get any double talk from me.”

“Give ’em hell, Harry,” people started to shout. Later he’d famously say he didn’t give ’em hell, he just told the truth and they thought it was hell.

And on Election Day, Nov. 2, 1948, his shocking victory. It wasn’t even close.

It’s old lore. It’s romantic just to remember it.

But Democrats should be Democrats again. When everything in your world is about to change, reach back to your old, best self.

Admit the chaos, own it, open this thing up, go for broke. Tell the press: “You’re gonna see everything but the pigeons.”

We are living big history. We do that so often we don’t always notice. But a proud president is hunkered down in the White House, and his party is frantically trying to decide whether to press him to step aside from his bid for re-election after a catastrophic 90 minutes revealing that he is neurologically not up to the demands of a campaign or a second term. (And revealing, too, that his true condition, the depth of his decline, had been kept, quite deliberately and systematically, from the American people. Oh, the histories that will be written, and the villains that will be named.)

To me it feels like August 1974. The president’s position isn’t going to get better, it is going to get worse. The longer he waits to step aside the crueler his departure will be.

The post-debate polls show he is losing support both overall and in the battlegrounds. A cratering like that doesn’t happen because you had a bad night, or a cold, or were tired. It happens when an event starkly and unavoidably shows people what they already suspected. It happens when the event gives them proof.

Before the debate a majority of those polled said they no longer thought he had it in him physically or mentally to do the job of president anymore. After the debate that number reached 72%. You can’t un-ring that bell.

There’s no repairing this. His staff can’t spin or muscle their way out. He is neurologically compromised, we can all see it, it isn’t his fault. You have no governance in how you age and at what speed, or what illnesses or conditions arise. You only have governance in what you do about it.

Those who support the president offer suggestions on conference calls. “Just get him out there—long, live interviews, lots of news conferences, a big rally in the round with Q&A from the voters.”

They don’t know what they’re talking about. He can’t do what they want him to do. He can’t execute it. He tried to do it last week—the debate was, in effect, a live, high-stakes interview. He won’t be able to do it next week or next month either. Old age involves plateaus and plummets. It gets worse, not better.

The president’s staffers fantasize that they can plow ahead with teleprompter events—he looks stronger at the podium. But no one doubts he can stand and read. His staffers think they can smooth past things with supportive interviews with sympathetic journalists, but that won’t work either, not long term. Because everyone saw the debate, or, since, has seen pieces of it, and the image of a debilitated president has burned its way into the American brain and there’s no erasing it.

A big part of the president’s personal mythos, and it is shared by all of Biden-world, is that the guy’s a survivor, he always pulls through, you knock him down, he gets back up. An inner belief like that can get you far and gird you. But it can also harden into mere conceit and unrealism, and blind you to the real facts of current circumstances.

I don’t agree with the narrative that what was revealed in the debate was a sudden and dramatic decline. What he has been showing, for at least two years, is a steady and unstopping decline. In January 2022 we worried here about the president’s propensity for “unfinished sentences, non sequiturs; sometimes his thoughts seem like bumper cars crashing and forcing each other off course.” In April 2022 we wrote of a poll in New Hampshire that asked if Joe Biden was physically and mentally up to the job if there is a crisis. Fifty-four percent said, “not very/not at all.” In June 2022 we said there’s a broad sense it’s not going to get better: “He has poor judgment and he’s about to hit 80 and it’s not going to change.” Voters feel “unease.” In December 2022: Mr. Biden doesn’t think he’s “slipping with age,” but he’s wrong. “He’s showing age and it will only get worse, and he will become more ridiculous, when he’s deeper into his 80s.” Trusted Biden intimates must tell him to get out of the race. “You got rid of Donald Trump. You got us out of Afghanistan. You passed huge FDR-level bills that transformed the social safety net. . . . You did your job in history. You fulfilled your role. And now you should go out an inspiration.”

In September 2023 Mr. Biden had been busted in the press for telling tall tales that didn’t check out. We noted that while repeated lying is “a characterological fault, not knowing you’re lying might suggest a neurological one.” “The age problem will only get worse.” “In insisting on running he is making a historical mistake. . . . He isn’t up to it.”

What we saw in the debate isn’t new. That’s why voters won’t accept the idea that it was just a bad night. They think it’s been a bad and worsening two years.

It doesn’t feel right that the final decision will come down to one family’s psychodrama—that feels too small a thing for such big history. In any case it isn’t about one man’s personal needs, or his family’s enjoyment of importance and the blessings of proximity to power. It isn’t a party question or a White House question, it’s about America. Can America afford for another four years to have an obviously neurologically impaired president? No, it isn’t safe. It is on some level provocative. Weakness provokes. The president’s rationalizers point out that he’s fine from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. I am sure presidents Xi of China and Putin of Russia will only decide to take back Taiwan or move on Poland at lunch time EST, to keep things fair. Why wouldn’t they schedule their aggressions around the president’s needs?

The elected officeholders of the Democratic Party should take responsibility and press the president to leave. You can’t scream, “Democracy is on the line,” and put up a neurologically compromised candidate to fight for it. They haven’t moved for two reasons. One has to do with their own prospects: You don’t want to be the one who kills the king, you want to be the one who warmly mourns the king and takes his mantle after someone else kills him. The other is fear of who would replace him on the ticket, and how exactly that would happen.

These are understandable fears. But the answer isn’t to hide in a dumb fatalism, a listless acceptance of fate. It makes no sense to say, “Joe Biden is likely going to lose so we should do nothing because doing something is unpredictable.” Unpredictable is better than doomed.

This is a party afraid of itself, literally afraid of its own groups and component parts. They are afraid of their own delegates. Party professionals think letting the convention decide would reveal how fatally shattered and divided the party is—how wild it is. But that’s how the party looks now, with its leaders in Washington frozen and incapable and no one in charge.

What a tragedy this is. A president cratering his historical reputation, his wife and family ruining any affection history would have had for them when Donald Trump wins. They have no idea how they’re going to look.

In the weeks before CNN’s presidential debate I was skeptical of its significance. I didn’t see a dramatic, high-stakes, pivotal showdown coming, only a moderately sized, pro forma moment in a long, drawn-out campaign. The format had too many prohibitions—muted mics, no open discussion, no live audience, no opening statements, no talking to aides during the breaks, no notes on the lectern. This promised something airless, manufactured, hermetically sealed.

Beyond that I doubted we’d learn anything, because I doubted whether either candidate had the ability to expand on his known persona. Joe Biden has moments of blurted thought, but could he really sustain a thought or make an argument that coheres over two minutes? Could he suddenly show command, a true grasp of his own positions?

Could Donald Trump demonstrate that returning him to power wouldn’t be a wholly irresponsible act? Could he make any dent in the doubts, grounded in history, as to his nature and character? This wasn’t a question about whether he’s grown but about whether he can control himself.

Still, as a national event the early debate would function as the formal kickoff of the campaign, replacing Labor Day. And it would make clear how each candidate intends to present himself and his issues the next four months. So maybe it would be more consequential than I anticipated.

It was in fact as consequential as any presidential debate in history, and the worst night for an incumbent in history. It was a total and unmitigated disaster for Mr. Biden. It was a rout for Mr. Trump. It wasn’t the kind of rout that says: If the election were held tomorrow Donald Trump would win. It was the kind of rout that says: If the election were held tomorrow Donald Trump would win in a landslide.

It is impossible to believe that the Democrats will continue with Mr. Biden as their presidential standard-bearer. They are going to have to do what they fear to do: make themselves uncomfortable, reveal their internal splits and brokenness, and admit what the rest of the country can see and has long seen, that Mr. Biden can’t do the job. They have to stop being the victim of his vanity and poor judgment, and of his family’s need, and get themselves a new nominee.

From the moment he shuffled out with a soft and faltering gait, you could see how much he has declined. He was pale and waxy, and there was something almost furtive in his gaze. His voice was hoarse and feathery, with no projection. His answers were scrambled, halting. At some points he made no sense. At some points he seemed out of it.

Mr. Trump came across as calm, sure-voiced, focused. His demeanor wasn’t insane. He was low-key but high-energy. He obeyed the rules, amazingly, to his benefit. He showed respect for the moderators. If not quite genial he was collected, and he offered a new tack on why he’s running: He didn’t want to, but Mr. Biden, unfortunately, is such a disaster that Mr. Trump has to come back and save the country. “His policies are so bad . . . he will drive us into World War III.” World leaders neither respect nor fear him.

In the split screen, when not talking, Mr. Biden’s face seemed to freeze, sometimes in unfortunate loose-jawed expressions.

Mr. Trump was self-disciplined and knew his arguments. Won’t his proposed tariffs be inflationary? No, they’ll just spur dynamism and growth. He scored Mr. Biden on inflation, and the disastrously executed withdrawal from Afghanistan. He had the president on the defensive on abortion.

After Mr. Biden mumbled “We beat Medicare,” Mr. Trump said, “He did beat Medicare. He beat it to death.”

Just before the half-hour mark, Mr. Trump unleashed an onslaught on illegal immigration and the border. It was pointed, tough and merciless. Mr. Biden had no answer. Or no answer you could follow. Instead he focused on a Trump aside. “Veterans are a hell of a lot better off” under him. “My son spent a year in Iraq.” His greatest hits. It seemed old and sad. Mr. Trump had just handed him his head on the border, and Mr. Biden had nothing to say.

“The whole world is blowing up because of him,” Mr. Trump said. Mr. Biden’s mumbled reply was neither memorable nor coherent.

The moderators turned to Jan. 6. What do you say to voters who say you violated your constitutional oath on that day, and will do it again? Mr. Trump used his reply to tee off a long attack on Mr. Biden and how the world had deteriorated under him. He claimed that he only asked people to move forward “peacefully and patriotically” on that day, and then scored Nancy Pelosi for not accepting his help. “And she now admits she turned it down.”

Mr. Biden said Mr. Trump “encouraged those folks who went to Capitol Hill.” During the riot he sat back and watched it on television. Then Mr. Biden seemed to lose his focus—on what should have been his most powerful case against Mr. Trump.

Mr. Trump accused Democrats of allowing endless riots after George Floyd’s death and said the “unselect committee” on Jan. 6 operated dishonorably.

Mr. Biden often looked at Mr. Trump and seemed to think his facial expression at those moments was powerful. I don’t think Mr. Trump ever looked at Mr. Biden, only at the moderators. He did his own greatest hits: “My retribution is going to be success.” “His son is a felon.” “I did nothing wrong.”

Mr. Biden attempted to bait him with little effect. “Having sex with a porn star while your wife was pregnant.” “You have the morals of an alley cat.” Mr. Trump didn’t get rattled or angry but defended himself: “The public knows it’s a scam.”

He calmly claimed that he has always opposed political violence. A moderator asked if Mr. Trump accept the results of the election. Mr. Trump responded with his usual caveat: “If it’s fair and legal and a good election—absolutely.” “There’s nothing I’d rather do.”

Here, toward the end, Mr. Biden finally had a strong moment. “I doubt if you’ll accept [the November outcome] because you’re such a whiner.” “Something snapped in you” after losing in 2020.

All the fact-checkers will be out this weekend. Good, fine. Mr. Trump played fast and loose—we know this. But he’s the one who’ll have made sense to people. You could hear him and understand what he was saying. He seemed focused. He didn’t seem unstable. Again, he didn’t seem insane.

In pushing and agreeing to an early debate, Mr. Biden’s White House and campaign advisers took a big swing. They missed. Mr. Biden couldn’t execute their plan. The Democratic Party doesn’t know it, but it got a gift. The dam broke. There is still time, and Mr. Trump is still takable.

This can’t continue. I am sorry to say this harsh thing, but allowing him to go forward at this point looks like elder abuse.

At the very least you can be sure that Donald Trump will never bother to debate Joe Biden again. He doesn’t have to. He’ll be only too happy to leave it exactly where it is.

We are talking about journalism this week, about newspapers and warring newsrooms and lost readership and what to do. At bottom, though this gets lost, all the arguments are really about what journalism is.

Here is what it is.

It is a dark night on a vast plain. There are wild sounds—the hiss of prehistoric cicadas, the scream of a hyena. A tribe of cavemen sit grunting around a fire. An antelope turns on a spit. Suddenly another caveman runs in, breathlessly, from the bush. “Something happened,” he says. They all turn. “The tribe two hills over was killed by a pack of dire wolves. Everyone torn to pieces.”

Clamor, questions. How do you know? Did you see it? (He did, from a tree.) Are you sure they were wolves? “Yes, with huge heads and muscled torsos.” What did it look like? “Bloody.”

As he reports he is given water and a favored slice of meat. Because he has run far and is hungry, but mostly because he has told them the news, and they are grateful.

Humans like news, need it, want it, will usually (not always) reward those who bring it. We need it to survive, to make decisions, to understand the world. We need it to live.

The purpose of journalism is to get the story and tell the story.

Now the cavemen turn to the tribal elder. “What should we do?”

“Short term, climb a tree if you see a wolf,” she says. “They don’t like fire and noise, so we should keep lit torches and scream. In the longer term, wolf packs are seen in the west, so we should go east to high ground.” That is the authentic sound of commentary, of editorials and columns. Advice, exhortation—they’re part of the news too. People will always want it, question it, disagree. “To the editor: You have it all wrong. We should go north, toward the water.” “To the editor: Has it occurred to your columnist the dead tribe may have provoked the wolves through farming practices that encroached on their habitats?”

But even cavemen who eat bugs and wear hides are not always grim. Man wants not only to be informed but to be amused, entertained. He wants humor, wit, mischief, a visual tour of the latest cave paintings. Cave man want cooking app. And word games and reporting on the richest tribes: “Most Expensive Cave Dwelling Sells in Malibu.” And he wants the story, the yarn, the tale that takes people into a reality unfamiliar to them and makes them want to share it, and in the sharing be less alone. “Martha, listen to this!” means you know Martha. What a serious purpose that is, to leave people less encased in themselves.

All that is the purpose of journalism, forever and now. It is what a newspaper is for, to serve the public by finding out what’s really going on in all sectors and telling them, clearly.

The great news for journalism is there will always be a huge market for this. The need for news is built into human nature. Tech platforms change, portals change, but the need is forever.

So what is the problem?

The past two decades, accelerating over the past four years, newsrooms have increasingly become distracted from their main mission, confused about their purpose. Really, they’ve grown detached from their mission. This has happened in other professions and is always hard to capture. But the journalistic product now being offered has become something vaguer than it was, more boring, less swashbuckling, more labored, as if it’s written by frightened people. There’s an emphasis on giving the story “context,” but the story doesn’t feel alive and the context seems skewed. Twee headlines: “What You Need to Know About Dire Wolf Intersectionality With Humans.”

I’ll decide what I need to know, bub.

It is as if journalism is no longer about Get the Story but about Meeting People Where They Are and helping them navigate through a confusing world. But do you really think current editors know where people are? Do you think they know how to navigate? It all feels presumptuous.

More disturbing, major stories go unreported because, the reader senses, they don’t relate to the personal obsessions of the editors and reporters, or to their political priors. Didn’t I say that politely? There’s a sense newsrooms are distracted by HR issues and how people treat each other. But the news doesn’t care if it is delivered by an especially collegial person, it just wants to be delivered. My FedEx package doesn’t care if it’s delivered by a nice person, and neither really do I. I just want it on time and in one piece.

More and more as I observe American journalism I miss the guys who were big TV news producers in the 1980s and ’90s. They were animals—real cavemen. They’d do anything to get the news. They yelled at people and pushed them around. But the people around them, they sure got the story.

Facebook and social media can’t get the story. They can amplify it, give an opinion, comment. But they don’t have the resources and expertise; they don’t have trained investigative journalists and first-class experienced editors and a publisher willing to take a chance and spend the money. Social media has opinions, emotions, propaganda.

And the great thing for newspapers is if you get the story—if you are known to get the story, like the Washington Post in the Watergate years—you will be read.

Because you will be needed. And if you are needed people will pay for you.

If you are just following along with some agenda, you will be read by those who share that agenda, but no one else. And readership will plummet.

In early 2023, Len Downie and Andrew Heyward, formerly executive editor of the Washington Post and president of CBS News, respectively, wrote a paper about how modern journalists see standards within their professions, and it seemed to me not only confused but a kind of capitulation. There had been a “generational shift” in journalism, and the many editors and reporters they interviewed think objectivity is more or less “outmoded,” a false standard created by the white male patriarchy. What was really striking was there was no mention, not one, of the thrill of the chase, of getting the story—of journalism itself. It was all about the guck and mess, not the mission, and made them look like news bureaucrats, joyless grinds, self-infatuated bores.

If that is who they are, who needs them? Who would pay hundred of dollars a year to read them?

They were obsessed with who’s in the newsroom when their readers are obsessed with what comes out of the newsroom. It is good and worthy and necessary to have reporters and editors who come from different experiences, different classes, different cultural assumptions. But current ways of encouraging diversity seem to yield a great sameness in terms of class and viewpoint, and in any case diversity is a mission within a mission, it isn’t the mission itself, which is: Get the story, tell the story.

“Something happened. The tribe two hills over . . .”

I suppose this is about being an honorable combatant in the middle of a culture war, which entails seeing the humanity of your perceived foe and, in the seeing of it, preserving your own.

The story, which you’ve already heard, is that a left-wing activist who calls herself an “advocacy journalist” went to the June 3 dinner of the Supreme Court Historical Society, a 50-year-old organization whose declared mission is to unearth and preserve the court’s history. During what appears to have been the drinks portion of the evening the activist, called Lauren Windsor, secretly taped private conversations with Chief Justice John Roberts, Justice Samuel Alito and Justice Alito’s wife, Martha-Ann. Ms. Windsor dishonestly presented herself as a conservative Christian. She goaded and baited the Alitos, hoping to get them to say extreme and stupid things, which she would later disseminate on social media.

Mrs. Alito, as appears to be her way—she is commonly described by friends as “a pistol”—said some spirited things. She has been under siege. Her husband wrote the Dobbs decision; she is by extension a target of hatred; she has been verbally confronted in her neighborhood and accused of inappropriate flag flying. Half the accusation—that after words with a neighbor she flew the American flag upside-down—was legitimate. It was a weird choice for the spouse of a justice in a time of tension. The other half—that the old Appeal to Heaven flag was flown at her vacation home, secretly signaling allegiance with the rioters on Jan. 6—was absurd. People on 1/6 carried Bibles and Bic pens too. Should we ban them? Slime those who use them?

The tone of the edited six-minute tape of the conversation with Mrs. Alito is at variance with news reports. Ms. Windsor comes across as a pushy and vaguely hysterical fangirl meeting an idol. Clearly she was acting out her idea of a Christian and conservative, which is a revved-up nut. Mrs. Alito’s mistake was responding in an egalitarian manner and not breezing past the nut with a quick, false smile.

Ms. Windsor introduces herself: “I’m a huge fan of your husband, and everything you’re going through, I just wanna tell you—”

“It’s OK, it’s OK,” Mrs. Alito says.

Ms. Windsor: “It’s not OK, though! It’s not OK!” Mrs. Alito offers a vow: “If they come back to me, I’ll get them. I’m gonna be liberated and I’m gonna get them.”

Ms. Windsor perks up. A threat! “What do you mean by ‘they’?”

Mrs. Alito answers: “The media.” The press made fun of her from the day she arrived in Washington, at the sparky confirmation hearings for her husband. She implies that when all this is over she’ll be giving them a piece of her mind. Everyone in Washington has this fantasy.

Ms. Windsor says the Appeal to Heaven flag flap was nonsense, and begins to swear excitedly. “Right,” says Mrs. Alito. “But, like, I have the same flag!” Ms. Windsor says. “Yes, I know,” says Mrs. Alito.

“But a lot of people fly that f—flag!” Ms. Windsor says. Mrs. Alito, in what sounds to my ears like a comforting tone: “Don’t worry about it, baby.”

Ms. Windsor says Mrs. Alito is being persecuted as “a convenient stand-in for anybody who’s religious.” Again Mrs. Alito says it will be OK—she’s German and tough. “You come after, me I’m gonna give it back to you.” This part had a “Real Housewives” flavor. “Don’t worry about it.” Mrs. Alito says, read Psalm 27.

Ms. Windsor changes tack, quoting something she had said to Justice Alito. “So I met him last year at this dinner. And I said to him, like, ‘This country is so polarized, how do we repair that rift?’ And he was like, ‘I don’t know, I don’t know, that’s not our role.’ And I told him this year, I’m like, ‘You know for the past year I remembered our conversation and I looked at what happened to you and your wife, and I’m like ‘How is there any negotiating with the radical left?’ ”

Mrs. Alito agrees there isn’t. “There’s not!,” says Mrs. Windsor. “You cannot negotiate with the radical left!” “You have to just win!”

It’s like Sean Hannity on meth.

Ms. Windsor: “No, but you have to win! And if we want to take this country back to, like, a godly place, to a moral place, that means that we actually have to just—”

By now Mrs. Alito is all in, blowing off steam. She’d like to put a Sacred Heart of Jesus flag up across from a pride flag. “Oh, please don’t put up a flag,” her husband says, and she won’t, but after he leaves the court, “I’m putting it up and I’m gonna send them a message every day. Maybe every week I’ll be changing the flags. They’ll be all kinds!”

One believes her.

The edited tapes made front-page news, which was odd in a mainstream media that regularly and rightly scorns the right-wing secret-sting-tape-maker James O’Keefe for deceptive reporting.

As to the contents of the Roberts and Justice Alito tapes, the chief justice didn’t take any bait or any nonsense. Of making America more godly, he said, “Would you want me to be in charge of putting the nation on a more moral path? That’s for people we elect. That’s not for lawyers. . . . It’s our job to decide the cases the best we can.”

Justice Alito gave Ms. Windsor more patience, but I agreed with the New York Post editorial that he seemed like someone gently trying to shake off a political obsessive. He agreed that polarization is real, and that for it to end, “one side or the other is going to win. I don’t know. I mean, there can be a way of working—a way of living together peacefully. But it’s difficult, you know, because there are differences on fundamental things that really can’t be compromised.” Still, the court can’t solve polarization. “We have a very defined role, and we need to do what we’re supposed to do.”

The Alitos and Chief Justice Roberts didn’t do or say anything wrong. But there was something quite inhuman in what the left-wing activist did. She treated human beings as if they were mere means to her end. She acted out admiration to perform reputational harm. She presented herself falsely to inflict damage. That the content she produced was disseminated by honest grown-up journalists is to their discredit.

She claims to oppose polarization but fans it, further alienating those who already lack trust in institutions like the court and professionals like journalists. She presents another warning to those who hold or are adjacent to high office: You can’t assume good faith on the part of fellow citizens who seek you out.

More than that, it is deeply Stalinist. In Stalin’s time private life was dead, and private comments too. Neighbor spied on neighbor and reported back subversive comments to the Central Committee. People became spies, rooting out ideological error.

And, if you’re serious, what does it even get you? You persuade nobody. Your ideological friends like it that you owned the cons. Your foes are hardened. You get attention for yourself. So what? You’ll always be the person who got attention that way.

Simi Valley, Calif.

I was to write on something else this week but an event in California sent me back in time. Friends of Ronald Reagan gathered to mark the 40th anniversary of his speeches at Normandy (June 6, 1984), and the 20th anniversary of his death (June 5, 2004). The dates remind me that Reagan first burst on the American political scene with his “A Time for Choosing” speech in 1964, and announced to the nation that he was suffering from Alzheimer’s in 1994. Somehow years ending in 4 marked significant occurrences in his life. Because I have been reading a biography of Carl Jung, I wonder if this might be an expression of synchronicity, in which circumstances that seem meaningfully related have no obvious causal connection.

Many of those who worked or got their start in Reagan’s White House came—Haley Barbour, Condoleezza Rice—and others traveled far to show respect, including Carol Thatcher, daughter of Margaret, and Ben Mulroney, son of Brian. Historians came.

Prime Ministers Thatcher of Britain and Mulroney of Canada, Reagan, Pope John Paul II—that quartet did great work together, for the benefit of humanity.

We at the Reagan Library felt there was a time when politics was sweeter, when big things got said in gentle ways, when geniality was a virtue and not a political faux pas. That time included the summer of ’84 and a day in Normandy. To have been able to work on the president’s remarks there was a privilege, and the past few days reminded me of a comment Reagan made in conversation. Now and then at night, relaxing in the White House, he’d channel-surf and come upon a movie he’d starred in 40 years before. He’d have the oddest sensation—he said it was like seeing a son you’d forgotten you had. I thought of it because in the library’s materials to mark the anniversaries I saw pictures of myself in meetings with him 40 years ago, and thought: the daughter I forgot I had.

We felt, and feel, that Ronald Reagan was the last unambiguously successful American president. He walked in, in January 1981, saying he would do two big and unlikely things, one domestic and one in foreign affairs, and walked out in January 1989 having done them. He revitalized the U.S. economy after decades of drift and demoralization, and he defeated the Soviet Union, the Berlin Wall falling months after he left the presidency. He did a third thing he hadn’t promised. He changed the mood of the country. We’d been depressed since JFK’s assassination and Vietnam, since Nixon and Watergate. Reagan said no, we aren’t a spent force, we aren’t incapable, we’ve got all this energy and brains. We’ve got this, he said. We did.

When presidencies are huge they are clear and you don’t have to finagle around with vague or technical language to cite their achievements.

To the D-Day speech at Pointe du Hoc. There’s something I always want to say about it.

The speech was a plain-faced one. It was about what it was about, the valor shown 40 years before by the young men of Operation Overlord who, by taking the Normandy beaches, seized back the Continent of Europe.

But there was a speech within the speech, and that had to do with more-current struggles.

Reagan wished to laud the reunited U.S. Rangers before him, so he simply described what they’d done: “At dawn, on the morning of the 6th of June, 1944, 225 Rangers jumped off the British landing craft and ran to the bottom of these cliffs.” Their mission was one of the hardest of the invasion, to climb the cliffs to take out enemy guns.

“And the American Rangers began to climb.” They shot rope ladders, pulled themselves up. “When one Ranger fell, another would take his place.” Two hundred twenty five Rangers had come there. “After two days of fighting, only 90 could still bear arms.”

“Behind me is a memorial that symbolizes the Ranger daggers that were thrust into the top of these cliffs. And before me are the men who put them there. These are the boys of Pointe du Hoc. These are the men who took the cliffs.”

The “boys,” in the front rows, began to weep. They had never in 40 years been spoken of in that way, their achievement described by an American president, who told all the world what they’d done. Nancy Reagan and others, as they looked at them, were moved, and their eyes filled. Reagan couldn’t show what he was feeling, he had to continue. But afterward, in the Oval Office, he told me of an old Ranger who, before the ceremony, saw some young U.S. Rangers re-enacting the climb, and the old vet joined in and made it to the top. Reagan’s eyes shined: “Boy, that was something.”

The speech within the speech was about the crisis going on as Reagan spoke. The Western alliance was falling apart. Its political leaders were under severe pressure at home. British, West German and Italian peace movements had risen and gained influence in 1982 and 1983, pushing to stop the U.S.-Soviet arms race. The Soviets had placed SS-20 missiles in Eastern Europe. In response, in late 1983, the U.S. put Pershing II and cruise missiles in Western Europe. Arms talks continued but went nowhere, and the Soviets often walked out. In New York, a million antinuclear protesters had marched from Central Park to the United Nations. In Bonn, hundreds of thousands protesters took to the streets in what police called the largest demonstration since the end of the war.

It was one of the tensest moments of the Cold War.

Reagan hated nuclear weapons but believed progress couldn’t be wrung from the Russians with words and pleas. More was needed, a show of determination.

He understood the pressure the political leaders of the West were under, and at Pointe du Hoc he was telling them, between the lines: Hold firm and we will succeed.

That’s why he spoke at such length of all the Allied armies at D-Day, not only the Americans. It’s why he paid tribute to those armies’ valor—to remind current leaders what their ancestors had done. It’s why he talked about “the unity of the Allies.” “They rebuilt a new Europe together.”

He was saying: I know the pressure you’re under for backing me, but hold on. They pretty much did. And in the end the decisions of 1983 and ’84 led to the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, signed in 1987 by Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev, a turning point in the Cold War.

If you hear that speech, be moved by the Rangers who climbed those cliffs and the country that sent them there. Care that Ronald Reagan became the first public person to capture and laud the greatest generation, but delicately, because it was his generation and he couldn’t self-valorize. (Yes, a sweeter time.) But he was telling the young: That guy you call grandpa, see him in a new way. See his whole generation for who they were.

And hear, too, a message that echoes down the generations: Good people with a great cause must stand together, grab that rope and climb, no matter what fire.

I’m seeing something and maybe you are too.

We talk in our country about political polarization and it’s real: We’re split into a thousand pieces within two big camps of left and right. We decry the harshness of our political discourse, particularly online, where outrageous and dehumanizing things are said.

But what I’m seeing is that we don’t mind disliking each other now. We like it. That’s the new thing, that we’re enjoying the estrangement.

Nobody’s trying to win anybody over. The biggest recent example of this is the story about the Supreme Court justice’s wife who didn’t understand that flying the American flag upside down outside her home during a crisis might be experienced by others as unhappily weird and possibly alarming, and her neighbor who didn’t understand that when engaged in a political dispute it’s not really nice to spew lewd and ugly epithets unbidden, or put them on lawn signs.

That was a local and particular expression of a larger trend we’re all witnessing. Bill Maher wrote of it in an essay last month: “Would anyone ride the New York City subway wearing a MAGA hat, or go to a NASCAR race in a Biden T-shirt? That’s where we are now: Other parts of the country are seen as no-go zones.”

It’s shocking that that’s true, but it is.

When was the last time you saw anyone try to address the other side with respect and understanding, and venture something like, “I think you’re seeing it this way, but I want to explain why I see it so differently, and that way we might both understand each other and proceed with respect.” Instead we accuse each other and put each other down and it doesn’t feel merry and high-spirited, like political business as usual, it feels cold.

Both sides have an equal but different sense of superiority. Both sides enjoy looking down on the other.

The left leans toward condemnation. It is going from “Trump is a criminal” to “Trump supporters are criminal.” They understand things the other dopes don’t. Class is involved. I have quoted the friend who said recently, with no bitterness, that Democrats see Trump voters as toothless, smelly Walmart shoppers. The left does look down, sometimes from a privileged economic position, which makes it the more shameful.

Trump supporters lean toward manipulation. They charge the other side are bad human beings—selfish elites who have no feeling for, no affiliation with, the common man. They’re coastal elites who look down on flyover states as they sip martinis in first class. Some Trump voters say his foes oppose him to go to “Georgetown cocktail parties” or similar gatherings in New York and Los Angeles. This started about a quarter-century ago but sped up with Donald Trump, and I thought at the time: Are cocktail parties still going on? I knew they existed in the 1930s and 1940s, because they were featured in the old movies I watched on television as a child. Nick and Nora Charles threw them! In my town the elites who oppose Mr. Trump don’t have cocktail parties, they doggedly attend fundraisers for hospitals and libraries and go to professional events. The most establishment Trump foes are among the hardest-working people in America. They are earnest. They run the institutions you’ll rely on if you have a heart attack on the sidewalk or a story that needs exposing or a court case that needs taking. And they drink water. At least cocktail parties make them sound glamorous and carefree.

But it really is something that we’re so estranged we know nothing of the other side’s lives, and because we know nothing even our insults are lame and need updating.

The class aspect of the big estrangement portends nothing good. America has been navigating its way through issues of class since its beginning; it is text or subtext of the country’s great novels. Now it is emerging in a new way in our politics, one more laden with meaning and encouraging of unashamed judgment.

I said I sensed people are enjoying their political hatred now. Why would that be?

Some of it is human and has been around forever. People enjoy hating—it feels so vigorous. Some enjoy their hatred because they are by nature shallow and see the implications of nothing. Some enjoy it because they see politics as an extension of sports—booing the other team is part of the fun of being at the game. Some enjoy it because it lets them feel immersed in a warm bath of righteousness: I’m not immoral like a Trump supporter; I’m not a mindless snob who drove the country into a ditch like a Democrat.

But some enjoy their hatred—this is the new part, and I think pretty widespread—because it helps them avoid seeing that they are involved in a tragedy.

The tragedy is that one of two old men, neither of them great, neither of them distinguished in terms of character or intellect, who are each in his way an embarrassment, and whom two-thirds of voters do not want as presidential candidates, will be chosen, in this crucial historical moment in which the stakes could not be higher, to lead the most powerful nation on earth.

One will likely fail physically in coming years—he’s failing now—and be replaced by a vice president who is wholly unsuited for the presidency because she is wholly unserious, who has had four years to prove herself in a baseline way and failed to meet even the modest standards by which vice presidents are judged. The other may, on being elected or even before then, be thrown into the slammer for one of the felony charges against him, including those connected to attempting to overthrow a democratic national election.

This is a tragedy—that this is what we’ve got, these are our choices.

When you’ve got a major hate on, you don’t have to notice.

What we should be doing is asking each other: How are we going to make our way through this constructively?

Instead, people prattle about a coming civil war. But what are they talking about? Neither side is going to raise an army and fight in the streets, the most Trump-supporting state in the country is not going to fire on a Fort Sumter, and even if anything like that happened, who gets custody of the nuclear arsenal? Who’s left sending out the Social Security checks?

Normally in a column like this you give a suggestion or two on how to turn things around. I don’t know, but I suppose it at least starts with understanding that the people we’re so harshly judging are our countrymen. They share the country with you. We have to go forward into the future together, because if we don’t we won’t have a future.

We have to ease up, we have to slow down our desire to look down, we have to be a little more generous, we have to stop enjoying our hate so much. And we’ll have to come up with thoughts that are better than that, because we can’t go on indefinitely like this.

Some Memorial Day thoughts on the importance of love:

Children don’t need to be taught to love their parents. From the moment they come out you are everything to them. They seem to arrive with a certain amount of love built in and fix it on the mother who holds them and looks into their eyes and the father who delights them by making them laugh. It really is something, this natural force that comes prepackaged. (In this corner we believe God did this, implanting the love; we believe God in fact invented love, for his and your pleasure.)

But after parents, family and nature—children are especially sensitive to and undefended against the idea of the miraculous within nature—children have to be taught to love certain things. Such as their country.

Parents, teach your children to love America, either as an extension of your own love or as a simple kindness to them.

We live in an age—I’ll say this part quickly as we all know it—in which children are instructed in 100 different ways through 100 different portals that America is and always was a dark and scheming place, that its history is the history of pushing people around, often in an amoral quest for wealth but also because we aren’t very nice. And we never meant it about the Declaration.

Ideology and idiocy imposed this view, shallowness too. It began some decades ago but has speeded up and became more extreme the past 10 years.

What does this atmosphere of unlove for America do to kids? To little ones 5 and 10 but also 15—what is its impact on them?

To kids from difficult circumstances it means there is no hope; you won’t escape a violent or unhappy family into a better place, the world outside, because it isn’t better. The world outside is America, which brutalizes the minority, the woman, the different. Inside is scary, outside is scarier. What a thing to do to vulnerable kids.

To kids from easier circumstances it does nothing good and carries a subtle bad effect. It means the thing you’re part of is, at its heart, corrupt, so you might as well be corrupt. The ugliness of America becomes a permission structure: We are amoral and you can be, too.

Kids live on dreams. Have the adults who’ve created this atmosphere forgotten that as they pursue their own resentments and make their accusations?

To kids in all circumstances, it denies a dream of a good thing you can make better. It undercuts the idea the people you came from were brave and hardy and did marvelous things. It robs you of a sense you’ve got this within you, and can go on and be a marvel too.

It denies kids a secure sense that they’re part of something sound and healthy. It subtly discourages them from trying to make things better—you can’t right something whose sicknesses are so structural. This isn’t a good way to bring up the future.

You have to start kids out with love. Irony and detachment will come soon enough, but start with love, if only to give them a memory of how that felt.

I’ve spent the past few days reading an old book, one that couldn’t possibly be published today because it’s so full of respect for America. “Manual of Patriotism: For Use in the Public Schools of the State of New York,” runs 461 pages of text and was published in 1900. The flag that illustrates this column is from its frontispiece.

The manual was written after the Legislature passed an 1898 law requiring public schools to display the American flag and “encourage patriotic exercises.” Organized veterans of the Civil War and of the Women’s Relief Corps, who were nurses on the battlefield, pushed for it to “awaken in the minds and hearts of the young” an “appreciation” for “the great deeds” of their nation.

Memorial Day meant a lot to those old veterans, but more was needed. Their generation was passing; they’d given everything to hold the nation together; they wanted the young to understand why.

Unsaid but between the lines: America at the turn of the 20th century was being engulfed by waves of immigrants; they too needed to understand what America is and means to be, so they would love it too.

What a book the manual is, what a flag-waving old classic.

How do you encourage love of country among schoolchildren? You let them have fun. You hold pageants and parades, have them read poems and learn songs. Let them dress up as figures in history and enact great events. This need not be costly: “An old-time coat or dress found in a garrett or unused drawer at home may serve all needful purposes.”

Tell the story of the American flag. The Continental Congress in 1777 said we need a national banner. Here enters the heroic Mrs. Elizabeth Ross of Philadelphia, known as Betsy, who, on the personal request of General Washington, started sewing. The stars and stripes from her hand, “were unfurled at the battle of Brandywine, in 1777. . . . They sang their song of triumph over defeated Burgoyne at Saratoga. . . . They saw the surrender of the enemy at Yorktown; they fluttered their ‘Goodbye’ to the British evacuating New York.”

Have children memorize and recite Longfellow’s “Paul Revere’s Ride.” Have them enact the battle of Lexington and Concord and read aloud Emerson’s “Concord Hymn”:

By the rude bridge that arched the flood,
Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled,
Here once the embattled farmers stood,
And fired the shot heard round the world.

Tell the story of the Mayflower, of the making and meaning of the Compact, of the landing on Plymouth Rock: Quote an old poem: “Here, on this rock, and on this sterile soil, / Began the kingdom, not of kings, but men; / Began the making of the world again.”

Remind children, as Sen. James G. Blaine once said, that the U.S. was long “the only country with a known birthday. All the rest began they know not when, and grew into power, they knew not how.” America wasn’t just some brute force that pushed up from the mud; we announced our birth with a Declaration that was “a revelation”: All men are created equal.

The manual includes a lot of opinions on historical events. One I liked was the assertion that the Civil War ended the day Ulysses S. Grant was buried in 1885. Why? Because America saw who his pallbearers were: “Johnston and Buckner on one side of his bier, and Sherman and Sheridan upon the other.” The first two were generals of the Confederate army, the last two of the Union Army. Henry Ward Beecher wrote that their marching Grant to his tomb was “a silent symbol that liberty had conquered slavery, and peace war.”

You come away from that vignette thinking not only “what men,” but “what a country” that could tear itself in two, murder itself, forgive itself, go on.

Parents, help your children love this country. It will be good for them, and more to the point this country deserves it.

Also when you don’t love something you lose it. We don’t want that to happen.

I have a friend who lives in western New Jersey near a lake. Dee is middle aged, works in sales in a service industry, had been a politically independent moderate most of her life, voted for Donald Trump in 2016 and, less fervently, 2020. When I last saw her, in February, she and her husband felt drawn to Robert F. Kennedy Jr. but that feeling has cooled. She didn’t like it that his family endorsed Joe Biden: “That was weird.” She has also concluded the 2024 election will be close. “I think I’m not willing to take a chance, to experiment at this point.” So they are back to Donald Trump, with revived enthusiasm.

Last Saturday she attended her first Trump rally, on the beach and boardwalk of Wildwood. That rally fascinates me because it has been the biggest of the 2024 presidential cycle, drawing 80,000 to 100,000 people in a Republican area of a deep-blue state, according to a local official’s estimate. From all the coverage the crowd looked raucous and entertained as Mr. Trump played his greatest hits. “We want strong borders, not open borders, we want the American dream, not the Biden inflation nightmare. . . . We want safe communities, not defund the police.” He led the crowd in chants of “Bulls—!” and insulted his foes in the usual manner. He spoke for an hour and a half, and in every video of the event the crowd seemed to stay with him and listen, not drift off.

I asked Dee what she saw and experienced. This is what I heard:

Trump may scare you, but he makes her feel safe. “It was like he made you feel everything’s gonna be OK. The economy’s gonna get better; everybody’s freaking out about the border, but he’ll get it stopped.”

At the rally she felt part of a rebel army, yet she also thinks the rallygoers represent the mass of regular Americans so maybe they’re not the rebels but the majority.

She finds him hilarious. When he riffs about Al Capone and Hannibal Lecter he’s goofing with the crowd and being comical because he’s an entertainer. “He’s very funny and sarcastic,” Dee says. “It’s like a husband sometimes.”

She does not trust the press, nor does she hate them. She just thinks they lie because they have preconceived notions and agendas: “They think we are smelly Walmart shoppers with no teeth.” She says this not with bitterness but as a dry descriptor.

Why did she go? “I thought no matter what happens, it’s history. I was curious. I get to tell my grandkids.”

It went all day. “You’re on line at 8 a.m. for a 5 p.m. start. There were thousands on line with us. We made a bunch of friends. Everyone was friendly, peaceful.” A 17-year-old Hispanic kid named Andrew and his single mother, a nurse, sat nearby and posed with Dee for a picture. His T-shirt said “Jesus is my savior and Trump is my president.” Dee: “It’s not just white people were there—a total mix, also in the speakers.”

“Secret Service was fantastic—they weren’t jerks to us, they checked bags, wanded you, metal detector, but all very respectful.”

Most politically significant, it seemed to me: Dee lives in an affluent suburban community with little crime, but “I have a lot of concern for my safety.” She locks the door when her husband puts out the garbage. At the rally, “there was no drugs, no people smoking weed, no violence.”

Late in the afternoon Mr. Trump flew over the crowd in his plane. “It was spectacular. He flew low enough for you to see it close. Everyone freaked out.” She thinks he landed in Atlantic City. His motorcade arrived at the rally late. “When he came out everybody went crazy.”

The message she took from his speech: “Everything’s going to go back to the way it was. He’ll put things back in order.”

She doesn’t see Trump as an evangelical Christian might, a fallen sinner redeemed in Christ and transformed in leadership. “We grew up with him in the East,” she says. “He’s a celebrity—TV, real estate.” Now he’s a politician. “It’s a rough-and-tumble business. . . . At this point most people don’t care about all the insanity—Stormy, Michael Cohen. It’s so tawdry and disgusting, yuck.”

I asked her to characterize previous figures of the Republican Party, such as both Presidents Bush. She said, “A bunch of uptight white guys, not necessarily honest. Them, Obama—I don’t think Trump is better or worse than any of them. They don’t have the moral high ground, not in hindsight.”

When the crowd started to build, people went online to see how big it was. The press seemed to be low-balling it. “A lot of us think a lot of the news is fake,” Dee says. TV cameras showed Trump on the stage and the people behind him but not the size of the crowd. Trump accused them of bias. “We started chanting, ‘Turn around, turn around!’ for the cameras to scan the crowd. So the Trump campaign put drones up, and later on social media we saw the video.”

Dee says: “I noticed—in the crowd you get these crazy people in their over-the-top outfits. The press flocks to them, to make us all look like white trash.”

I asked about Jan 6. Why didn’t that change her view of Trump? I, and many others, understand it as a singular event. Breaking in, smashing doors and windows, beating cops, threatening the vice president’s life—this was a violent assault on an institution that was also an assault on the Constitution. Doesn’t it threaten or imply something about the future?

She said she understood but sees it differently.

In Wildwood, “we had a bunch of Jan. 6 people in the crowd around us. Middle-aged white women—grandma. . . . The thing about Jan. 6 is we see it as a two-part story. His speech that day was a Trump speech, the crowd was a Trump crowd, it was kind of normal. Part 2 was the people up at the Capitol. But the people just at the speech, they quietly left, they got on the bus, they went home. There was the speech and the insanity up the street. We talked, I heard people say, ‘We left.’”

“There were some bad people and some agitators. They shouldn’t have gone in there. Some people broke windows, shouldn’t have happened. And some old ladies go to jail!”

“A lot of what happened at the Capitol—a lot of that was created. A constant narrative to make Trump look as bad as possible at all times.”

I mentioned the testimony under oath of people around Mr. Trump in the White House that day who said he enjoyed it, thought Mike Pence deserved it, refused for hours to tell the rioters to stop, watched it on television, did nothing.

We were on the phone but I could feel her shrug.

“Jan. 6 wasn’t even on our radar,” she said of the people at the rally. “The only thing that made us a little nervous—if there was any trouble, it would be some pro-Hamas thing would cause trouble.”

She thinks Mr. Trump will carry New Jersey and win the election. What will happen the day after? She sighed: “I don’t know. Gonna be bumpy.”

Six months to election day and things feel sort of fatalistic. There seems little to discover and nothing new to say about each of the candidates. It’s not going to dawn on you suddenly that Joe Biden is too old and infirm or Donald Trump too crazy. You’ve factored that in. You know what you think of both and have a sense of what compromises you’ll make within yourself to vote for either.

Voters can still be nudged, it’s not over, but Mr. Trump is ahead in most if not all of the battleground states, and I’m struck by the number of political operatives, veterans and thinkers now asking, honestly, if there is anything the president can do to pull it out.

Someone will suggest a “Sister Souljah moment” in which the president distances himself from the cultural left. Then they’ll shake their heads: too late, and who would believe it?

A veteran Democratic officeholder gives the bottom line: “A pro-Biden coalition does not exist, but an anti-Trump one does.” Mr. Biden must stop making the election a referendum on his record. “Instead make it a referendum on Trump’s. When people are this negative, make it about your opponent.”

The past month’s campus demonstrations will hurt Mr. Biden, at least marginally. They reveal his party’s split. People don’t like violence and screaming and the antisemitism bubbling up from the universities. The veteran political consultant Alex Castellanos said the other night, on Mark Halperin’s “Wide World of News,” that for parents with kids in high school and college, what’s happening on campus isn’t abstract and faraway, it’s personal. Afterward he elaborated: parents have seen their children not only radicalized but left unfit and unprepared for a productive future. Parents are “stunned to see that trusted educational institutions have captured their children and engrossed them in naive fantasies about the world.” When voters object to a situation, they kick against the incumbents who reign over them.

The Trump criminal cases seem a bust. The stolen-documents case is delayed; the Georgia election-tampering case done in by the arrogance and ill-judgement of prosecutors. The one that’s gone ahead, in New York, is the case of least national significance and no news: Donald Trump is a pig with women and a financial finagler. Stormy Daniels, on the stand, was more descriptive than required, and it actually isn’t nice to see a former president embarrassed in this way. On the other hand news reports reminded me of Oscar Wilde on the death of Little Nell: One would have to have a heart of stone to read it and not laugh.

I begin most days with John Ellis’s reliably brilliant daily newsletter, Political News Items. Six months ago he sensed that voters weren’t sold on the idea that what stands between them and the end of democracy was Joe Biden. He advised Democrats to offer “a variation on the theme”: “Trump is a one-man anxiety-creation machine.” He all but promises chaos with his late-night Truth Social screeds and menacing behavior. “Chaos is a feature, not a bug, of Trump’s idea of his re-election campaign. It will continue because he enjoys it; enjoys testing the boundaries of acceptable behavior and seeing what happens when he does.” Democrats should hit hard there. “If the issue is Biden, defeat is certain.”

This week Mr. Ellis advanced the idea that Democrats home in not on Mr. Trump or his supporters but on MAGA-world. He may be half mad, but there’s often method to his madness. MAGA-world is just crazy, and dumb. Highlight the clown car with its “three stooges—Marjorie Taylor Greene, Matt Gaetz and Lauren Boebert.” Not many people want them in the driver’s seat.

Mr. Ellis sees Mr. Biden struggling because “the two pillars” of his re-election effort are “tenuous at best.” The first is abortion. Mr. Ellis cites a CNN poll showing only 23% of voters say that a candidate must share their views on abortion. Abortion polled way down at 5% when respondents were asked the nation’s most urgent issues. The issue helps him, but not decisively.

As for the second pillar: “Is there anyone who believes that defending democracy can only be entrusted to an 82-year-old man of halting gait and declining ‘mental acuity,’ whom three-quarters of the American electorate view as incapable of serving effectively as president if re-elected?” That issue too can help him in November, but not decisively. “The Biden campaign needs a larger argument.”

Mr. Ellis writes that for Mr. Trump, his choice of vice president could be decisive.

My read on that question is that Mr. Trump tends to do what Mr. Trump does. In 2016 he picked Gov. Mike Pence because he needed a veteran officeholder who was demonstrably sane. Mr. Trump has since acquired his own political experience but still needs sane. He is said to want someone who would put personal loyalty over other loyalties, which limits the list. And as Mr. Biden has more donor money, Mr. Trump would want someone with lots of cash.

I saw the vice presidential choice as important but not crucial. Mr. Ellis sees otherwise. “One of the strongest (implicit) arguments for voting for Trump is the not unimaginable possibility that Biden will have a stroke or be otherwise brain-damaged (or dead) and thus be replaced by . . . Vice President Harris.” People regardless of political affiliation see her as not competent. She is far less a liability to Biden if Trump picks a running mate such as Gov. Kristi Noem, “a dog murdering nitwit.”

Mr. Trump needs someone with gravitas and stature.

Mr. Ellis puts forward Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin, “a proven vote-getter in a blue-ish state,” who became wealthy in the private sector. “He’s personable and untainted by scandal. He’s not crazy but “steady and sturdy as they come.” This might impress those among “the roughly 300,000 voters in the seven or eight battlegrounds who’ll swing the election.”

I end with a word to Trump foes who hope he’ll be found guilty in the New York case and sentenced to prison time. They think this will finish him off. It will not.

Donald Trump doesn’t know it, but he will love prison. He’ll be the most specially treated convict in American history, better than the mob bosses in “Goodfellas.” He’ll be in his cell with his phone—he’ll get one—live-streaming and live-Truthing; he’ll be posing thumbs up in his uniform surrounded by gangbangers and white collar hoodlums. He’ll philosophize about how a lot of people in prison don’t deserve to be there, the system’s rigged, he’ll consider pardons. All convicts tell you that they were railroaded, but this will be new to Trump, he’ll believe them.

He’ll be the king of Rikers. He’ll say he’s learned a lot and the guards are all for Trump and he’s going to get out and reform the justice system. It will be fabulous for him. He’ll put himself as Martin Luther King and he’ll be writing Truths From the Birmingham Jail.

People forget: He loves this, loves the game, the drama, and the devil takes care of his own.