Peggy Noonan

What just happened?

That wasn’t just a high-charged celebrity interview that everyone talked about and then it went away. Oprah Winfrey’s conversation last weekend with the duke and duchess of Sussex will reverberate and last. It was history, a full-bore assault on an institution, the British monarchy, that has endured more than 1,000 years.

Harry and Meghan famously leveled two big charges, that the House of Windsor is racist and that it is weak. Previous incarnations of criticism painted it as invincible—the sharp-elbowed courtiers, the coldhearted family, they can crush you like a bug. No, Harry said, they are the bugs, trapped in fear of the tabloids that control whether they’ll keep the throne. “There is a level of control by fear that has existed for generations. I mean generations,” he said. “My father and my brother”—Prince Charles and Prince William —“they are trapped. They don’t get to leave. And I have huge compassion for that.” That must be a comfort to them.

No immediate-family heir to the British throne has ever talked like this. You are made quite vulnerable when people suddenly see you as weak. What remains of your mystique is lessened when you’re seen as just another group of frightened persons.

Meghan charged that her infant son, Archie—the “first member of color in this family”—was treated differently and denied things due him because he was biracial. There were “concerns and conversations about how dark his skin might be when he’s born.” She wouldn’t say who was involved. “I think that would be very damaging to them.” So she knew the power of the charge she was bringing. Harry, asked about it, said, “That conversation I’m never going to share, but at the time—at the time it was awkward. I was a bit shocked.” His refusal to name the person with whom he had the conversation didn’t limit guilt but dispersed it.

The queen’s response was a small masterpiece of blandness that sucked the heat from the moment: Accusations of racism are “concerning” and will be “taken very seriously,” but “recollections may vary.”

This is a story that will evolve for some time. Some observations:

Public life has gotten extremely, unrelentingly performative. Have you noticed you keep hearing that word? It means everyone is always performing—the politician, the news anchor, the angry activist. This gives natural actors an edge, and leaves those who aren’t by nature actors at a disadvantage. Meghan was a professional actress.

Both Meghan and Harry speak a kind of woke-corporate communications language that is smooth and calming but also slippery and opaque. You can never quite get your hands around the thought as you grab for meaning.

They spoke a great deal about their pain—it is a subject that animates them—but they seemed also to wield that pain as a weapon in a way that left you wondering if pain is really the word for what they experienced, as opposed to anger followed by cool desire for revenge.

Some of what was said beggared belief. Meghan claimed that going in she didn’t really have any idea what the royal family was, didn’t Google or do any research. “As Americans especially what you do know about the royals is what you read in fairy tales.” Actually, no. When Princess Diana died in 1997 it was a world-wide, epic drama. Diana was raised to heroic status, the people’s princess, roughly treated by royals who didn’t deserve her. Her funeral was watched by 2.5 billion people. Meghan Markle, home in California, was 16, presumably loved media, and went on to study acting. Is it believable she didn’t know this story, follow it, see who had the starring role?

As I watched I got the sense she knew more history than she said, that perhaps on some level she wanted to be Princess Diana, only she wanted not to die.

She sees herself as a moral instructor, an ethical leader. She and Harry were originally “aligned” by their “cause-driven work”: “I’ve always been outspoken, especially about women’s rights.” She wishes to “live authentically,” “just getting down to basics.” This apparently involves rescue chickens. She and Harry spirited them from a factory farm. “Well, you know, I just love rescuing,” she said. This was perhaps meant to underscore the idea that she rescued Harry from his charnel house of a family.

She is good at underscoring. She watches “The Little Mermaid” and comes up with a handy metaphor for her journey: “And I went, ‘Oh my God! She falls in love with the prince and because of that, she has to lose her voice.’ . . . But by the end, she gets her voice back.”

This is performative to the nth degree.

They have a foundation and a media-content company called Archewell. Asked about the latter, she said, “Life is about storytelling. About the stories we tell ourselves, what we’re told, and what we buy into.” Well, that’s part of what life is. “For us to be able to have storytelling through a truthful lens, that is hopefully uplifting, is going to be great knowing how many people that can land with.” Can land with? That is practiced show-people talk. She wishes to “give a voice” to those who “underrepresented, and aren’t really heard.”

Why should an American care about any of this? I suppose we shouldn’t. In a practical way we’re interested in the royal family because we don’t have one, don’t want one, and think it’s great that you do. We get the benefits—the pictures of clothes and castles, the horses and military outfits, the stories of backstairs and love affairs—and you pay the bills.

But I think there’s something deeper, more mystical in our interest, a sense that however messy the monarchy, it embodies a nation, the one we long ago came from and broke with. The high purpose of monarchy is to lend its mystique and authority to the ideas of stability and continuance.

Henry VIII, Mad King George, Victoria—these names still echo. It is rare and wonderful when you can say of a small old woman entering a large reception area, “England has entered the room.” Someday Elizabeth II will leave us and the world will honestly mourn, not only because of what she represented but because she was old-style. She performed but wasn’t performative. She was appropriately, heroically contained, didn’t share her emotions because after all it wasn’t about her, it was about a kingdom, united. You could rely on her to love her country and commonwealth; she was born and raised to love them. And so she has been for the world a constant. And in this world, a constant is a valuable thing.

I keep thinking of the special predicament she and her family are in. Diana did them a lot of damage in her life, and her death, but their feelings about her were mixed. She wasn’t born into the family, she was a thing that happened to the family. But Harry—Harry they would have loved, as brother and son and grandson. They would miss him. And now he has done great damage to everything they are and represent.

The old queen must be grieving. Not that she’d say it, or share the wound. There’s something so admirable in that.

A friend died this week, and I want to try and do him some justice in this pandemic time, with no memorials or gatherings and old social expectations gone down. He was a singular man, a profound presence in many lives, and I keep thinking of the simple old phrase, “the pleasure of his company.”

Vernon Jordan was variously called a civil-rights leader, Washington insider, Wise Man, power broker, deal maker, rainmaker, Wall Street banker and, as an interviewer put it a few years ago in the Financial Times, “the most connected man in America.” He was all those things.

He relished the tale of how far he’d come. Born in Atlanta in 1935, father a postal worker, mother a cook and caterer, raised in public housing, waited tables at his mother’s events. He saw local white establishments up close and thought, as a friend put it Wednesday, “I’m gonna be that, only I’m gonna show them how to do it right.” He went to college and law school; as a young lawyer he helped desegregate the University of Georgia. On to civil-rights leadership with the NAACP, United Negro College Fund, National Urban League. In 1980 he was shot by a white supremacist and almost died. After three months in the hospital and a long recuperation he took a turn. Others would work on voting rights and the schools, and he would help, but he was going to bring the movement into the boardrooms of America. He joined a great Washington law firm, lobbied, advised CEOs and political figures, became an investment banker. He told me he wanted to make money and support his family, but he didn’t feel he’d left the civil-rights movement, he brought it with him into every powerful room he entered.

I want to describe the special quality of his friendship. He took the most serious and active interest in the lives of those within his ken. It takes time to do what he did, to answer every call, make yourself available, really listen. “Attention is the beginning of devotion,” the poet Mary Oliver said. That is what he gave. He drilled down, reduced problems to their essentials, discussed concrete ways out and through. His advice was considered, serious. Loyalty was central to his nature. People confided in him, knew they could. The head of a New York cultural institution said this week, “You could share everything, and he would never trade on it. He was honorable and discreet. As effective as he was at connecting and building alliances, he didn’t trade on what he knew. It was not transactional.”

I knew him since the late 1990s; as a longtime friend of the Clintons he sought me out to explain I was wrong in my criticisms of them. Over the decades we had lots to disagree on, and lots to agree. When he’d call you’d pick up and hear a deep Southern baritone: “This is Jordan, like the river.” He was raucous, teasing, sometimes profane. He often talked about his faith; he was a Christian, had been brought up in a Bible culture and liked to think aloud about what that meant. He wrote me once that “friendship is the medicine of life.” He signed off, “I am on Martha’s Vineyard with the liberals.”

Vernon was a singular figure in that he was a true and honest partisan, declared and convinced, a liberal Democrat, but he didn’t only tolerate the other side; he had deep affection and respect for the other side, for those he judged deserved it, and there were many. This attitude is so old-school, a throwback. It was convenient for him to think this way—political differences don’t help deals get made—but it was also what he thought. He was of that generation of Washington people who, as bipartisan figures, function as the glue that keeps things from falling apart.

“Political differences must be subordinated to common humanity,” he said in a commencement speech at Syracuse University in 2017. He meant it. After he was shot and came out of surgery, the first telegram he read was a warm and encouraging one from George Wallace, the famous segregationist. It meant a lot to Vernon when, a few years later, Wallace asked to be wheeled over to him for a warm conversation. Life is full of such marvels, Vernon thought. Be open to them.

I remember he was exasperated in early 2015 that more wasn’t being made of the election of South Carolina’s Tim Scott —the only black man ever elected to the Senate from that state. That was Strom Thurmond’s seat! Why isn’t this getting more attention? Vernon, I said, he’s a Republican, the press sees it not as a clean breakthrough but a vague setback. I asked why he was so moved by the rise of a conservative. “I didn’t expect when we were crossing the Edmund Pettus bridge that we’d all agree on everything when we got to the other side.”

He had a yearly lunch at home in Washington’s Kalorama neighborhood to mark the Alfalfa Club dinner, and it was even more exclusive. Those lunches summoned—they required—a cordial bipartisan spirit. You never knew who would be there, and everywhere you looked there was someone fascinating. Embedded unseen at the dozen round tables were dozens of small kindnesses, and some judgments you didn’t know he’d made. If you were a journalist and it would do you good to understand economic issues better, you were seated with Warren Buffett. If you were a progressive with an attitude you would be placed near the sweetest-souled and intellectually sharpest old Republican, who just might gently bop you on the head in a way you need bopping.

Vernon knew how establishment it all looked. He welcomed guests in January 2018 with “Welcome to the swamp!”

He was worldly in some old-fashioned way that was more than “at home in the halls of power” or “understood the ways of the world.” He was discerning about human nature and secretly charitable about who the humans are. He thought people were complicated, that you could never get to the bottom of them, that they could be mysterious but at the end of the mystery was a simplicity: Most people are doing their best within their limits. Maybe the action is in figuring out the depth and provenance of the limits.

He acted as if life was delicious, and if you were lucky enough to be here, you had a kind of moral responsibility to have fun. Take pleasure in your accomplishments, admit your mistakes, face problems, accept all the blows, but remember how delicious it is.

Once friends of his, a couple, had a big, fancy imported car they loved. Its plush seats were the only ones the husband, who’d long been ill, was comfortable in. But the wife feared it was ostentatious, and she was embarrassed people would think they were showing off, so she’d just sold it. Vernon turned to her and said, softly, “Did your husband steal the money for the car?”

She was startled. No, he was an honest man who worked hard.

“Then he earned it. Don’t be afraid, don’t worry about what people think, live your life.”

Good advice, no? Rest in peace, dear Vernon.

New York

You can know something yet not fully absorb it. I think that’s happened with the pandemic. It is a year now since it settled into America and brought such damage—half a million dead, a nation in lockdown, a catastrophe for public schools. We keep saying “the pandemic changed everything,” but I’m not sure we understand the words we’re saying.

It will be decades before we fully appreciate what the pandemic did to us, and I mean our entire society—our culture, power structures, social ways, economic realities. We’ll see it more clearly when we look back from 2030 and 2040. A lot is not fully calculable now, and some problems haven’t presented themselves. One is going to be the profound psychological impact on some young people—how anxious and frightened this era will leave them, even how doom-laden. Kids 5 and 7 years old were trapped in a house surrounded by screens, and the screens said “germs” and “death” and “invisible carriers.” The pictures were of sobbing people on gurneys. We should be especially concerned about kids who are neglected and have no calm in the house, because they were left most exposed to the endless vibrations of the adults on the screens, and had no schools or teachers to help them.

But we’re in a transformational time. Some things that might have changed inch by inch over the next few decades were transformed in one large, incredible, 12-month shift. So many institutions will have to be nimble and farsighted now or they won’t survive. They’re going to have to be creative and generous and leave old intransigences behind. To lead in times like this will require the eyes of an artist who sees the broad shape of things, not an analyst who sees data points.

Look at the cities. I’m not sure we see the implications of what has happened there. In New York we are witnessing, for the first time in a century and a half, the collapse of the commuter model. You had to be in the magic metropolis if you were going to be in the top of your profession—finance, theater, law, whatever. Many couldn’t afford to live in the city because it’s where the top, moneyed people were, so they lived in the near-outside—New Jersey, Long Island, Connecticut. That is what my people did when they came to America a century ago, settling in Brooklyn and commuting to work as cooks and maids in the great houses of Manhattan.

But now you don’t have to be in the city. The top people are everywhere. You can be pretty much home and be the best. The office towers of Midtown are empty.

In the past year the owners of great businesses found how much can be done remotely. They hadn’t known that! They hadn’t had to find out. They don’t have to pay that killer rent for office space anymore. People think it will all snap back when the pandemic is fully over but no, a human habit broke; a new way of operating has begun. People will come back to office life to some degree, maybe a significant one; not everything can be done remotely; people want to gather, make friends, instill a sense of mission; but it will never be what it was.

The closed shops in and around train stations and office buildings, they’re not coming back. The empty towers—people say, “Oh, they can become luxury apartments!’ Really? Why would people clamor for them, so they can have a place in the city and be near work? But near work has changed. So you can be glamorous? Many of the things that made Manhattan glamorous—shows, restaurants, clubs, museums, the opera—are wobbling.

A lot of cities, not only New York, are going to have to reinvent themselves, digging down and finding newer purposes, their deepest value. They’re going to have to take stock in a new way: New York has the greatest hospitals, universities, the media, parks. What else?

And they will be doing this within a hard context. Public spending is skyrocketing due to greater need; the city and state budget deficits are through the roof. New York is Democratic and public sentiment will be for tax increases, big ones.

Here are some numbers from the Partnership for New York City, a business group. The city has lost 500,000 private-sector jobs since March, 2020. Tens of thousands of small businesses, and 5,000 restaurants, have closed. Less than 15% of office workers are back in the workplace they left a year ago.

Tourism, an approximately $70 billion industry, won’t be back until theater is back. When? Judith Miller had a good piece in City Journal on how Broadway’s older houses can’t be retrofitted for social distancing and still make a profit. No one is sure theatergoers will rush back. Theater will be reborn—man will always have shows and stories—but as what? Whatever comes—hybrid productions, tape and live, or more small and intimate theaters—it will have a whole new profit structure and financial realities. Show folk will tell you: A lot will depend on what the unions allow. Can they be nimble and farsighted? Or will they think everything is just an unending 2019?

The Partnership for New York City reports 300,000 residents of high-income neighborhoods have filed change-of-address forms with the U.S. Postal Service. You know where they are going: to lower-tax and no-income-tax states, those that have a friendlier attitude toward money making and that presumably aren’t going hard-left. Florida has gotten so cheeky that this month its chief financial officer sent a letter inviting the New York Stock Exchange to relocate to Miami.

Everyone in public life “knows” these things. But so far in New York’s mayoral debates no one is bluntly addressing these central challenges, no one is stressing them. The candidates seem like very nice people but not one that I saw in two Zoom debates radiated an appropriate sense of alarm or urgency.

“The pandemic has changed everything.” It has. Never have we needed visionaries more than now—people in politics, and out, who have an outsize creativity and a deep knowledge of human beings, who can come up with reasons people want to be here, have to be here, would be happy nowhere else.

That’s the long-term project. In the short term, New York needs to hold on to the wealthy—the top 5% percent in New York pay 62% of state income taxes—and force down crime. If you tax the rich a little higher, most will stay: There’s a lot of loyalty to New York, a lot of psychic and financial investment in it. But if you tax them higher for the privilege of being attacked on the street by a homeless man in a psychotic episode, they will leave. Because, you know, they’re human.

No one can stay fixed in the old world, in the Before Times. We’re in the After Times, and every stakeholder, as they say, is going to have to be generous, patient and farsighted in a way they’ve never been before. That’s the kind of bargain people who know how to survive make. We’re in a battle for our survival, and should start absorbing this.

I meant to talk about something else this week, but my thoughts keep circling back to Rush Limbaugh. His obituaries in the mainstream press were mostly judgment, no mercy. It’s not nice when malice gets a final, unanswered shot. On the conservative side, TV commentaries were cloying to the point of cultish. It gives a sense of horror to see people who are essentially cold enact warmth of feeling.

So here I give Rush without tears, and I guess the subtext has to do with the words “the base” in both a broad and narrow sense.

He was a remarkable figure, a phenomenon. At his height he was the most powerful radio personality since Walter Winchell, who rose in the 1930s after radio’s beginnings. Limbaugh helped save radio and certainly saved the AM band by pioneering a new form, the national conservative call-in show. This spawned an entire industry. Most important, he created a community—an actual community of, at his height, tens of millions of people who thought along with him every day and through that thinking came to feel less lonely, less like outsiders in their views. When Limbaugh came on the scene, conservatives had gotten good at electing presidents, but were largely left out of the national conversation on the airwaves.

To create a community of tens of millions of people in fractured, incoherent America was an astounding feat. To pretty much sustain it over 30 years was equally astounding.

It is perhaps ironic but probably inevitable that that community was created by a man whom one of his closest friends this week called “an isolate.” Knowing him slightly over a few decades, I believe the most important thing to him was his profession, his show—three hours a day, five days a week, unscripted, with sound elements and callers. Preparation was all-consuming. He had to be constantly plugged in, staying on top of the news, monitoring opinions, settling on the one he’d put forward. Three hours of live performance takes everything you have.

Once in the 1990s I told him what struck me wasn’t the political content but what it took to be an entertainer, to go out there live and make it fresh, fun and interesting. People see you as about politics, I said, but you have to be Jackie Gleason. His eyes widened and he thanked me profusely. People thought he was just popping off, but every show had to be planned—segments, subjects, how to imagine what turn a conversation might make, how to anticipate curveballs and cul-de-sacs.

In its early days his show was funny, bombastic, original and over the top—“talent on loan from God,” “dittoheads.” There was a joy to it. His patriotism was real. He was, in the post-Reagan era— Ronald Reagan was the last man who, while president, didn’t know who Rush Limbaugh was—the great broadcast explainer of conservative stands. He would, as the Journal noted, give an hour to tax policy or deregulation, exposing generations of listeners to arguments they’d never heard before. This was powerful and constructive.

There were downsides, flaws that over the years became ingrained. There was a growing attitude of conservatism, c’est moi, which crowded out newer, sometimes more complicated strands of thought. He was too quick to do the bidding of those he considered powerful. He was too much the cigar-chomping head of the He Man Woman Hating Club. He could credibly be accused of bigotries and blindnesses. And in his last years what had always seemed at least one kind of conservatism looked more like nihilism.

To have a show such as his you had to be The Guy With the View, and knock down others’ views. In the past 15 years my views on important issues diverged from his; he came to see me as an apostate and attacked me for my criticisms of Iraq policy, Sarah Palin, George W. Bush and Donald Trump. His attacks turned personal: I was an elite fancy person, an establishment character of rarefied background who looked down on honest people like him and his listeners. His criticisms were at odds with the facts of our lives, and he knew it; for one thing he was damning me from his vast Palm Beach, Fla., estate. Like many male conservative media figures he made a game of pretending to class sensitivity and implying he’d had to scrap his way up. The radio station where he got his start was co-owned by his father.

In the past dozen or so years, I came to think he was not trying to lead people through thought but simply to divine where his followers were going and rushing to the head of the line so he could look as if he was leading them.

Everyone in public life has a base. The talkers on radio and cable TV, left and right, have one, and Rush had one. And they don’t want to get crosswise with them because they are afraid of them. They constantly have to be alert to where the base is and giving it what it wants, or it may leave. All this degrades and damages public attempts at honesty. It also feeds political polarization.

In 2006, when Mr. Bush’s White House led the party to a devastating congressional defeat, Rush said on his show that, now, “I no longer have to carry the water” for the people who’d just lost.

It actually shocked me when he said that. In supporting the president and the GOP on Iraq and immigration, he was carrying their water? But if you have class and self-respect, you carry no one’s water. And you don’t follow the base; you respect them, tell them what you actually think, and take the blows.

Rush Limbaugh had a groundbreaking career and a big one, but his legacy is mixed. Conservatives after him were less lonely and more aggressive. I think maybe they were at their best when they were lonely, when they didn’t have an echo chamber, when they had to be more deliberative and steelier, when they had to think it through, argue it through in their heads. Now they have the further iterations of Rush, who talk about conspiracy theories and stolen elections as they try, each in competition with the other, to hold on to their base.

What made Rush Limbaugh’s show possible was the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine, which, starting in 1949, mandated that holders of broadcast licenses must both give airtime to important issues and include opposing views. It asserted a real public-interest obligation from broadcasters.

By the 1980s it was being argued that the doctrine itself was hurting free speech: It was a governmental intrusion on the freedom of broadcasters, and, perversely, it inhibited the presentation of controversial issues. There were so many voices in the marketplace, and more were coming; fairness and balance would sort themselves out.

In 1987 the doctrine was abolished, a significant Reagan-era reform. But I don’t know. Let me be apostate again. Has anything in our political culture gotten better since it was removed? Aren’t things more polarized, more bitter, less stable?

I’m not sure it was good for America.

And that’s a base, too.

The second impeachment trial of Donald Trump has been a rout for the pro-impeachment side. They made the case through time-stamped videos and close argumentation, and their timeline linked in an undeniable way the statements of the president on 1/6 and the actions of the rioters who stormed the Capitol. Democratic floor managers were at their best when they were direct, unadorned, and dealt crisply with information and data, as they did most of the time. They were less effective when they employed emotional tones to move the audience. Here is a truth: Facts make people feel. People are so unused to being given them. They’re grateful for the respect shown in an invitation to think.

Congress was riveted; journalists were riveted. Was America? Did it watch? We’ll find out the ratings and in time get a sense of what people felt was worth absorbing. Did the proceedings have the power to break through as anything other than a partisan effort? I don’t know, but I suspect so. In the pandemic people are glued to their screens. Nothing they saw—nothing—would make them admire Mr. Trump more.

As this is written a formal defense of the president’s actions is coming. It is hard to believe his lawyers will argue his innocence of the charge that he incited a crowd to move on Congress and thwart its certification of the 2020 election. Everyone knows he did that. More likely the defense will speak of extenuating circumstances—Democrats now speak violently too, and they didn’t care when cities exploded in violence last summer.

Beyond that I don’t understand the defense being mounted informally in conservative media. This is that everyone knows the storming of the Capitol was being planned before the president’s rally, and the government knew. This exonerates him? If the government Mr. Trump headed knew trouble was coming, it’s evidence of both imminent lawless action and Mr. Trump’s intent—the legal elements of incitement. It makes him more culpable, not less.

I do not see how Republican senators could hear and fairly judge the accumulated evidence and vote to acquit the former president. If we want to keep it from happening again, all involved must pay the stiffest possible price. That would include banning Mr. Trump from future office.

Everyone has a moment that most upset them in the videos of the rioters milling around, unstopped and unresisted, on the floors of both houses. Mine is when the vandals strolled through the abandoned Senate chamber and rifled through the desks of senators. Those are literally, the desks of Mike Mansfield, Robert M. La Follette, Arthur Vandenberg, John F. Kennedy and Barry Goldwater. They each had, in accordance with tradition, carved or otherwise inscribed their names in them. It looked to me like history itself being violated. It isn’t “loving government” to feel protective of that place; it is loving history and those who’ve distinguished themselves within it.

History will see 1/6 for what it was. Those who acquit are voting for a lie. Conviction would be an act of self-respect and of reverence for the place where fortune has placed them.

Some thoughts attendant to the proceedings.

An aspect of 1/6 that has yet to be satisfyingly addressed is also something I’m certain was one of the most upsetting for the American people.

You don’t know how hollow the tree is until you push against it and it collapses. That’s what people watching on 1/6 saw, a massive public-security and police failure. The Democrats played up the heroism of the Capitol police throughout the trial, and there was heroism, so that’s fine. But the fact is, order just collapsed, and people watched it, live, and it gave a sense of horror.

The Capitol still looks like an armed camp with big ugly fences and troops and the public unwelcome. That citizens could come in with relative ease was one of our glories. Congress should get things in hand and reopen, after the pandemic, as in the past. The long-term imposition of a stiff security regime would be a mistake—cowardly, and abusive of American citizens.

Here is a human question. I don’t understand why I haven’t heard a single story of a member who supported the president in refusing Electoral College certification, who stood with him, and who, hearing what was happening in the first stages of the riot, went into the halls to speak with the rioters. Why did they not do that? They knew there was a rally and expected a march, presumably peaceful. Why didn’t they go into the halls where the clamor was and tell the people, “Friends, I share your beliefs and am arguing for them on the floor, but what you are doing is wrong and unlawful, and you must leave.” Instead they were spirited from the floor by the police and hid in their offices and other rooms. Why didn’t they go out and speak to the crowds, their own people?

Is it that they didn’t actually understand their own people? Or, in barricading themselves in, were they showing they understood them all too well?

Another human question. Watching all the videotape, seeing all the posing of the rioters and holding up phones and live-streaming the event—there was something about it all that made you wonder if something about this age of hypermedia has made people less human, less natural, more like actors who operate at a remove from themselves, even in a passionate moment of insurrection. They acted as if the Senate was a movie set, and they took videos because they’re actors in a story called “Storming the Capitol.”

They dressed up in costumes, as if they’d ordered them up from Wardrobe for the big scene. They live-streamed like they were doing the long tracking shot from “Goodfellas.” There was a feeling of profound unreality about all this.

We are removing ourselves from ourselves. It’s all the image before your eyes and what you feel. There is no emphasis on thought, on reflection, on the meaning of things.

Connected to this is the emotionalism of politics now. I’m not talking about the House managers this week, I’m talking about what is becoming our national style, or at least a public political style. I thought of this last week when Democratic representatives who wanted to share what 1/6 was like for them spoke on the floor. It was full of tears, full of personal information, full of feelings. People wept and got choked up.

I don’t mean it’s insincere—it’s all too sincere. They think their feelings are important and must be voiced. But when institutions seem so frail I’m not sure it helps that leaders are frail. I watched and thought: It’s like nothing bad has ever happened to them before. And I realized it’s not ideal to be governed by people to whom nothing bad has ever happened.

Friends, you are the elected representatives of a great nation. The template is supposed to be Atticus Finch standing up to the crowd, not Atticus Finch endlessly sharing his retrospective terror on YouTube.

We can’t go forward with a national style of such timorousness. It won’t do us any good in this rough world, and don’t think they’re not noticing.

Liz Cheney won. She won’t lose her leadership position after her blistering statement supporting the impeachment of Donald Trump. The vote in the House Republican Conference Wednesday night wasn’t even close, it was reportedly 145-61. Her antagonists spent two weeks bragging they had it in the bag. She insisted on a vote and called their bluff. Suddenly people remembered: She was raised by a House whip.

What does it mean? It doesn’t turn the page on the Trump era in Congress but it does, tentatively, begin a new chapter. The pro-Trump group lost, and the We Exist in the Time After Trump forces won. The lopsidedness of the vote implies some sympathy for Ms. Cheney’s stand, or at least grudging respect for the idea of a vote of conscience. Some were likely glad to see someone stand up to a bully, even if they won’t. Some may have been thinking: Hmmm, maybe it wasn’t a good idea to offer quiet encouragement for an insurrection that left five people dead. Some no doubt worried Republicans would be seen as the party of knuckle-dragging louts if they removed the only woman in House leadership for doing what she thought was right.

The men who’d threatened her almost from the moment she backed impeachment were left looking like what they are—weak, emotional, spiteful and in the end incompetent. Rep. Matt Gaetz, who swanned around in his Elvis hair in Ms. Cheney’s Wyoming in an attempt to whip up a movement against her, looked especially silly, and left the conference meeting with no statement for the press. Which is exactly how Joe McCarthy left after Margaret Chase Smith gave it to him full in the face on the floor of the Senate 71 years ago.

Sometimes things repeat themselves neatly and in a way rich with meaning. (Though to be fair, Mr. Gaetz later tweeted and went on “Hannity,” but I’m sure McCarthy would have too if he could.)

Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, after letting Ms. Cheney twist in the wind for a few weeks, spoke forcefully in her support and called for unity. He didn’t relieve freshman Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, the QAnon-supporting conspiracist whose social-media accounts appear to have endorsed violence, anti-Semitism and denialism of historic events, of her committee assignments, which was wrong and a mistake.

Mr. McCarthy said in an interview soon after that he didn’t really know what QAnon is. He knows what QAnon is. They all know.

Here is what the party, and conservatism, cannot do. They cannot sit back and hope the new extremism will go away, play itself out, magically disappear. It won’t. It is going to get worse. This is the moment, while it’s fully on the table, to face it down. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who is not exactly excitable and tends to choose his words carefully, called it what it is, a “cancer for the Republican Party and our country.”

The GOP and the constellation of conservatism—cable news and magazines, local party officials and state leaders—should move against this tendency, in force and together. What exists in the dark corners of the internet has to be exposed and refuted. It’s time for some frank exposés, investigations and documentaries.

Sick theories radicalize and destabilize those who hold them. They encourage disrespect, suspicion, anger and ultimately violence. Individuals and families are harmed, and so is the country.

Parties have reputations. Not everyone is passionately immersed in politics. People see politics as it goes by on their screens; they get impressions. Do Republicans want their party to seem like a serious alternative, or yet another American institution that has lost hold of reality? Suburban voters, the college-educated—they will not align with what appears to be degenerate radicalism.

We are probably already seeing repercussions. In Arizona and Pennsylvania, thousands of voters have dropped their GOP registration.

Republican officials should at least have some feeling of protectiveness toward their own party. Its great virtue was that it stood for certain truths about the relationship between man and the state, between what is justly and rightly demanded of the citizen and what is not justly asked. It is odd that current members of Congress, so obsessed with words like the “brand,” don’t even know their brand, which, at its best, has stood for hard truths gently given. It is wanton and destructive to let it be reduced to crackpot conspiracies loudly brayed.

The whole conspiracy thing will only get worse with time, and more dangerous. A few weeks ago we asked what would have become of the John Birch Society if it had existed in the age of the internet. They were pretty radical; their anticommunism reached the point of suspecting Dwight Eisenhower was a Soviet agent. They faded. All they had to spread the word was books, magazines and some radio stations.

In our age they would have flourished. A recent CNN.com piece by Donie O’Sullivan described a South Carolina woman, Ashley Vanderbilt, who joined QAnon and then left. Ms. Vanderbilt had become increasingly radicalized—passionately pro-Trump, worried about the future, convinced America was nearing its end. Out of work in the pandemic she began spending more time online. She interacted with pro-Trump and anti-Biden videos, and soon TikTok’s “For You” page—“an algorithmically determined feed in the app that suggests videos a user might like,” according to CNN—was showing her conspiracy theories. This “continued on Facebook, YouTube, and Telegram,” the network reports. By January, Ms. Vanderbilt said, she was spending hours each evening learning more about the supposed cabal of pedophiles in the Democratic Party that had stolen the election. She believed in “the plan,” the QAnon narrative that martial law would soon be declared and the Biden inauguration halted. Mr. Trump would remain president. When he didn’t, Ms. Vanderbilt panicked. Her family intervened. She came to wonder if she had put Trump before God. Looking back, she thinks she might have quit QAnon earlier if Mr. Trump had condemned it instead of retweeting QAnon accounts.

The internet changes everything, and internet behemoths have some game going. They divine your interests and thoughts from what you search for, then adjust your algorithms. If you’re looking for darkness they feed you poison, nonstop incitement toward further radicalism. If you act on what they feed you, if you post incendiary, racist, anti-Semitic comments and videos, they then make a great moral show of banning you for hate speech.

They are like drug dealers who condemn their clients for becoming addicted to the fentanyl they sell.

There is no particular reason to believe we will have less conspiracism in the future, every reason to expect more. And it has the power to tear the country apart.

Republicans who still don’t know how to think about the big tech companies, whether to break them up or regulate them, might start with this insight: They are not your country’s friends.

There is radicalism and strangeness on the left and on the right, it has been going on for years, it has sped up in the Trump era, and on the right it fed the beliefs that led to the storming of the Capitol. That was a seminal moment, and it’s the work of Republicans to do whatever they can to keep it not the first but the last such moment.

Sen. Rob Portman of Ohio isn’t running for re-election in 2022. This is not good. He is a rightly respected figure. He tries to advance serious legislation. He doesn’t spend all his time talking on television.

He cheerily returned my call Wednesday from “the beautiful Russell Office Building.” He thinks his office was once that of Sen. Harry Truman ; his previous office had been occupied by Truman’s frequent antagonist, Ohio’s Sen. Robert Taft. Mr. Portman finds this satisfying. In 11 years in the Senate, he has been known for a bipartisan approach.

Before being elected to the Senate in 2010 (by 18 points) and 2016 (by 21), Mr. Portman had six terms in the House and stints as director of the Office of Management and Budget and U.S. trade representative, both under President George W. Bush. He’s dexterously made his way through the party’s Trumpian minefields. Over the years when national events have turned especially murky, I’ve asked his read on things, and what’s always struck me is his stubborn sense of reality: He doesn’t let his wishes get in the way of what he sees. In the geography of the Republican Party he’d be placed with figures like Mitch Daniels —the We Actually Know Things Caucus.

When he made his announcement Monday, he said the Senate is too polarized, common ground has been lost. He has been moved by the response: “It’s a crazy world right now, and this decision I made I thought normal, but the response was abnormal. I think people are really yearning for some renewed bipartisanship and cooperation.” Potential candidates for his seat have called to say they want to be like him. “It’s been crazy,” he laughs, “like dying a good death.”

He’s 65 and means it when he says he wants more time with his family: “I never expected to be a career politician.” He intends to make progress “on the outside” on issues he cares about—drug addiction, sex trafficking, a commission on mandatory federal spending.

It really is something that we’re living in a time when ambitious people leave the U.S. Senate to get things done.

On his party’s prospects he’s somewhere between bullish and serene. Everybody is talking about the inevitability of breakup, but he doesn’t see it that way. The 2020 election, he argues, showed Republican strength—gains in the state legislatures and the U.S. House. He thinks coming elections can bring out traditional Republicans and summon new ones. “There’s a meshing of the traditional GOP agenda—lower taxes, strong military—with more-populist approaches on, say, immigration, on trade. In the real world you have to have a fair trade system, and it’s not un-Republican to think so.”

An altered tone would help. “This does require leaders who have the ability to communicate these messages without the coarseness and the divisiveness that we have seen over the last four, five years.”

He sees his state as a microcosm of the country. In 2020, “a lot of the pushback in the suburbs was style and personality. The suburban, more educated folks in Ohio, who are independent voters these days—you can win these areas if you’re focused on the right policies, and more welcoming and embracing.” Donald Trump did well among minorities: “That was about issues—the economy, small business, lower taxes.”

In spite of the smallness and rage various state GOP committees are displaying now, we agree in this space with Mr. Portman’s sense that in the long term it is issues that count. The potential health and durability of the GOP will be based on an integration of old and still-applicable stands with new and still-urgent ones. But that process won’t proceed easily with Mr. Trump as a dominant force. If he’s on the scene it’s back to the old battle lines, and everyone dug in.

On the upcoming impeachment trial: “I have said I will listen to both sides, and I will. I’m a juror.” But he believes trying a former president probably sets a bad precedent.

I asked about the comment of his former campaign manager Corry Bliss, published Tuesday in National Journal, on Portman’s decision not to run: “If you want to spend all your time on Fox and be an a—h—, there’s never been a better time to serve. But if you want to spend your time being thoughtful and getting s— done, there’s never been a worse time to serve.” Mr. Portman roared with laughter. “Did he say that?” He roared again. “Yeah, I won’t comment.”

Here I switch away from Mr. Portman to squeeze in something being overlooked on the coming impeachment debate.

I started the new year talking with an ambassador to the U.S. from a European nation, who spoke of Mr. Trump’s campaign to delegitimize the election. Do Americans understand the damage this does to U.S. allies, the ambassador asked. We look to you for an example of how to do democracy—you’re the oldest in the world! It grieves us to see the beacon of democracy sullied in this way.

Those words rang in my ears five days later as I watched the Capitol besieged.

On “Axios on HBO” Sunday we will hear from President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine. He is playing a hard hand. Russia is breathing down his neck, Republicans don’t want to hear about him because they’re embarrassed by the Trump phone call that triggered the first impeachment, and Democrats are embarrassed by Hunter Biden and Burisma. Mr. Zelensky seems kind of on his own, sitting on top of one of the world’s flashpoints. China has been sweetly reaching out.

Reporter Jonathan Swan asked the president how he felt as he saw the Capitol stormed. “Shocked,” Mr. Zelensky said. “I could not even imagine something like this was possible in the United States of America. . . . We are used to thinking that the U.S. has ideal democratic institutions where power is passed calmly, without war, without revolutions.” Such things happen elsewhere; they’ve happened in Ukraine. “That it could happen in the United States, no one expected that. . . . After something like this, I believe it would be very difficult for the world to see the United States as a symbol of democracy in the world.”

For more than a century we have claimed the mantle of world power, basked in the warm glow of our exceptionalism, and put ourselves forward as an example. When you do that you have responsibilities; you owe something in return. What you owe is the kind of admirable behavior that gives the world something to aim for. On 1/6 they saw the storming and the siege and thought: Ah, no stability in that place. We can’t learn how to do it there and replicate it here.

This is a loss to rising democracies and also to us, to our standing and reputation. Senate conviction is the chance to show the world: No, we won’t have this; those who did it will pay the highest penalty.

It matters that all evidence be presented, that everyone sees we can come down like a hammer, ensuring that 1/6 was a regrettable incident, not a coming tendency.

It matters that the world see this. That we see it.

So it ended, so it begins. We ought to give ourselves a moment this weekend to take pleasure in the end of a strange, grinding era and rejoice in the continuance of something we had blithely taken for granted: the peaceful transfer of presidential power. That jewel in our crown had been there a long time; we’d neglected the binding wire and setting and it came loose. The aim of the inauguration was to show it is back in place, immovably, as are our institutions, and our 200-year-old way of moving forward in the world.

It was all very handsome and well done, a real achievement considering the circumstances: a pandemic, an insurrection in the Capitol two weeks earlier, and what amounted to a military occupation of the streets. The swearings-in took place in what amounted to a militarized ghost town. There is a grim defensiveness in a guarded, boarded-up, fenced-off Capitol Hill and White House. Their relative undefendedness in the past was an assertion: We have nothing to fear from each other. You lose a lot when you lose that.

There was no way the planners could produce a happy, moving inauguration with that degree of difficulty. Yet they did. It was a day worthy of a great people.

I did not, unlike everyone I know and almost every conservative, find tears in my eyes. I just felt gratitude and relief.

What a hunger there is for “normal,” for stately, serene and dignified. For seeing forms maintained.

Crucially, the world saw it. It won’t change their minds about the mess and weakened state America is in, but they’ll be impressed we regained our composure. The past few weeks, or years, they’d had it in the back of their minds that maybe we’d run out our string. Wednesday would have left them thinking: Maybe not.

Arrayed before the world were former presidents, the chief justice, members of Congress and representatives of the institutions—the military, law enforcement, the press right down to the scrambling photographers. The corny old music, the flags going by, the bands and drums and flutes, the old majesty re-enacted and, through re-enactment, to some degree restored.

Lady Gaga looking delightfully freakish, and killing it. China, you have penetrated every data cloud and downloaded every invention, you have discipline and determination and believe the future is yours, but you don’t have Lady Gaga.

It wasn’t a scandal Donald Trump wasn’t there, it was a gift. He would have tried to harm it in some way, cast a pall.

The inaugural address was what the moment needed.

More than President Biden’s other speeches it reflected who he is, his essential nature and intent. Yes, he is a practical pol, a lifer who enjoyed being called Senator and relished making the kind of deals that leave the deal makers safe and the public possibly served with what might turn out to be a useful initiative, or at least one that is high-minded and generous. He is sentimental, not cerebral, and blarney is his default setting. But he is sufficiently cunning to last half a century in public life and rise to the top. And he loves his country in an old-school way, with an old-style heart on his sleeve. When he recited from the Pledge of Allegiance—“One nation, under God, indivisible”—you know he meant every word.

The heart of his speech was an urgent call for unity. We must unite as we have in crises past—if we do, everything is possible. But so much is tearing us apart. “We must end this uncivil war” between groups, races, conditions. We must move past “exhausting outrage.” We need tolerance and humility. We cannot allow our tensions to break us up: “Disagreement must not lead to disunion.” “Every disagreement doesn’t have to be a cause for total war.” “Politics need not be a raging fire destroying everything in its path.” This seemed aimed not only at his political opposition but at some of his party’s constituent groups.

It was clear he wants to be the Great Unifier. That’s what he meant when he asked those who didn’t vote for him to “take a measure of me and my heart” and vowed, “My whole soul is in it.”

Good for him, that’s the ambition for this moment. Will he have the force, judgment and toughness to become what he wants to be? We’ll see. But it’s the right thing to want.

His instincts are generally and historically those of a moderate. If he is allowed to proceed and govern as a liberal centrist who yet has a canny sense of where he can push the edges, it will be one kind of presidency—quite possibly a unifying one. If not, it will be another.

There were clichés, the banalities we’re all used to—“A day of history and hope,” “the American story,” all that stuff. But they too had the odd effect of being reassuring. In a time of jarring change some things continue.

As for former President Trump, one wants to be gracious as a man leaves—but what was departing was a national trauma.

His goodbye rally at Joint Base Andrews was intended to show the spirited and temporary receding of a titanic force. It didn’t. His remarks were wan and offhand, and the White House had to scramble to get people to come. His last words in public as president: “Have a good life. We will see you soon.” Then he flew off to Xanadu.

Shortly after, the alt-right group Proud Boys disowned him as a “total failure,” and QAnon message boards lit up. They had believed in “the plan,” when that conspiracy was always fantastical and bizarre. Now they were concussed. Mr. Trump was gone. Were we played? Yes, you were played. Now get offline and go find your life.

A final thought on Mr. Trump. It is one thing to come into the presidency with no particular class or dignity, as a person who knows “the price of everything and the value of nothing.” It is another and almost an achievement to leave the presidency like that—to have been untouched by the grandeur, unchanged by the stature and history of the office. None of it rubbed off and improved him. His supporters see this as proof of his authenticity, of his irreducible Trumpness. It is not. It is proof not that he couldn’t be reduced but that he couldn’t be enlarged.

Anyway it’s over, and goodbye to all that.

Hollywood, you would do us a great kindness if you would stop for a while making movies and series that show how sick and corrupt politics is, and how conniving and immoral our political leaders. Your cynicism helped lower standards and reduce expectations. It had a leveling effect. After you gave them decades of fictional bums they one-upped you and started electing real ones. People could use a little faith now, and inspiration.

Can a good inauguration and speech heal the nation? No. But they can assert an attitude, they can turn the page, help people feel something new is beginning, maybe something better. They can encourage citizens to take part.

Those things were done. Now onward to new history.

Liz Cheney’s was a moment of real stature. Addressing the issue of impeachment, the third-ranking member of the Republican leadership said, of the events of Jan. 6: “The president of the United States summoned this mob, assembled the mob, and lit the flame of this attack. Everything that followed was his doing. None of this would have happened without the president. The president could have immediately and forcefully intervened to stop the violence. He did not. There has never been a greater betrayal by a president of the United States of his office and his oath to the Constitution.”

And so she would vote to impeach. Her remarks implicitly urged others in her party to do so, and the bluntness and power of what she said offered them cover: They could be tough too. But most couldn’t. They were stupid and cowardly.

They claimed high-minded concern for the nation’s well-being, but they didn’t seem to believe their own arguments; some rushed through their statements, some gestured wildly as if hoping their arms could convince their brains they were sincere. Impeachment is needlessly divisive. They weren’t concerned about division when they refused to accept the Electoral College result. You’re rushing it. The president’s term is expiring; those who need more time to understand what happened on 1/6 don’t want to understand it. It’s revenge. Revenge has no high purpose and is base. The impeachment consisted of a branch of the American government asserting the country’s standards and the rule of law; an attempt to act decisively against a historic transgression in a way that says, “No more”; an attempt to draw clear and vivid lines for future leaders. To do nothing is to guarantee that it will happen again, that “storming of the Capitol” will become a picture in the minds of the ignorant and unstable as a thing that is possible for them, an option.

Ms. Cheney’s stand seemed brought by conviction, and given that she is the only woman in the House Republican leadership, took some guts: She operates within an environment that is dumb, male and clubby. She courted danger by giving them more reason to want to suppress her down the road.

They didn’t wait for down the road. Rep. Jim Jordan quickly announced she should be stripped of her leadership position. Others showed up on Hannity to drum up momentum. Having a GOP House leader vote for impeachment is “untenable,” Rep. Matt Gaetz said, showing he knows the word untenable.

The distinguishing characteristic of the House Republican Caucus right now is that whenever you say, “Could they be that stupid?” the answer—always—is, “Oh yes!”

That is how to kill the party in American national life—the men make it clear that the woman can’t be brave, that they rough her up because she stood on principle. This week, before the vote, Mr. Jordan was awarded the Medal of Freedom. I am not sure that great honor will ever recover. No press were allowed, but I’m sure the ceremony was elevated, like P.T. Barnum knighting Tom Thumb with a wooden sword in the center ring of the circus.

“I’m not going anywhere,” Ms. Cheney told reporters Wednesday, and good for her. As this was written, there was a rumor it had dawned on her antagonists that there might be a backlash if the only woman in leadership was ejected. So they thought they might replace her with—a woman! They could be this crude, but I can’t believe it. I can’t imagine any woman would be so classless, so happy to be used, so craven that she’d be switched in for a woman who took a brave stand based on conscience. There’d be a pall over that woman for years.

For the senators who will try the impeachment, a thought: It’s time to demystify Donald Trump. He leaves the presidency disgraced. He is a diminishing asset: postpresidential power always wanes, and will especially in this case. He can’t tweet his insta-attacks. Not all of his supporters are rocked and disheartened, but some are: What happened on 1/6 was wrong, has been seen by the country as wrong, and people are going to go to jail for it. Thousands turned up that day, but only thousands, in a nation of 330 million. The more time passes, the more we will learn how sinister it was. Evangelicals are having true and meaningful arguments about the meaning of the past five years. So much of Trump’s mystique rests on his wealth and worldly success, but they too are diminishing. Other, newer, younger candidates will draw attention. Just as establishment Republicans have known they cannot win without the Trump base, the Trump base is about to learn they cannot win without non-Trump Republicans. To come together eventually, in coming years, the Normals will have to agree to a party with more-populist inflections. The populists will have to cede something too. Quietly, over time, that will be Mr. Trump himself.

In running in fear from him you are running from a corpse. And you’ll never be safe anyway. Something wild has been let loose. So be brave. The Democrats want you tied to Mr. Trump forever. Stop, now.

I end with—well, my imagination. But I’ve got a hunch. We’ve got the simmering, resentful, enraged man in the White House, a man who due to his position is dangerous. You never know what he’s going to do. That’s why no one in America has had a normal sleep pattern since Jan. 5.

And yet—systems are maintaining. It’s as if sane, good people have set themselves to making sure everything is smooth, not endangered by a mad person. Perhaps this has to do with some of those who have been endlessly put down the past five years—governmental servants. The sober, boring people who don’t say they’re patriots but are patriots. I have a feeling we will look back—in time, after journalists and historians do their work—and find that some very specific people were deeply protective of their country. And maybe the 25th Amendment figuratively kicked in, informally, almost spontaneously, quietly. I am guessing a network of souls are quietly doing their jobs, establishing protocols of safety, wordlessly nodding as they keep their hand on the tiller. They’ve taken the keys from the drunk, so quietly he doesn’t even know. I’m imagining a mix of people—deputy secretaries and assistants to assistants and generals and some elected officials. Nancy Pelosi nattered on about how she’s on the horn with the Joint Chiefs, but beyond that no mistakes seem to have been made, and at least she stopped.

I just have a feeling our much-maligned establishments are saving the day. A former cabinet official said to me this week, “Trump never understood our institutions.” He never understood how strong and deeply layered they are. The agencies held, the military, the courts. Because Mr. Trump is purely transactional, he thought if he appointed Neil, Brett and Amy, they’d naturally do his bidding because that’s how the world works. But it’s not always how the world works. This week the Supreme Court blandly refused to fast-track his latest election appeal. They did it quietly, without comment.

I have a feeling there was a lot of quiet stature around us all along.

And they were quietly thinking: Don’t mess with my country. But they didn’t say mess.

How do we deal with all that has happened?

We remember who we are. We are a great nation and a strong one; we have, since our beginning, been a miracle in the political history of man. We have brought much good. We are also in trouble, no point not admitting it.

We regain our confidence. We’ve got through trouble before. We love this place and will keep it. We have a Constitution that’s gotten us this far and will get us further.

We lower the boom. No civilized country can accept or allow what we saw Wednesday with the violent assault on the U.S. Capitol. This was an attack on democracy itself. That is not just a phrase. Rule by the people relies on adherence to law and process. The assault and siege was an attempt to stop the work of democracy by halting the peaceful transfer of presidential power, our crowning glory for more than two centuries.

This was a sin against history.

When something like this happens it tends to be repeated. It is our job to make sure it is not.

And so we should come down like a hammer on all those responsible, moving with brute dispatch against members of the mob and their instigators.

On the rioters: Find them, drag them out of their basements, and bring them to justice. Use all resources, whatever it takes, with focus and speed. We have pictures of half of them; they like to pose. They larked about taking selfies and smiling unashamed smiles as one strolled out with a House podium. They were so arrogant they were quoted by name in news reports. It is our good luck they are idiots. Capitalize on that luck.

Throw the book at them. Make it a book of commentaries on the Constitution. Throw it hard.

They have shamed and embarrassed their country in the eyes of the world, which is not only a painful fact but a dangerous one. The world, and the young—all of us—need to see them pay the price.

Now to the devil and his apprentices.

As for the chief instigator, the president of the United States, he should be removed from office by the 25th Amendment or impeachment, whichever is faster. This, with only a week and a half to go, would be a most extraordinary action, but this has been an extraordinary time. Mike Pence is a normal American political figure; he will not have to mount a new government; he appears to be sane; he will in this brief, strange interlude do fine.

The president should be removed for reasons of justice—he urged a crowd to march on Congress, and, when it turned violent, had to be dragged into telling them, equivocally, to go home—and prudence. Mitt Romney had it exactly right: “What happened here . . . was an insurrection, incited by the president of the United States.” As for prudence, Mr. Trump is a sick, bad man and therefore, as president, a dangerous one. He has grown casually bloody-minded, nattering on about force and denouncing even his own vice president as a coward for not supporting unconstitutional measures. No one seems to be certain how Mr. Trump spends his days. He doesn’t bother to do his job. The White House is in meltdown. The only thing that captures his interest is the fact that he lost, which fills him with thoughts of vengeance.

Removing him would go some distance to restoring our reputation, reinforcing our standards, and clarifying constitutional boundaries for future presidents who might need it.

As for his appointees and staff, the garbage they talk to rationalize their staying is no longer acceptable to anyone. “But my career.” Your career, in the great scheme of things, is nothing. “But my future in politics.” Your future, even if your wildest schemes are fulfilled, is a footnote to a footnote. There are ways to be a footnote honorably. “But my kids.” When they are 20 they will read the history. You want them proud of your role, not petitioning the court for a name change.

It was honorable to arrive with high hopes and idealistic commitments. It is not honorable to stay.

As for the other instigators, a side note.

True conservatives tend to have a particular understanding of the fragility of things. They understand that every human institution is, in its way, built on sand. It’s all so frail. They see how thin the veil is between civilization and chaos, and understand that we have to go through every day, each in our way, trying to make the veil thicker. And so we value the things in the phrase that others use to disparage us, “law and order.” Yes, always, the rule of law, and order so that the people of a great nation can move freely on the streets and do their work and pursue their lives.

To the devil’s apprentices, Sens. Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz. They are clever men, highly educated, well-credentialed, endlessly articulate. They see themselves as leading conservative lights, but in this drama they have proved themselves punks practicing punk politics. They are like people who know the value of nothing, who see no frailty around them, who inherited a great deal—an estate built by the work and wealth of others—and feel no responsibility for maintaining the foundation because pop gave them a strong house, right? They are careless inheritors of a nation, an institution, a party that previous generations built at some cost.

They backed a lie and held out the chimera of some possible Trump victory that couldn’t happen, and hid behind the pretense that they were just trying to be fair to all parties and investigate any suspicions of vote fraud, when what they were really doing was playing—coolly, with lawyerly sophistication—not to the base but to the sickness within the base. They should have stood up and told the truth, that democracy moves forward, that the election was imperfect as all elections are, and more so because of the pandemic rules, which need to be changed, but the fact is the voters of America chose Biden-Harris, not Trump-Pence.

Here’s to you, boys. Did you see the broken glass, the crowd roaming the halls like vandals in late Rome, the staff cowering in locked closets and barricading offices? Look on your mighty works and despair.

The price they will pay is up to their states. But the reputational cost should be harsh and high.

Again, on the president: There have been leaders before who, facing imminent downfall, decide to tear everything down with them. They want to go out surrounded by flames. Hitler, at the end, wanted to blow up Germany, its buildings and bridges. His people had let him down. Now he hated them. They must suffer.

I have resisted Nazi comparisons for five years, for the most part easily. But that is like what is happening here, the same kind of spirit, as the president departs, as he angrily channel-surfs in his bunker.

He is a bad man and not a stable one and he is dangerous. America is not safe in his hands.

It is not too late. Removal of the president would be the prudent move, not the wild one. Get rid of him. Now.