Peggy Noonan

Cedar Rapids, Iowa

The famous caucuses are Feb. 3. Christmas is coming, the calendar tightening, and candidates zooming through the broad expanse in tinted-window SUVs.

A surprise is there’s little surprise. Reporters say interest in impeachment is minimal, and it’s true: in three days not a single question from the floor, not a stray comment from a voter in a forum. The candidates seem bored with the subject and don’t bother to fake passion if you ask. Impeachment is a reality show going on in Washington, and everyone knows the outcome, so it’s not even interesting. On my way to Waterloo I realized: We’re about to have the third impeachment of a president in American history, and the day it happens it’s not going to be Topic A in America. It will barely be mentioned at the dinner table. It is a coastal elite story, not a mainland story.

The Democratic race is as fluid as it looks. No one, even bright party professionals speaking off the record, knows what to expect. Biden was inevitable, then maybe Elizabeth, maybe Pete’s inevitable, but Bernie may be inevitable, and don’t write off Joe.

But “Beat Trump” is back. When 2019 began Democrats were thinking that was priority No. 1. Then other things became more important—Medicare for All, climate change, policy. But it feels like Democrats here are circling back to their original desire. “Who can beat Trump?” is again the most important question. They don’t know the answer. They’re trying to figure it out.

You can hear this in what the candidates say.

At a Teamsters forum in Cedar Rapids Saturday, Sen. Bernie Sanders was burly in his aggression. “This is a president who is a fraud,” “a pathological liar,” “a homophobe,” “a bigot.” Mr. Sanders said his campaign is about “telling the billionaire class that their greed is unacceptable.” He got a standing ovation.

Sen. Amy Klobuchar the day before, in Grinnell, spoke to about 150 people at the Iowa Farmer’s Union: “We’re not gonna let this Gilded Age roll right over us.” Donald Trump made promises he didn’t keep. After his tax cut passed, “he went to Mar-a-Lago and told his rich friends, ‘I just made you all a lot richer.’ And I can tell you none of them were farmer’s union members.”

“He thinks the Midwest is flyover country.”

Leaders are making decisions for seven generations, she said: “He can’t keep his decision seven minutes from now.”

Pete Buttigieg, at Cornell College in Mount Vernon, told a crowd of more than 1,000—lots of students but others too, many of them prosperous and middle-aged: Don’t just watch “the Trump show—help me pick up the remote and change the channel.”

Before he spoke, a handsome, gray-haired psychotherapist from Iowa City told me why she supports him: “I think he has empathy. His orientation, what he’s been through. Yet also the military and a Rhodes scholar.” She liked his liberal Christianity: “He hasn’t let anyone else co-opt his spiritual life.”

Mr. Buttigieg used to say his name was pronounced “Buddha judge.” When he went national he changed it to what his crowds now chant: “boot edge edge.” I suspect he did this because America wears boots and likes edginess, but no one wants to be judged by the Buddha. I mention this because Mr. Buttigieg has the air of someone who thinks through even the smallest questions of presentation.

In person he seems like the smart young communications director for a Democratic presidential candidate, not the candidate himself. Yet he gets a particular respect because people think whatever happens this year, he’s going to be president some day. The local congressman who introduced him said as much: “No matter who comes out of this . . . Pete Buttigieg is the future of the party.”

He is personable in an old-fashioned sense; he reminds me of Michael Kinsley’s description of Al Gore when he was 38: “an old person’s idea of a young person.”

Mr. Buttigieg is often painted as a moderate. After he spoke I asked about something I’m interested in, how people develop their political views, where they get them. Do most inherit them, swallow them whole? His father was a Marxist-oriented academic at Notre Dame; he himself, I said, is a man of the left. Had he ever kicked away from family assumptions? Did he ever feel drawn to conservatism, to Burke or Kirk? He had not, though “I will say this: I came to respect the ways in which, right around the time of Russell Kirk, conservatives came to be very much in touch with the relationship between their ideas and their politics and politicians. I think it was born out of a period when the left had universities already, and the right needed to construct a structure of think tanks and so forth.”

When he was an intern on Capitol Hill, every young Republican staffer had a copy of Hayek on his desk. “On our side, the academic left, particularly in the humanities, had gotten into really abstruse things around postmodernism and poststructuralism. There was, ironically, contrary to our self-image, I think less of a clear relationship between ideas and politicians on the left. We had our policy intellectuals, but there was less of a connection between our politicians and our political theorists.”

He came to respect “the organizing efforts of conservatives.” I asked if this was around the time Daniel Patrick Moynihan said, “Of a sudden the Republican Party is the party of ideas.” He smiled and shrugged: “Just a hair before my time.”

Ms. Klobuchar’s polls have been going up, from 1% in the Emerson College poll in October to 10% now. Her audiences are bigger. It has broken through that she’s a moderate, a senator, a Midwesterner: “I’m from Minnesota and I can see Iowa from my porch!” She has wit. She knows she has to prove that she’s tough, that she can go toe to toe with Donald Trump.

She’s had strong debates. In the last one, social media went crazy because her hair shook. Not her face or voice, her hair. She later joked on Twitter: “I’ll plaster my runaway bangs down for the next NBC debate.”

What happened? She told me the debate hall had been reconfigured, overly air-conditioned, and unknown to her, a nearby air vent was blasting at the top of her head. She didn’t know there was a problem until the break, when a tech came by and said he was sorry.

“Now I guess hair spray,” she laughed as she told the story.

How difficult will it be to beat Mr. Trump? While I was in Iowa the new jobs numbers came out. America has functional full employment. It is a marvelous thing. We’re not in any new wars. With peace and prosperity, how can the incumbent lose?

The counterargument is that his approval is stuck in the low 40s with peace and prosperity, which tells you everything—he is vulnerable, more than half the country rejects him in what are for him ideal circumstances. This in turn brings back the familiar 2016 theme of shy Trump voters, people who don’t tell pollsters they’re going to vote for him, or even tell themselves.

Maybe the real story is that it’s all fluid.

During presidential scandals, members of the media often speak of the Iran-Contra affair. I’m not sure they really understand it

In retrospect that scandal was distinguished by two central, shaping characteristics. First, it was different from other scandals in that its genesis wasn’t low or brutish. It wasn’t about money, or partisan advantage, or sex; it was about trying to free American hostages in the Mideast, and attempting to pursue a possible, if unlikely, foreign-policy advance. It had to do with serious things. Second, when the story blew it eventually yielded a model of how to handle a scandal, though it didn’t look that way at the time.

In July 1985 President Reagan was in Bethesda Naval Hospital recovering from colon-cancer surgery when his national security adviser, Bud McFarlane, told him of a potential opening in efforts to free the seven American hostages the Iranian-dominated terrorist group Hezbollah had taken in Beirut. Among them were the Associated Press reporter Terry Anderson; Father Lawrence Jenco, the head of Catholic Relief Services in Lebanon; and William Buckley, the Central Intelligence Agency’s Beirut station chief. Buckley, who’d seen action in the U.S. Army in Korea and Vietnam and been much decorated, had been held since March 1984 and endured more than a year of torture. Reagan knew this, and he’d met with the families of other hostages.

Mr. McFarlane said Israeli contacts had told him that a group of moderate, politically connected Iranians wanted to establish a channel to the U.S. With the Iran-Iraq war raging and Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in his 80s, Iran’s political leadership might soon be in play. The moderates would show their sincerity by persuading Hezbollah to give up the hostages. Mr. McFarlane wanted to talk. Reagan approved.

Thus commenced an initiative that its participants thought farsighted, its critics called almost criminally naive, and Secretary of State George Shultz later called “crazy.”

The moderates wanted the U.S. to permit Israel to sell them some TOW antitank missiles. They would pay, and the U.S. would replenish the Israeli stock. This would enhance their position in Iran by proving they had connections to high officials in Washington.

Reagan should have shut everything down at the mention of weapons. He didn’t. He later wrote, “The truth is, once we had information from Israel that we could trust the people in Iran, I didn’t have to think thirty seconds about saying yes.” It was only a one-shipment deal, he reasoned, and the moderates had agreed to his insistence that they get the hostages out. A shipment was made, and hostage Benjamin Weir was released.

In October 1985 the terrorist group Islamic Jihad announced it had killed William Buckley. (The White House National Security Council concluded he’d probably already died of a heart attack.) Reagan stayed hopeful, although when word got around of what was happening, Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger and Mr. Shultz opposed it. Mr. Shultz told Reagan that while it might not technically be an arms-for-hostages deal, it would certainly look like one—and it would blow sky-high as soon as it leaked, as it would leak.

By winter it was clear some of the Iranian go-betweens were dubious. No more hostages were being released. Mr. McFarlane resigned. His successor, John Poindexter, pressed for another shipment of missiles, to be followed by talks with Iranian moderates. CIA Director William Casey agreed it was worth the risk if there’s a chance they could deliver. Mr. Shultz and Weinberger pushed back. Reagan later said, “I just put my foot down.” In the spring, Mr. McFarlane returned for a secret trip to Iran, which he’d been told would free the last of the hostages. He went home without them.

That July, Jenco was released. Casey and the NSC asked for another missile shipment. Reagan approved.

Then a new terrorist group took three more American hostages in Lebanon.

A channel had been opened to a group that included a nephew of the speaker of the Iranian Parliament, who requested various gifts including a Bible inscribed by the president. Amazingly, he got them. Later, it was reported the Americans even brought a cake shaped like a key.

In November 1986, a Lebanese news outlet broke a story saying America was trading arms for hostages.

It was explosive. Reagan looked like a hypocrite—his administration had long pressed others not to sell arms to the Iranians. His people looked like fools gulled by gangsters.

Mr. Shultz later summed it all up this way: “The U.S. government had violated its own policies on antiterrorism and against arms sales to Iran, was buying our own citizens’ freedom in a manner that could only encourage the taking of others, was working through disreputable international go-betweens . . . and was misleading the American people—all in the guise of furthering some purported regional political transformation, or to obtain in actuality a hostage release.” Mr. McFarlane, Mr. Poindexter and Casey “had sold it to a president all too ready to accept it, given his humanitarian urge to free American hostages.”

Reagan was embarrassed, but once he saw the dimensions of the problem—he believed his motivations were right and the American people would understand once he explained—he took a series of constructive decisions. He kept Mr. Schultz, who’d been public in his criticism, in the administration.

When Reagan’s friend and confidante, Attorney General Ed Meese, announced he’d found evidence that Lt. Col Oliver North of the NSC had diverted part of the money the Iranians paid for the weapons to the anti-Communist Contras in Nicaragua, Reagan was originally sympathetic, less so when he was told Col. North was shredding documents. In the end he fired him. Mr. Poindexter resigned.

Reagan appointed a commission to investigate everything that had been done. The three members were sensitively balanced: chairman John Tower, a Republican senator; Edmund Muskie, a Democratic former senator and vice-presidential nominee; and Brent Scowcroft, the coolheaded former and future White House national security adviser. There were 50 witnesses, including the president. A joint congressional committee held public hearings. Reagan waived executive privilege. He accepted an independent counsel.

The Tower Commission’s 200-page report was delivered in February 1987, three months after the story broke. It was sharply critical of the president but found he did not know of the Contra angle.

Democrats in Congress and the media had exploited the mess for all it was worth, but on another level some Democrats quietly pitched in. A former chairman of the Democratic National Committee, Robert Strauss, met with the Reagans and helped steady the ship.

Throughout the drama the president fell into a funk. The public turned on him; his poll numbers plummeted.

But he wasn’t over. There were great triumphs ahead—the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, signed in 1987 and ratified in 1988; “Tear down this wall” in 1987, and its fall in 1989, less than 10 months after Reagan left the presidency.

Our allies were offended by the scandal but impressed by its aftermath. Mikhail Gorbachev noticed too: The old lion didn’t die.

Iran-Contra was a big mistake, a real mess. But its deeper lessons have to do with how to admit and repair mistakes, how to work with the other side, and how to forge through and survive to the betterment of the country.

As I watched “The Irishman” a few weeks ago in a Manhattan movie theater I felt an ache, a kind of grief sneaking up on me, and toward the end I thought I knew why. I realized: I am watching John Ford’s “Cheyenne Autumn.” I am watching a great artist say goodbye to a world he knew, the world in which he’d risen, a particular kind of America. This is an artist’s farewell to his great subject. For Ford, America’s greatest movie director, it was the settlers who pushed West and the American Indians who lived there. It was his coming to terms with their suffering, and his treatment of it.

For Martin Scorsese, who’s had a similarly epic career, it was 20th century gangsters high and low, especially the Italian-American mob.

Both movies are a summing up and a kiss on the hand to a whole lost world.

Some time after I shared my thought with the great mob chronicler and screenwriter Nick Pileggi, a Scorsese collaborator. He agreed, and later in an email said the movie is the last act of “Marty’s mob quartet,” which forms “a morality tale about being a gangster.”

The first act is “Mean Streets,” in which “youthful exuberance winds up in a shooting and a fatal car crash.” Wanting to be a gangster turns out to be a nightmare. Then comes young manhood—“Goodfellas.” Then, the third act, middle age—“Casino.” In the end, the mob always screws it up. “In Casino, when the gangsters finally get to own casinos and a city, they overreach and collapse.” Finally, old age.

“‘The Irishman’ is about the end of it all. Death even comes to those who pull the trigger.” Their dreams are gone. “That’s the final wallop and why the nursing home, the wheelchairs, the semi confessional with a young priest, so powerfully evoke the end of that world.”

“The Irishman” left Nick Pileggi wistful too. “Watching DeNiro in the wheelchair made me think of him in ‘Mean Streets’ as young Johnny Boy, dancing into the bar with some girls he ‘picked up in the Village,’ the Rolling Stones crashing the juke box.”

*   *   *

“The Irishman” is great art and as such has stature.

But it is not, as we know, great history. It captures a world while blithely ignoring its facts. Frank Sheeran, the mobster on whose life the film is based, didn’t kill the flashy, up-and-coming gangster Joey Gallo, as he does in the film. And he surely didn’t kill Jimmy Hoffa.

Who did? There’s no reason to doubt the longtime consensus that mafia leadership OK’d the murder and a particular mobster, probably Anthony Provenzano, ordered it.

But who pulled the trigger? Over the years a lot of people have “confessed” or claimed they know. For some of the real story, and for a great American tale in itself, you want to go to Jack Goldsmith’s book, “In Hoffa’s Shadow,” which came out earlier this year.

It is some book. It is about the guy the FBI and everyone else, for decades, thought drove the union leader to his doom, and may have been involved in his killing. That man was a mobbed-up low-level union official named Chuckie O’Brien. He was Hoffa’s longtime gofer and like a second son to him. Coming under suspicion and never being exonerated ruined Chuckie’s life.

Mr. Goldsmith is a professor of law at Harvard Law School, a person of establishment respect, an Ivy League guy who was in George W. Bush’s Justice Department.

And he started his career with a secret. He was Chuckie O’Brien’s adopted son. His mother married Chuckie when he was a kid, and in his turbulent childhood Chuckie was the only solid source of love and support. “Chuckie was my third father, and my best,” Mr. Goldsmith writes.

As Jack O’Brien—as he was then—grew up, he became a good student, a reader. He got accepted at a respected college, then went on to Oxford and Yale Law. He came to understand that a connection to Chuckie wouldn’t exactly be a career enhancer. He came to see Chuckie as crude, gruff. He lived as a criminal, a man who broke the law. Which was now horrifying for Jack, who’d come to love the law and saw the value of order. So he changed his last name back to Goldsmith, his absent father’s name, and broke off relations with Chuckie. When the court where he hoped to clerk, and later the Justice Department, did security and background checks, he said he hadn’t seen or spoken to Chuckie in years. He had only contempt for the life Chuckie led. He threw him right under the bus. They let Jack in, and he rose.

Now it’s years later, the Bush era is over, and Jack Goldsmith is uncomfortable. His entire life had been that most American of things, a big class shift, a status shift: He’d started in one place, wound up in another, and felt the dislocation of it. He questioned things. He hadn’t spoken to Chuckie in years, hadn’t invited him to his wedding. He wanted to heal the breach, to make amends. He began a dialogue that produced a book about Chuckie’s life, and their relationship, and more than that.

Mr. Goldsmith rethinks not only his personal decisions but his intellectual predicates. He sees the irony in the decision of Bobby Kennedy’s Justice Department to launch a massive federal investigation of Hoffa. Kennedy did it because Hoffa and the Teamsters were mobbed up. What Kennedy didn’t understand was that Hoffa dealt with the mob strategically, on his terms and at arm’s length.

After Hoffa was jailed, “The wall that Hoffa had maintained between the Teamsters union and organized crime collapsed,” Mr. Goldsmith writes. They hounded Hoffa to stop the mob from taking over the union. It turned out only when he was in jail could the mob take over the union—and its pension funds.

Chuckie saw a class element in Kennedy’s targeting of the Teamsters: Justice Department guys were a bunch of privileged Ivy League punks who under the guise of enforcing the law often broke it. Mr. Goldsmith’s research reveals that, in fact, they did break the law, with indiscriminate and illegal surveillance of Hoffa and his associates.

Tantalizingly, Mr. Goldsmith tells us at the end that the FBI now finally believes it knows who murdered Hoffa. “The killer was a low level family member in 1975, someone entirely off the early investigators’ radar. His status in the Detroit family rose almost immediately after the disappearance, and he died in January 2019.”

Mr. Goldsmith doesn’t use his name. “The person has not been associated with the Hoffa murder in the past 44 years,” he said in a telephone interview. “I didn’t want to do with this guy what had been done to Chuckie.”

Fair enough. An internet search matching Mr. Goldsmith’s exact descriptors yields the name Tony Palazollo, a Detroit mob figure who died in January 2019.

Is that who did it? After all these years the FBI should open its files, say what it knows, and close this case.

Last thought. All these people, from Ford to Scorsese, from RFK to Hoffa, from gangsters and pols to warriors and prairie saints—all these vivid, varied, colorful characters, these types, these humans—it takes some kind of country to make room for them, to make them all so possible, until they say goodbye.

And a happy Thanksgiving to the great and fabled nation that is still, this day, the hope of the world.

Look, the case has been made. Almost everything in the impeachment hearings this week fleshed out and backed up the charge that President Trump muscled Ukraine for political gain. The pending question is what precisely the House and its Democratic majority will decide to include in the articles of impeachment, what statutes or standards they will assert the president violated.

What was said consistently undermined Mr. Trump’s case, but more deadly was what has never been said. In the two months since Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced a formal impeachment inquiry was under way and the two weeks since the Intelligence Committee’s public hearings began, no one, even in the White House, has said anything like, “He wouldn’t do that!” or “That would be so unlike him.” His best friends know he would do it and it’s exactly like him.

The week’s hearings were not a seamless success for Democrats. On Tuesday they seemed to be losing the thread. But by Wednesday and Thursday it was restored.

Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman was not a persuasive witness and did not move the story forward, because in spite of the obvious patriotism reflected in his record he was annoying—smug and full of himself. He appeared in full dress uniform with three rows of ribbons. When Rep. Devin Nunes called him “Mr. Vindman,” he quickly corrected him: “Ranking Member, it’s Lieutenant Colonel Vindman, please.” Oh, snap. As he described his areas of authority at the National Security Council, he seemed to glisten with self-regard. You got the impression he saw himself as fully in charge of U.S. policy toward Ukraine. Asked if it was true that government offered to make him their defense minister he said “yes” with no apparent embarrassment. I don’t know about you but I don’t like it when a foreign government gets a sense of a U.S. military officer and concludes he might fit right in. (A Ukrainian official later said the job offer was a joke.)

Mr. Vindman—I’m sorry, Lt. Col. Vindman—self-valorized, as other witnesses have, and tugged in his opening statement on America’s heart strings by addressing his father, who brought his family from the Soviet Union 40 years ago: “Dad, . . . you made the right decision. . . . Do not worry, I will be fine for telling the truth.”

The committee has paid entirely too much attention to the witnesses’ emotions. “How did that make you feel?” “Without upsetting you too much, I’d like to show you the excerpts from the call . . .”

I am sure the questioners were told to take this tack by communications professionals who believe this is how you manipulate housewives. In fact a mother at home with a vacuum in one hand and a crying baby in the other would look at them, listen, and think: “You guys represent us to other countries? You gotta butch up.”

Later, as Col. Vindman returned to work, and clearly wanting to be seen, he posed grinning for photos in front of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building.

It is not only Donald Trump who suffers from Absence of Gravity.

On Wednesday Gordan Sondland, the ambassador to the European Union, was both weirdly jolly and enormously effective in doing Mr. Trump damage. He followed the president’s orders; there was a quid pro quo; “everyone was in the loop, it was no secret“; Rudy Giuliani was the point man, with whom Mr. Sondland worked “at the express direction of the president.”

It was his third try at truthful sworn testimony and it was completely believable. It was kind of the ballgame. He seemed like a guy with nothing to lose, or maybe a guy who’d already lost much.

On Thursday Fiona Hill, the former White House Russia expert, was all business, a serious woman you don’t want to mess with. She reoriented things, warning that those who excuse or don’t wish to see Russian propaganda efforts against America, and targeting its elections, are missing the obvious. The suspicion of the president and his allies that Ukraine is the great culprit in the 2016 election is a “fictional narrative.” They are, in fact, bowing to disinformation Russia spreads to cover its tracks and confuse the American people and its political class. She dismissed the president’s operatives’ efforts to get Ukraine’s new president to investigate his country’s alleged meddling as a “domestic political errand.” She and other diplomats were “involved in national security, foreign policy,” and the interests of the operatives and the diplomats had “diverged.” She warned Mr. Sondland: “This is all going to blow up.”

Truer words.

What became obvious in the hearings was the sober testimony from respectable diplomats—not disgruntled staffers with nutty memoirs but people of stature who don’t ordinarily talk—about how the administration operates. It became clear in a new and public way that pretty much everyone around the president has been forced for three years to work around his poor judgment and unpredictability in order to do their jobs. He no doubt knows this and no doubt doesn’t care. Because he’s the boss, they’ll do it his way.

But we saw how damaging this is, how ultimately destructive, not only to coherence and respectability but to the president himself.

After Thursday’s hearings I felt some free-floating sympathy for high Trump appointees who joined early. You can say they knew what they signed up for, but it’s human to have hope, and they surely had it when they came aboard. They were no doubt ambitious—they wanted a big job—but they probably wanted to do good, too. They were optimistic—“How bad can it be?” And there would have been vanity—“I can handle him.” But they couldn’t. He not only doesn’t know where the line is; he has never wanted to know, so he can cross it with impunity, without consciousness of a bad act or one that might put him in danger. They were no match for his unpredictability and resentments, which at any moment could undo anything.

As to impeachment itself, the case has been so clearly made you wonder what exactly the Senate will be left doing. How will they hold a lengthy trial with a case this clear? Who exactly will be the president’s witnesses, those who’d testify he didn’t do what he appears to have done, and would never do it?

Procedures, rules and definitions aren’t fully worked out in the Senate. But we are approaching December and the clock is ticking. A full-blown trial on charges most everyone will believe are true, and with an election in less than a year, will seem absurd to all but diehards and do the country no good.

So the reasonable guess is Republican senators will call to let the people decide. In a divided country this is the right call. But they should take seriously the idea of censuring him for abuse of power. Mr. Trump would be the first president to be censured since Andrew Jackson, to whom his theorists have always compared him. In the end he will probably be proud of a tightening of the connection.

A young foreign-affairs professional asked last week if the coming impeachment didn’t feel like Watergate. He was a child during that scandal, I in college. I said no, Watergate had the feeling of real drama, it was a reckoning with who we were as a people; it felt grave. This is more like the Clinton impeachment, grubby and small.

But watching the first day of hearings I thought that wasn’t quite right. There was something grave in it, and a kind of reckoning. This was due to the dignity and professionalism of the career diplomats who calmly and methodically told what they had seen and experienced. They were believable. It didn’t feel embarrassing to have faith in them.

Republicans on the panel didn’t know what to do. They know what this story is, and I believe they absolutely know the president muscled an ally, holding public money over its head to get a personal political favor. But they’re his party, they didn’t want to look weak, they had to show the base they had his back. In their interruptions and chaos-strewing they attempted to do some of what the Democrats did during the Kavanaugh hearings, only without the screaming meemies of Code Pink.

The Democrats were disciplined in their questioning and not bullying and theatrical, which was a surprise and unusual for them.

But the juxtaposition of the witnesses, the men of America’s diplomatic class, with the sullen, squirrelly, off-point Republicans, was what gave the hearing shape.

William B. Taylor Jr., acting ambassador to Ukraine, 72, was fifth in his class of 800 at West Point, where he was cadet battalion commander. Bronze Star, Vietnam, 82nd Airborne, 101st Airborne, 506th Infantry, Second Cavalry. After that, government work and diplomacy. He’s known for his modesty. You couldn’t be more impressive. Testifying along with him George P. Kent, younger and a different sort—studied Russian history and literature at Harvard and Johns Hopkins, speaks Ukrainian and Russian, 27 years in the foreign service.

They seemed to have capability and integrity. They weren’t deep state; they were old school, old style, not some big dope of a political donor, as all administrations have among their ambassadors, but the people who make it work, who maintain the standards, who keep it all up and running.

This is what I saw: the old America reasserting itself, under subpoena. They were American diplomats, with stature and command of their subject matter.

And the world was seeing it, and maybe thinking, “I remember them.” Older prime ministers and presidents in foreign capitals could be thinking, “I remember those pros, the bland Midwestern tough guys who knew their stuff. Good that they still exist.”

Quietly, smoothly, brick by brick, they gave their testimony and painted a picture that supports the charge that yes, Donald Trump muscled Ukraine.

*   *   *

To the week’s other attempt to make a case against the president:

I don’t like to beat up books, because they’re books; you can’t have enough data and argumentation and art; if you don’t like it, don’t read it. But “A Warning,” the White House insider exposé by “Anonymous,” is a poor piece of work, and something false at its heart shows a deep disrespect for the reader.

What we especially need in the political world now is guts, brains and sincerity. Anonymous does not offer them.

There’s nothing here that hasn’t already been said in a dozen books and a thousand articles. There is little first-person testimony telling us what the author saw, what was said, what happened, what it meant.

Halfway through I realized: Anonymous isn’t really hiding his identity, he’s hiding the major fact of that identity, which is that he is not a significant figure. The premise of the original article in the New York Times, of which this book is an expansion, was that he was a major player—a “senior official of the Trump administration”—who’s giving you what history needs, eyewitness testimony. But you get the impression the author wasn’t actually in the room where it happened, or not often. Not having new, first-person information he relies on high-class padding (thoughts on Cicero, Marcus Aurelius, the role of Congress) and style. The style is midlevel ad agency, clean but with no ballast. It is by the end irritating—shallow yet haughty, common yet pretentious, and full of clichés. His Trump “takes no prisoners” and “behind closed doors” damages “the fabric of our republic.” The president is historically and politically uninformed, inattentive in briefings, vengeful and dangerous, gets harebrained ideas, and says stupid things. Yes, we know. But you have to do more than assert.

Anonymous suggests he can’t be specific because it would blow his cover. But without specificity the work becomes contentless and devolves into mere rhetoric and polemic. And why not be specific and let people know who you are? It would make the truths you feel demand urgent expression more credible and concrete. There’s nothing dishonorable about thinking you are witnessing a catastrophe and telling the American people. But you have to look history in the face and take its punishments.

And in this case what punishments, anyway? You’ll be fired? You hate where you work! You’ll be insulted in tweets? So what? There are two Trump tweet lists in America, one with the names of those who’ve been attacked and the other with those who haven’t. The first is longer, and they’re still alive.

It is all so disguised, self-valorous and creepy.

Why was Anonymous there? He doesn’t really say. Since he saw the emptiness and danger early on, why didn’t he leave? “God knows,” he says, “it would have been easy.” He says he stayed because Mr. Trump is “a mess” and he wanted to help. But he gives no examples of how he helped. The fact is it’s hard to leave a White House. You’re unemployed, your office is gone, your old colleagues cool on you, and the neighbors are no longer impressed. Better to stay and simmer.

He claims “senior advisors and cabinet-level officials pondered a mass resignation, a ‘midnight self-massacre’ ” to draw the public’s attention to the White House disarray. But they didn’t go through with it. Why? “It would shake public confidence.” But diminishing public confidence in the administration was the point, no?

He refers to sensitive conversations that have not been declassified and vows not to speak of them—“such details have been omitted.” But it’s hard not to suspect he didn’t “omit” them, he didn’t know them.

“Trump wanted to use a domestic presidential power to do something absurd overseas, which for security reasons I cannot disclose.” Oh come on.

This book is as edifying as Omarosa’s White House memoir, but without the leavening air of insanity.

At one point Anonymous reports that at a Group of Seven meeting Trump threw some Starburst candies at Angela Merkel and said: “Here, Angela. Don’t say I never gave you anything.” I’d never heard that. That’s news! But I Googled the quote and there it was, rows of citations attributing the anecdote to Ian Bremmer of the Eurasia Group.

My only advice to Anonymous is for the good of your reputation, stay that way. And if you feel such heavy daily repugnance, leave already.

It is all so very grave, yet it feels only like a continuation of the past three years of fraught and crazy political conflict. But impeachment of the American president came much closer this week.

I believe retired Gen. John Kelly, President Trump’s former chief of staff, when he told the Washington Examiner that he had told Mr. Trump that if he did not change his ways he would get himself in terrible trouble. “I said, ‘Whatever you do don’t hire a yes-man, someone who won’t tell you the truth—don’t do that. Because if you do, I believe you will be impeached.’”

He knew his man. Mr. Kelly was in the White House for 17 months, from July 31, 2017, to Jan. 2, 2019. I ask Trump supporters, or anyone with even a small knowledge of what a White House is, to consider how extraordinary it is for a chief of staff to say such a thing to the president. Can you imagine James Baker saying to Ronald Reagan, “Keep it up, buddy, and you’ll break the law and be thrown out”? You can’t because it does not compute, because it isn’t possible.

When Mr. Trump first came in I would press his supporters on putting all of American military power into the hands of a person with no direct political or foreign-affairs experience or training. They’d say, confidently, “But he’s got the generals around him.” His gut would blend with their expertise. But though they went to work for him with optimism and confidence in their ability to warn him off destructive actions or impulses—though they were personally supportive, gave him credit for a kind of political genius, and intended to be part of something of which they could be proud—they found they could not. This president defeats all his friends. That’s why he’s surrounded now, in his White House and the agencies, by the defeated—a second-string, ragtag, unled army.

In fact the president wasn’t so interested in the generals’ experience and expertise. In fact he found them boring but with nice outfits. One by one they left or were fired. This should disturb the president’s supporters more than it does. And they should have a better response than, “But they’re jerks.”

To impeachment itself. It received a powerful push forward when the House voted Thursday for a new, public phase in the inquiry. This means among other things that the Democrats think they have the goods. They wouldn’t go live unless they did.

They feel the great question is clear. That question is: Can we prove, through elicited testimony, that the president made clear to the leader of another nation, an ally in uncertain circumstances, that the U.S. would release congressionally authorized foreign aid only if the foreign leader publicly committed to launch an internal investigation that would benefit the president in his 2020 re-election effort?

The odd thing is I think most everyone paying attention knows the answer. It’s been pretty much established, from leaks, reports, statements and depositions. Can I say we all know it happened? I think the definitive question for the hearings will turn out not to be “Did he do it?” but “Do the American people believe this an impeachable offense?”

The president’s defenders have argued that in the transcripts of the phone call the White House released, he never clearly lays out a quid pro quo. I suppose it depends how you read it, but in a book I wrote long ago I noted that in government and journalism people don’t say “Do it my way or I’ll blow you up.” Their language and approach are more rounded. They imitate 1930s gangster movies in which the suave mobster tells the saloon keeper from whom he’s demanding protection money, “Nice place you have here, shame if anything happened to it.”

In the past I’ve said the leaders of the inquiry will have to satisfy the American people that they’re trying to be fair, and not just partisan fools. So far that score is mixed. Republicans charge with some justice that it’s been secretive, the process loaded and marked by partisan creepiness. If I were Adam Schiff now I wouldn’t be fair, I’d be generous—providing all materials, information, duly inviting the Republicans in. That would be a deadly move—to show respect and rob Republicans of a talking point.

It should be communicated to the president’s supporters that they must at some point ask themselves this question: Is it acceptable that an American president muscle an ally in this way for personal political gain? If that is OK then it’s OK in the future when there’s a Democratic president, right? Would your esteem for Franklin D. Roosevelt be lessened if it came to light through old telephone transcripts found in a box in a basement in Georgetown that he told Winston Churchill in 1940, “We’ll lend you the ships and the aid if you announce your government is investigating that ruffian Wendell Willkie”? You’d still respect him and tell the heroic old stories, right?

Some of the evidence in the hearings will be colorful and stick in the mind. There will be phrases from testimony or questioning that encapsulate the scandal, such as “What did the president know and when did he know it?” and “There’s a cancer growing on the presidency.” That will have impact. If White House workers attempted to deep-six evidence of the president’s conversation, doesn’t that suggest consciousness of guilt?

There is John Bolton’s testimony, if he testifies. He’s not known as a shy man. He is a conservative who has made his career as a professional (worked for four presidents, former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, head of the National Security Council), a foreign-affairs tough guy, a Fox News contributor. Some, perhaps many conservatives were heartened when he came aboard with the president in the spring of 2018.

He would know a great deal about the issues at hand. Did the president act in a way he disapproved of on Ukraine? Was there a side-game foreign policy? All that would be powerful. But what if he was asked to think aloud about what he saw of the way Mr. Trump operates, of what he learned about the president after he came to work for him, of what illusions, if any, might have been dispelled? To reflect (as the generals who used to work for the president reflect, off the record)? What if he is questioned imaginatively, even sympathetically, with a long view as to what history needs to be told?

If he did this under oath and answered as he thought right, honest and helpful, if he was asked the question, “After all you’ve seen, is it good for America that Donald Trump is president?” “Tell us about what you’ve observed about the nature and mind and character of Donald Trump.” “Share your thoughts as a respected professional who has worked with presidents and who knows what the presidency is.”

Public candor would take plenty of guts and could have reputational repercussions.

But it would not just be powerful, it could be explosive. History, at least, would appreciate it.

I was writing a rather stern column about the mess in Washington, but I got kind of swept Thursday by the beautiful bipartisan tribute to Democratic Rep. Elijah Cummings, in Congress’s Statuary Hall, a ceremony held just before his burial back in Baltimore.

I want to get beyond the merely sentimental. Everyone seems to have liked him a lot; I knew him slightly and liked him too. I would only add to his enumerated virtues the power of his warmth. I met him at an event five or so years ago and when we were introduced I went to shake his hand. He’d have none of that and enveloped me in a hug. I don’t remember what we talked about but it seemed important to the two of us, in one of those nice moments that sometimes happen, that we show a mutual appreciation for who the other was. We did, and held hands. I just found to my shock that remembering this leaves me a little choked.

There was something not sentimental but poignant and half-grasped in the tribute to him. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell spoke movingly about how Cummings came to Washington not to be a big man but to do big things. Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said, “He was strong, very strong when necessary. . . . His voice could . . . stir the most cynical hearts.” Cummings’s friend Republican Rep. Mark Meadows said he had “eyes that would pierce through anybody standing in his way,” and like the others read Scripture. It was nice to hear the Bible read in Statuary Hall; the religiosity had a great sweetness to it. “In my father’s house are many mansions,” Mr. Meadows read, and suggested the Baltimore boy was in a grand new home.

What was poignant was how much the speakers enjoyed being their best selves. Congress knows how hapless it looks, how riven by partisanship and skins-vs.-shirts dumbness. For many of them it takes the tang out of things. They know it lowers their standing in America. They grieve it. It embarrasses them. They’d like to be part of something that works, something respected.

It wouldn’t be lost on the brighter of them that they were enacting in the Cummings ceremony a unity and respect, a shared purpose, that they wish they could sustain but are unable to.

They believe they are forced into their partisan positions by several things, among them that America is badly divided and the politically active on both sides, in their mutual loathing, pull toward the extremes.

As I watched the ceremony I thought of a dinner two weeks ago with a close friend. It was just the two of us and we found ourselves going deep about how we feel about everything. She is a spirited lefty, a longtime Democratic donor, I am a righty, a conservative as I define it, but neither of us has ever cared much about that because the essence of friendship is . . . essence. Who you are, which fairly enough includes politics but is not limited to politics. We’ve had 30 years of teasing and occasional sparring but this night we went to the thoughts behind our views. She asked me how I see my own political views; am I more lefty than I was? I found myself saying something I’d never said, that all my political thinking comes down to this: I am for whatever will hold America together, full stop. I see it breaking in a million pieces and my every political impulse has to do with wanting it to hold together, to endure, to go forward in history and the world. If that means compromise, fine. She thought about this, nodded and said softly that that makes complete sense right now. “That’s a program.”

But don’t most of us kind of think like this? Even if we haven’t articulated it or even noticed it’s what we think. But isn’t it the right primary intention?

A deep impediment is the air of political maximalism that careless people who never know the implications of things encourage. Years ago Rep. Bella Abzug of New York would point out that her father was a butcher, who owned the Live and Let Live Meat Market. I always liked that. Nobody says that phrase anymore, live and let live, but long ago everybody did. Now it’s part of what’s missing—a sense of give. So many people feel bullied, pushed around by vague and implacable forces. They fear the erosion of central freedoms.

Here is the first example that springs to mind. It reflects my cultural views and indignations, but I ask you to take it on its own terms.

In early October CNN had a town hall on LGBTQ issues for the Democratic presidential candidates. They said the sort of things they say, you can imagine them, you don’t need your neighborhood pundit to tell you. But at one point the essential nature of the new progressivism jumped out.

Don Lemon asked Beto O’Rourke: “Do you think religious institutions like colleges, churches, charities, should they lose their tax exempt status if they oppose same-sex marriage?”

“Yes,” said Mr. O’Rourke, not missing a beat. “There can be no reward, no benefit, no tax break for anyone or any institution, any organization in America that denies the full human rights and the full civil rights of every single one of us. So as president we’re going to make that a priority and we are going to stop those who are infringing upon the human rights of our fellow Americans.”

Regular readers know we do not especially admire Mr. O’Rourke, that we believe the past year he has been having not a campaign but a manic episode. But he said what he said because he wanted to please a significant part of the Democratic base, and he received big applause.

Can we agree his is a radical, maximalist stand? Under his standard the Catholic Church would be ruined, and with it a whole world of charities, schools, hospitals, orphanages, other agencies, all of which help those with limited resources. Let’s just posit without bothering to defend the proposition that an America without the Catholic church would be a poorer, sicker, colder place, and one less likely to continue.

At almost the same time as the CNN town hall, the Little Sisters of the Poor, who serve the elderly and impoverished, were again in court asking for protection from the ObamaCare mandate that tells them they must include contraceptive coverage in their employee health plans. It’s been a long legal journey: The Supreme Court has already been involved. So has the Trump administration, whose directives regarding religious protection have been challenged by certain states, which got injunctions, which have been upheld by the appellate courts. The Sisters are forced to appeal to the high court again, which will, please God, affirm, with clarity and force, the constitutional rights without which they cannot exist.

Oh, progressives, if you only had the wisdom to back off, to see your demands as maximalist, extreme, damaging to the fabric, the opposite of live and let live. When you push in this way to control the culture of the country, do you ever ask, “When I win, will there be a country left?”

Things are more fluid than they seem. That’s my impression of Washington right now. There’s something quiet going on, a mood shift.

Impeachment of course will happen. The House will support whatever charges are ultimately introduced because most Democrats think the president is not fully sane and at least somewhat criminal. Also they’re Democrats and he’s a Republican. The charges will involve some level of foreign-policy malfeasance.

The ultimate outcome depends on the Senate. It takes 67 votes to convict. Republicans control the Senate 53-47, and it is unlikely 20 of them will agree to remove a president of their own party. An acquittal is likely but not fated, because we live in the age of the unexpected.

Here are three reasons to think the situation is more fluid than we realize.

First, the president, confident of acquittal, has chosen this moment to let his inner crazy flourish daily and dramatically—the fights and meltdowns, the insults, the Erdogan letter. Just when the president needs to be enacting a certain stability he enacts its opposite. It is possible he doesn’t appreciate the jeopardy he’s in with impeachment bearing down; it is possible he knows and what behavioral discipline he has is wearing down.

The second is that the Republican leader of the Senate, Mitch McConnell, told his caucus this week to be prepared for a trial that will go six days a week and could last six to eight weeks. In September there had been talk the Senate might receive articles of impeachment and execute a quick, brief response—a short trial, or maybe a motion to dismiss. Mr. McConnell told CNBC then that the Senate would have “no choice” but to take up impeachment, but “how long you are on it is a different matter.” Now he sees the need for a major and lengthy undertaking. Part of the reason would be practical: He is blunting attack lines that the Republicans arrogantly refused to give impeachment the time it deserves. But his decision also gives room for the unexpected—big and serious charges that sweep public opinion and change senators’ votes. “There is a mood change in terms of how much they can tolerate,” said a former high Senate staffer. Senators never know day to day how bad things will get.

The third reason is the number of foreign-policy professionals who are not ducking testimony in the House but plan to testify or have already. Suppressed opposition to President Trump among foreign-service officers and others is busting out.

The president is daily eroding his position. His Syria decision was followed by wholly predictable tragedy; it may or may not have been eased by the announcement Thursday of a five-day cease-fire. Before that the House voted 354-60, including 129 Republicans, to rebuke the president. There was the crazy letter to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, which was alternately pleading (“You can make a great deal. . . . I will call you later”) and threatening (“I don’t want to be responsible for destroying the Turkish economy—and I will”).

There was the Cabinet Room meeting with congressional leaders, the insults hurled and the wildness of the photo that said it all—the angry president; Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the House, standing and pointing at him; and the head of Gen. Mark Milley, the new chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, bowed in—embarrassment? Horror? His was not the only bowed head.

The president soon tweeted about a constitutional officer of the U.S. House, who is third in line for the presidency: “Nancy Pelosi needs help fast! There is either something wrong with her ‘upstairs’ or she just plain doesn’t like our great Country. She had a total meltdown in the White House today. It was very sad to watch. Pray for her, she is a very sick person!”

As the Democratic leaders departed, he reportedly called out, “See you at the polls.” Mr. Trump is confident that he holds the cards here—he’s got the Senate, and the base of the party says all these issues should be worked out in the 2020 election. But he is seriously weakening his hand by how he acts.

That meeting will only fortify Mrs. Pelosi’s determination to impeach him.

The president tweeted out the picture of that meeting just as the White House made public the Erdogan letter—because they think it made the president look good. Which underscored the sense that he has no heavyweight advisers around him—the generals are gone, the competent fled, he’s careening around surrounded by second raters, opportunists, naifs and demoralized midlevel people who can’t believe what they’re seeing.

Again, everything depends on the quality and seriousness of the House hearings. Polling on impeachment has been fairly consistent, with Gallup reporting Thursday 52% supporting the president’s impeachment and removal.

Serious and dramatic hearings would move the needle on public opinion, tripping it into seriously negative territory for the president.

And if the needle moves, the Senate will move in the same direction.

But the subject matter will probably have to be bigger than the Ukraine phone call, which is not, as some have said, too complicated for the American people to understand, but easy to understand. An American ally needed money, and its new leader needed a meeting with the American president to bolster his position back home. It was made clear that the money and the meeting were contingent on the launching of a probe politically advantageous to Mr. Trump and disadvantageous to a possible 2020 rival.

Everyone gets it, most everyone believes it happened, no one approves of it—but it probably isn’t enough. People have absorbed it and know how they feel: It was Mr. Trump being gross. No news there.

Truly decisive testimony and information would have to be broader and deeper, bigger. Rudy Giuliani’s dealings with Ukraine? That seems an outgrowth of the original whistleblower charges, a screwy story with a cast of characters— Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, natives of Ukraine and Belarus, respectively, who make you think of Sen. Howard Baker’s question to the Watergate bagman Tony Ulasewicz: “Who thought you up?”

More important will be a text or subtext of serious and consistent foreign-policy malfeasance that the public comes to believe is an actual threat to national security. Something they experience as alarming.

It cannot be merely that the president holds different views and proceeds in different ways than the elites of both parties. It can’t look like “the blob” fighting back—fancy-pants establishment types, whose feathers have been ruffled by a muddy-booted Jacksonian, getting their revenge. It can’t look like the Deep State striking back at a president who threatened their corrupt ways.

It will have to be serious and sincere professionals who testify believably that the administration is corrupt and its corruption has harmed the country. The witnesses will have to seem motivated by a sense of duty to institutions and protectiveness toward their country.

And the hearings had better start to come across as an honest, good-faith effort in which Republican members of Congress are treated squarely and in line with previous protocols and traditions.

With all that the needle moves. Without it, it does not.

One thing I think I’ve correctly observed about the U.S. military in the 21st century is that its leaders tend to be the last to want to go to war and the last to want to leave it. Political figures operate under public pressures and shifting geopolitical needs and goals; they’re surrounded by people who see the world a certain way; they get revved up, and say, “Go, invade.” Top military staff have reservations. They’ve studied the area, know the realities, the history—they have doctorates in it—and don’t want to get into anything America can’t win cleanly, decisively, relatively quickly. They’re skeptics.

In the end the commander in chief makes the decision and they do their constitutional duty. Troops are deployed and perform. They dig in and fight, they’re professionals—they commit.

The political figures then decide after a few years—or decades—that it’s time to come home. Military leaders are skeptical again. They’ve been in this thing a while, they’re committed to the battle space, they’ve lost men, they know and care about their allies in the fight, they have a sharp sense of the repercussions of withdrawal. They want more time.

I suspect the current habit of skepticism springs in part from the military’s generations-long reckoning with Vietnam. You can see it in Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster’s influential 1997 book, “Dereliction of Duty.” “The war in Vietnam was not lost in the field, nor was it lost on the front pages of the New York Times,” Donald Trump’s second national security adviser writes. “It was lost in Washington, D.C.” Responsibility for the failure rested not only with President Lyndon B. Johnson and his civilian advisers but also his military advisers, particularly the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Between the lines Gen. McMaster was telling the current military: Don’t claim to see lights at the ends of tunnels when you don’t really see them, play it straight. Be forthcoming with political leaders—and the public—about “likely costs and consequences.”

Anyway, history is human. Military leaders have their ways and biases. But public military opposition to the president’s withdrawal of U.S. forces from northern Syria, after a Sunday telephone call with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, seems to me completely correct. Gen. John Allen, a retired Marine, said, “If we were going to draw a circle around a group of American troops who are more important right now to the stabilization of any place on the planet, it’s that thousand troops.” He said of Turkey’s incursion into Syria, “This is just chaos.” Retired Adm. James Stavridis said it will lead to the comeback of ISIS and embolden other U.S. adversaries. He noted that it’s some kind of policy that can unite, in opposition, Sens. Lindsey Graham and Bernie Sanders.

It is.

More compelling is what Jennifer Griffin, the respected national-security correspondent for Fox News, reported Wednesday night. She spoke to a “distraught” U.S. Special Forces soldier on the ground alongside the Kurdish forces that were about to be abandoned. “It was one of the hardest phone calls I have ever taken,” she tweeted. The soldier told her “I am ashamed for the first time in my career.” He said, “There was no threat to the Turks—none—from this side of the border.” The Kurds, who are guarding thousands of ISIS prisoners, had just prevented a prison break and were pleading for U.S. support. Without it, the soldier said, those detainees would likely soon be free. Of the president: “He doesn’t understand the problem. He doesn’t understand the repercussions to this.” “It’s a shame,” he added. “The Kurds are standing by us. No other partner I have ever dealt with would stand by us.”

I believe every word of this.

Why this decision? Why now?

To redeem a campaign pledge with another campaign looming? On impulse? What was behind the impulse? The president doesn’t seem to know much about the Kurds—that they’ve backed the U.S. since 2003 and fought ISIS since 2011. They have their reasons: They want their own state. But they are a gallant people, brave and sympathetic to the West.

The president, defending this decision, asked what we owe them. “They didn’t help us in the Second World War, at Normandy for example.”

Yes, I forgot. Reagan made that point in his Pointe du Hoc speech. He said, “Don’t forget to stick it to the Kurds for not showing up.” Oh wait, he didn’t say that, because he was quite the reader of history.

Mr. Trump, in defending his position, says he is against the “endless wars” that have marked the first two decades of this century. Fair and good, the right approach, he ran for president opposing them and Americans left and right agreed.

But there is too much craziness to the decision, both its substance and how it was made. The area has been functioning, the number of U.S. troops small and limited. Adm. Stavridis called it “a small investment with a big spring to it.”

The decision was done on the word of Mr. Erdogan, a particular kind of player—thuggish, duplicitous. He considers the Kurds on his border a security threat. He threatens to send Syrian refugees to Europe if European countries call his incursion an occupation. If they insult him like that, “We will open the gates and send 3.6 million refugees your way.”

Mr. Trump himself says if the ISIS terrorists the Kurds are holding in prison are freed or escape, no worry. “They’re going to be escaping to Europe,” he said. “They want to go back to their homes.”

That’s a viciously careless way to treat your allies. Who, by the way, were at Normandy.

Most unsettling was the president’s mad tweet assuring critics that his decision was right: “If Turkey does anything that I, in my great and unmatched wisdom, consider to be off limits, I will totally destroy and obliterate the Economy of Turkey (I’ve done before!).” This isn’t funny, it’s self-inflated nut stuff.

The president is misreading his base, which will have qualms. Their sons and daughters fought in the wars; they know who the Kurds are.

Why would he do such a dramatic, piercing thing at what is for him a dramatic, piercing moment, with impeachment looming and support for it rising in the polls? Why offend Republicans senators, whom the president needs to survive impeachment? Why give them an excuse to start peeling off?

Why give those of his supporters who are cable-news hacks an excuse to show some pride? I’m not a lackey, this is about principle, the president has made a misjudgment! Watch it, they could get in the habit of self-respect.

The Syria decision contributes to the hardened impression that in foreign policy he’s all impulse, blithely operating out of his depth. It adds to the hardening suspicion that in negotiations he’s not actually tough; he’ll say yes to a lot of things, and some very bad things, to get the deal, the photo-op, the triumphant handshake.

Foreign-policy decisions in this administration look like the ball in a pinball machine in some garish arcade with flashing lights and some frantic guy pushing the levers ping ping ping and thinking he’s winning.

We have grown used to the daily bedlam, the nonstop freak-out that is the Trump White House. Nevertheless it should be noted the president’s language and visage this week were especially wild. It’s “treason,” it’s “a coup,” it’s a “hoax” and a “fraud,” the whistleblower’s information came from “a leaker or a spy,” it’s a political “hack job,” it’s “bulls—.” He had a Travis Bickell moment—“You talkin’ to me?”—with Jeffrey Mason of Reuters. He’s careening around, growling and prowling like some preliterate King Lear. It’s a reality show about a reality you don’t want to be in.

The best description of him was low-key, from a former GOP congressional staffer: “The president is an unsettled person,” he said.

It is assumed the House will impeach the president. If that is so, how is the great question. If it is a straight party-line vote, if it’s shirts vs. skins, then the Democrats will have their victory in the House, quickly fail in the Senate, and not win in America.

This cannot be one party doing its one-party thing. I think Nancy Pelosi knows that.

The reason she did not put forward a formal resolution calling for an impeachment inquiry is said to be that she didn’t want to jeopardize her moderate members from districts that voted for Mr. Trump. There’s something in that, though a former member of Congress pointed out to me that most of the moderates aren’t all that vulnerable—they’re way ahead in fundraising; Mr. Trump didn’t win some of the districts by much; some don’t have opponents yet.

I suspect another reason Mrs. Pelosi didn’t call a vote is that she knew the outcome would have been completely down-the-line partisan: Dems on this side, Reps on that. And that wouldn’t look good. It would allow more than half the country to dismiss the effort as more party mischief.

Here is a very open question: Can House Democrats control themselves? Can they look like they’re not trying to kill their foe but trying to get the truth? I don’t know. There’s something about Democrats now that they seem embarrassed to reach out to Republicans, as if that’s not done by nice people.

Can they establish an air of earnestness and care, of fairness, of investigative depth?

Members of the investigating committees have to understand that in hearings they are not talking to the media, they are not talking to the Democratic base, and they are not talking to cable news. It’s not about the hot exchange with a witness or a dramatic sound bite. You’re talking to the American people. The impressions of fair-minded centrists and swing voters will be everything. And they will see right through your sound bites and Spartacus moments.

You won’t impress them that way. They will turn on you if you give them only showbiz.

Members of the committees really have to prove they’re operating in good faith. During the impeachment hearings for Richard Nixon you could honestly look at the Democrats and think: Most of them are trying to play it straight. It was still true of Republicans, though less so, in the Clinton impeachment.

But there’s a good-faith deficit in Congress now as it becomes more brutal and partisan. It leads to losing sight of the big picture, which is what is good for America.

For instance, the Democrats want access to more transcripts of the president’s phone calls with foreign leaders. That’s a dangerous area. Foreign leaders need to have confidence they can speak frankly and privately with a president. In a world crisis lacking that confidence could prove disastrous. Normal people would understand this right away, and not approve of irresponsible fishing.

Mrs. Pelosi keeps saying she’s moving forward more in sorrow than in anger and that she’s praying for the president. Maybe she’s overlarding it, but swing voters will see her calm in contrast to the president’s lunacy, and prefer it. Her members should be watching her.

She is also trying to wire this thing without the help of committee chairmen of conspicuous stature. Here we get to Adam Schiff, chairman of the Intelligence Committee. He is an intelligent, focused and strikingly partisan figure. He will be a face, maybe the face, of the impeachment hearings.

He has already stepped in it with his tendentious paraphrasing of Mr. Trump’s conversation with the president of Ukraine, a so-called parody that was bizarre, unserious, embarrassing. This was followed by reports he was misleading in denying prior knowledge of the whistleblower’s complaint.

Mr. Schiff’s weakness, at least in public, appears to be lack of judgment. You could see it last week in his questioning of the acting director of national intelligence.

Joseph Maguire had been on the job in this high-turnover administration for all of six weeks. He’s a serious looking guy, joined the Navy in 1974, was 33 years a Navy SEAL, rose to vice admiral. Speaking under oath he said, “I am not partisan and I am not political.” He’s from a long line of those who’ve served: “When I took my uniform off in July of 2010, it was the first time in 70 years that an immediate member of my family was not wearing the cloth of the nation.”

This guy is a citizen. He said he supports whistleblowing, that he got the whistleblower complaint a few weeks into his tenure, reviewed it, consulted with lawyers, tried to determine if the complaint was subject to executive privilege. The day before the hearing, the White House had released the transcript of the call, and he felt that allowed him to reveal the complaint, unredacted.

He said he believed the whistleblower and the inspector general did nothing wrong, did everything by the book. He believes this matter is “unprecedented.” Deeper in his testimony he said “I believe the whistleblower is operating in good faith,” and “I think the whistleblower did the right thing.” He expressed no skepticism at all.

It was pretty explosive!

Mr. Schiff didn’t see it for what it was and rise to the moment. He proceeded to beat Mr. Maguire around the head, grilling him and interrupting answers. You went to the White House. You told the president’s lawyers. Why didn’t you come to me sooner? He fixated on “sequencing” and “chronology.”

He seemed to miss the story totally and have no sense of how people at home would experience it. He was weirdly hostile.

I was watching at home like an American and thought: What’s wrong with you? The nation’s top spy, who appears thoroughly upstanding, is expressing no skepticism about a complaint that alleges his boss, the president, is kind of a bum.

How could you miss that? You’d have to be blinded. By what?

During Watergate there was a guy called Peter Rodino of New Jersey, head of the House Judiciary Committee—Democrat, Newark, pretty tough guy. He was no child, he was no naïf, he was a party man. But he was judicious and capable and ran his committee well. After it voted to impeach Nixon, he got on the phone with his wife and wept. “You know, he was our president,” he told Susan Stamberg of NPR in 1989.

That’s what the Democrats need, someone who’d be genuinely sad at taking out a president.