Peggy Noonan

We’re in a funny moment. Those who do politics for a living, some of them quite brilliant, are struggling to comprehend the central fact of the Republican primary race, while regular people have already absorbed what has happened and is happening. Journalists and politicos have been sharing schemes for how Marco parlays a victory out of winning nowhere, or Ted roars back, or Kasich has to finish second in Ohio. But in my experience any nonpolitical person on the street, when asked who will win, not only knows but gets a look as if you’re teasing him. Trump, they say.

I had such a conversation again Tuesday with a friend who repairs shoes in a shop on Lexington Avenue. Jimmy asked me, conversationally, what was going to happen. I deflected and asked who he thinks is going to win. “Troomp!” He’s a very nice man, an elderly, old-school Italian-American, but I saw impatience flick across his face: Aren’t you supposed to know these things?

In America now only normal people are capable of seeing the obvious.

But actually that’s been true for a while, and is how we got in the position we’re in.

Last October I wrote of the five stages of Trump, based on the Kübler-Ross stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. Most of the professionals I know are stuck somewhere between four and five.

But I keep thinking of how Donald Trump got to be the very likely Republican nominee. There are many answers and reasons, but my thoughts keep revolving around the idea of protection. It is a theme that has been something of a preoccupation in this space over the years, but I think I am seeing it now grow into an overall political dynamic throughout the West.

There are the protected and the unprotected. The protected make public policy. The unprotected live in it. The unprotected are starting to push back, powerfully.

The protected are the accomplished, the secure, the successful—those who have power or access to it. They are protected from much of the roughness of the world. More to the point, they are protected from the world they have created. Again, they make public policy and have for some time.

I want to call them the elite to load the rhetorical dice, but let’s stick with the protected.

They are figures in government, politics and media. They live in nice neighborhoods, safe ones. Their families function, their kids go to good schools, they’ve got some money. All of these things tend to isolate them, or provide buffers. Some of them—in Washington it is important officials in the executive branch or on the Hill; in Brussels, significant figures in the European Union—literally have their own security details.

Because they are protected they feel they can do pretty much anything, impose any reality. They’re insulated from many of the effects of their own decisions.

One issue obviously roiling the U.S. and Western Europe is immigration. It is the issue of the moment, a real and concrete one but also a symbolic one: It stands for all the distance between governments and their citizens.

It is of course the issue that made Donald Trump.

Britain will probably leave the European Union over it. In truth immigration is one front in that battle, but it is the most salient because of the European refugee crisis and the failure of the protected class to address it realistically and in a way that offers safety to the unprotected.

If you are an unprotected American—one with limited resources and negligible access to power—you have absorbed some lessons from the past 20 years’ experience of illegal immigration. You know the Democrats won’t protect you and the Republicans won’t help you. Both parties refused to control the border. The Republicans were afraid of being called illiberal, racist, of losing a demographic for a generation. The Democrats wanted to keep the issue alive to use it as a wedge against the Republicans and to establish themselves as owners of the Hispanic vote.

Many Americans suffered from illegal immigration—its impact on labor markets, financial costs, crime, the sense that the rule of law was collapsing. But the protected did fine—more workers at lower wages. No effect of illegal immigration was likely to hurt them personally.

It was good for the protected. But the unprotected watched and saw. They realized the protected were not looking out for them, and they inferred that they were not looking out for the country, either.

The unprotected came to think they owed the establishment—another word for the protected—nothing, no particular loyalty, no old allegiance.

Mr. Trump came from that.

Similarly in Europe, citizens on the ground in member nations came to see the EU apparatus as a racket—an elite that operated in splendid isolation, looking after its own while looking down on the people.

In Germany the incident that tipped public opinion against Chancellor Angela Merkel’s liberal refugee policy happened on New Year’s Eve in the public square of Cologne. Packs of men said to be recent migrants groped and molested groups of young women. It was called a clash of cultures, and it was that, but it was also wholly predictable if any policy maker had cared to think about it. And it was not the protected who were the victims—not a daughter of EU officials or members of the Bundestag. It was middle- and working-class girls—the unprotected, who didn’t even immediately protest what had happened to them. They must have understood that in the general scheme of things they’re nobodies.

What marks this political moment, in Europe and the U.S., is the rise of the unprotected. It is the rise of people who don’t have all that much against those who’ve been given many blessings and seem to believe they have them not because they’re fortunate but because they’re better.

You see the dynamic in many spheres. In Hollywood, as we still call it, where they make our rough culture, they are careful to protect their own children from its ill effects. In places with failing schools, they choose not to help them through the school liberation movement—charter schools, choice, etc.—because they fear to go up against the most reactionary professional group in America, the teachers unions. They let the public schools flounder. But their children go to the best private schools.

This is a terrible feature of our age—that we are governed by protected people who don’t seem to care that much about their unprotected fellow citizens.

And a country really can’t continue this way.

In wise governments the top is attentive to the realities of the lives of normal people, and careful about their anxieties. That’s more or less how America used to be. There didn’t seem to be so much distance between the top and the bottom.

Now is seems the attitude of the top half is: You’re on your own. Get with the program, little racist.

Social philosophers are always saying the underclass must re-moralize. Maybe it is the overclass that must re-moralize.

I don’t know if the protected see how serious this moment is, or their role in it.

What is happening in American politics?

We’re in the midst of a rebellion. The bottom and middle are pushing against the top. It’s a throwing off of old claims and it’s been going on for a while, but we’re seeing it more sharply after New Hampshire. This is not politics as usual, which by its nature is full of surprise. There’s something deep, suggestive, even epochal about what’s happening now.

I have thought for some time that there’s a kind of soft French Revolution going on in America, with the angry and blocked beginning to push hard against an oblivious elite. It is not only political. Yes, it is about the Democratic National Committee, that house of hacks, and about a Republican establishment owned by the donor class. But establishment journalism, which for eight months has been simultaneously at Donald Trump’s feet (“Of course you can call us on your cell from the bathtub for your Sunday show interview!”) and at his throat (“Trump supporters, many of whom are nativists and nationalists . . .”) is being rebelled against too. Their old standing as guides and gatekeepers? Gone, and not only because of multiplying platforms. Gloria Steinem thought she owned feminism, thought she was feminism. She doesn’t and isn’t. The Clintons thought they owned the party—they don’t. Hedge-funders thought they owned the GOP. Too bad they forgot to buy the base!

All this goes hand in hand with the general decline of America’s faith in its institutions. We feel less respect for almost all of them—the church, the professions, the presidency, the Supreme Court. The only formal national institution that continues to score high in terms of public respect (72% in the most recent Gallup poll) is the military.

A few years ago I gave a lecture to a class at West Point, the text of which was: You are entering the only U.S. institution left standing. Your prime responsibility throughout your careers will be to keep it respected. I then told them about the Dreyfus case. They had not heard of it. I explained how that scandal rocked public faith in a previously exalted institution, the French army, doing it and France lasting damage. And so your personal integrity is of the utmost importance, I said, as day by day that integrity creates the integrity of the military. The cadets actually listened to that part.

I mention this to say we are in a precarious position in the U.S. with so many of our institutions going down. Many of those pushing against the system have no idea how precarious it is or what they will be destroying. Those defending it don’t know how precarious its position is or even what they’re defending, or why. But people lose respect for a reason.

To New Hampshire: The rejection of the establishment’s preferred candidates in both major parties is a big moment. It is also understandable, the result of 15 years of failed presidencies. It is a gesture of rebuke toward the political class—move aside.

It’s said this is the year of anger but there’s a kind of grim practicality to Trump and Sanders supporters. They’re thinking: Let’s take a chance. Washington is incapable of reform or progress; it’s time to reach outside. Let’s take a chance on an old Brooklyn socialist. Let’s take a chance on the casino developer who talks on TV.

In doing so, they accept a decline in traditional political standards. You don’t have to have a history of political effectiveness anymore; you don’t even have to have run for office! “You’re so weirdly outside the system, you may be what the system needs.”

They are pouring their hope into uncertain vessels, and surely know it. Bernie Sanders is an actual radical: He would fundamentally change an economic system that imperfectly but for two centuries made America the wealthiest country in the history of the world. In the young his support is understandable: They have never been taught anything good about capitalism and in their lifetimes have seen it do nothing—nothing—to protect its own reputation.

It is middle-aged Sanders supporters who are more interesting. They know what they’re turning their backs on. They know they’re throwing in the towel. My guess is they’re thinking something like: Don’t aim for great now, aim for safe. Terrorism, a world turning upside down, my kids won’t have it better—let’s just try to be safe, more communal.

A shrewdness in Sanders and Trump backers: They share one faith in Washington, and that is in its ability to wear anything down. They think it will moderate Bernie, take the edges off Trump. For thus reason they don’t see their choices as so radical.

As for Mr. Trump, it is not without meaning that his supporters have had eight months to measure the cost of satisfying their anger by voting for him. In New Hampshire, 35% of the electorate decided that for all his drama and uncertainty they would back him.

The mainstream journalistic mantra is that the GOP is succumbing to nativism, nationalism and the culture of celebrity. That allows them to avoid taking seriously Mr. Trump’s issues: illegal immigration and Washington’s 15-year, bipartisan refusal to stop it; political correctness and how it is strangling a free people; and trade policies that have left the American working class displaced, adrift and denigrated. Mr. Trump’s popularity is propelled by those issues and enabled by his celebrity.

In winning, Donald Trump threw over the GOP donor class. Political professionals don’t fully appreciate that, but normal Americans see it. They get that the guy with money just slapped silly the guys with money. Every hedge-fund billionaire donor should be blinking in pain. Some investment!

This leads me to Citizens United. Conservatives applauded that Supreme Court decision because it allowed Republicans to counter the effect of union money that goes to Democrats. But Citizens United gave the rich too much sway in the GOP. The party was better off when it relied on Main Street. It meant they had to talk to Main Street.

Mr. Trump is a clever man with his finger on the pulse, but his political future depends on two big questions. The first is: Is he at all a good man? Underneath the foul mouthed flamboyance is he in it for America? The second: Is he fully stable? He acts like a nut, calling people bimbos, flying off the handle with grievances. Is he mature, reliable? Is he at all a steady hand?

Political professionals think these are side questions. “Let’s accuse him of not being conservative!” But they are the issue. Because America doesn’t deliberately elect people it thinks base, not to mention crazy.

Anyway, we are in some kind of moment. Congratulations to the establishments of both parties for getting us here. They are the authors of the rebellion; they are a prime thing being rebelled against.

Connected to that, something I’ve noticed. In Washington there used to be a widespread cliché: “God protects drunks, children and the United States of America.” I’m in Washington a lot, and I’ve noticed no one says that anymore. They stopped 10 or 15 years ago. I wonder what that means.

The president has every right to nominate a successor to Justice Antonin Scalia. He shouldn’t, but he has the right by law and precedent.

The reasons he shouldn’t spring from facts particular to the moment and having to do with what Justice Scalia symbolized.

In a 50/50 country, one that suffers deep ideological divisions and is constantly at its own throat, Justice Scalia stood, for that half of the country that is more or less conservative, for wisdom, permanence, enduring structures and understandings. That he was brilliant, witty and penetrating in his thought goes without saying. He was also brave, with that exhausting kind of courage that has to do with swimming each day against the tide. Here is Justice Scalia as prophet, dissenting in 1992’s sweeping abortion decision, Planned Parenthood v Casey: “Its length, and what might be called its epic tone, suggest that its authors believe they are bringing to an end a troublesome era in the history of our Nation and of our Court. . . . [But] by foreclosing all democratic outlet for the deep passions this issue arouses, by banishing the issue from the political forum that gives all participants, even the losers, the satisfaction of a fair hearing and an honest fight, by continuing the imposition of a rigid national rule instead of allowing for regional differences, the Court merely prolongs and intensifies the anguish.”

It did; it has.

Here is the end of his dissent in Obergefell v. Hodges, the 2015 decision on same-sex marriage: “Hubris is sometimes defined as o’erweening pride; and pride, we know, goeth before a fall. . . . With each decision of ours that takes from the People a question properly left to them—with each decision that is unabashedly based not on law, but on the ‘reasoned judgment’ of a bare majority of this Court—we move one step closer to being reminded of our impotence.”

By “we” he meant the people, not the court.

Conservatives—again, half the country, maybe more—took succor from his bracing 30-year presence on the bench. The country, and the court too, benefited: With his fierce dissents Scalia helped people accept decisions with which they disagreed. At least our view was spoken. At least it’s respected by someone!

Our divided country has been stumbling along for decades with a split court. We have grown used to the phrase, “In a 5-4 decision.” Half the country probably thinks high-court decisions are by definition 5-4.

The court in our time has both expanded its role and loosened its intellectual standards. It pronounces now on every facet of life in America—on our religious life, on abortion and marriage, on guns and immigration. At the same time members of the court have grown used to approaching issues based on their personal vision of what is desirable public policy. Scalia famously didn’t think his preferences were the issue; what the law says is the issue.

Justice is supposed to be blind, impartial. It is not supposed to be about politics and brute power. But we all know that is what it is now about. As Hugh Hewitt wrote this week in the Washington Examiner, the court “has assumed power never intended it by the Framers, but it is what it is and there is no going back.”

Which is why the issue of Scalia’s replacement is so consequential.

When the court is roughly balanced, 5-4, the public is allowed to assume some rough approximation of justice will occur—that something that looks like justice will be handed down. There will be chafing and disappointments. ObamaCare will be upheld. Yay! Boo! Gay marriage will be instituted across the land. Yay! Boo!

The closeness of the vote suggests both sides got heard. The closeness contributes to an air of credibility. That credibility helps people accept the court’s rulings.

When the balance of the court tips too much one way, it invites people to see injustice and bully politics. It invites unease and protest.

That in turn will produce another crack in the system—and in public respect for the system. This divided nation does not need more cracks and strains.

What to do? The closest you can come to public peace in resolving the question of Scalia’s replacement is to take a step wholly unusual, even unprecedented, and let the American people make the decision themselves, this year, with their 2016 presidential vote.

Maybe that election will produce a progressive Democratic president. That president will choose as progressive a nominee as the Senate will accept.

Maybe that election will produce a conservative Republican president. That president will choose as conservative a nominee as the Senate will accept.

Either way half the country will be half happy, half unhappy, but the country will have chosen. That they made the decision will allow people to accept the outcome more easily—either a real change in the ideological makeup of the court, or a court whose rough and not always predictable balance has been preserved.

We take a swerve or stay where we are. But it will be the people who swerved or stayed.

For President Obama to leave the Scalia replacement to the next president would be an act of prudence and democratic courtesy. He of course says he will put a nominee forward. What a thing it would be if he changed his mind.

The Republican Senate has every right by law and precedent to block his nominee. They moved quickly after Scalia’s death, and with startling unanimity, to announce they would do so. This had the virtue of clarity and the defect of aggression. Still, their ultimate stand is right.

It should be noted there’s no reason to believe leaving it to the people will guarantee conservative outcomes.

I close with a thought about an aspect of modern leftism that is part of the context here.

There is something increasingly unappeasable in the left. This is something conservatives and others have come to fear, that progressives now accept no limits. We can’t just have court-ordered legalized abortion across the land, we have to have it up to the point of birth, and taxpayers have to pay for it. It’s not enough to win same-sex marriage, you’ve got to personally approve of it and if you publicly resist you’ll be ruined. It’s not enough that we have publicly funded contraceptives, the nuns have to provide them.

This unappeasable spirit always turns to the courts to have its way.

If progressives were wise they would step back, accept their victories, take a breath and turn to the idea of solidifying gains, of heroic patience, of being peaceable.

Don’t make them bake the cake. Don’t make them accept the progressive replacement for Scalia. Leave the nuns alone.

Progressives have no idea how fragile it all is. That’s why they feel free to be unappeasable. They don’t know what they’re grinding down.

They think America has endless give. But America is composed of humans, and they do not have endless give.

Isn’t that what we’re seeing this year in the political realm? That they don’t have endless give? And we’ll be seeing more of it.

You’ve heard all the Iowa analysis you need. It was a triumph for Cruz, a humbling for Trump, a boost for Rubio. We’re all tired of talking about lanes, outsiders and establishment candidates. My read: Marco Rubio may emerge as the choice of those who prefer their candidate not be abnormal, by which I mean outsized or unsettling. This is arguably an underserved market on the GOP side. Mr. Rubio is young. What’s in that noggin beyond hunger? It will be interesting to find out.

Rick Santorum suspended his campaign. He didn’t catch on but was generally held in high regard. When voters think you’re a good guy but not the winner, they see to it that you leave as a good guy who’s not the winner. He seemed to me one of the Republicans most attuned to the shifting political moment—one who knows that certain old assumptions about the base no longer apply and maybe haven’t for some time. He did not emphasize traditional GOP themes of competition, opportunity, individualism. His concerns were more implicitly communal. Raise the minimum wage? Sure, help where you can. Of the candidates he seemed to have most absorbed Pope Francis’s Great Insight: that the modern world is a field hospital after battle. So in many ways is America 2016. John Kasich knows it also. He didn’t discover drug addiction and mental health issues by reading a long takeout in a magazine. He knows it because he lives with the people of Ohio.

Donald Trump was dinged by Iowa, but not by losing—loss happens. He dinged himself, perhaps significantly, with his subsequent reaction. He was robbed, we need a recount, he may sue. Mr. Trump’s supporters are derided as working-class knuckle-draggers and if it amuses you to see them that way you can, but his people respect style. There he let them down.

In politics—in life—you have to know how to lose. The presidency itself involves losing—the bill fails, the talks stall, your numbers plummet. You have to be supple, have some give. “All political careers end in failure”—you never get all you want and in the end you slink away or get thrown out. How to respond? You don’t whine, you don’t complain, you don’t act like a little rhymes-with-witch. You take it full in the face and keep walking. Anyone can win with style. A real champ knows how to lose.

The press is dying to write their “End of Trump” pieces and will if he underperforms in New Hampshire, where he’s long held a double-digit lead.

On the Democratic side, Hillary Clinton did not “win” Iowa; she had a near-death experience and emerged intact. In October she was winning by 41 points. Monday she effectively tied Bernie Sanders. She is now trying to limit the size of his expected New Hampshire victory.

She has been game and alert, especially Wednesday night in a town-hall interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper. But the effect was marred by her answers on Goldman Sachs and the six-figure speech fees they paid her. Why so much? “I don’t know, um, that’s what they offered.” She added that at the time she didn’t know she would be running for president. It was reminiscent of Dan Quayle telling reporters in 1988 that yes he got into the National Guard and didn’t go to Vietnam, but when he made the decision, “I did not know . . . that I would be in this room today, I confess.” If he’d known of the future political necessity, this suggested, he would have gone to the stupid damn war. All the smart people who say Mr. Sanders cannot possibly beat Mrs. Clinton as the battle moves south are no doubt correct—and yet he is more in tune with the motivating spirit of his party right now than she is, so who knows?

A final small thing, though it’s really my headline regarding New Hampshire. On a recent trip I watched candidates in town halls and forums in middle-school gyms, community clubhouses, hotel ballrooms.

I keep thinking of the young woman, black, about 20, I saw departing a Sanders event with a friendly young Asian man the same age. Are you for Bernie? I asked. “Have you seen my T-shirt?” she replied, and opened her jacket: “Carson 2016.” I laughed and asked if she was trolling. She was startled. “No, we just go see all the candidates.”

This of course is a great New Hampshire cliché—they won’t vote for you unless they’ve met you three times. Yet when you see it, something stops you. Every adult in New Hampshire seems to go hear every candidate at least once. They listen and take their measure; they give it the most precious thing they have, time. They take their duty seriously not because they’re jerky and self-important but because they have self-respect. They believe they are the winnowers. Their function is to get the Reasonable Possibles, put down a marker on their favorite, and then throw it to the South.

At the meetings they don’t ask meek, deferential questions. I saw them lecture candidates, mildly upbraid them, inform them. At a Kasich town hall he was put through his paces on the integrity of state water reservoirs. At a Hillary rally she was pressed on protocols governing the U.S. nuclear arsenal. At a Jeb town hall a woman spoke of Iraq and said if the people who launched that war had known history they wouldn’t have gone in. What, she asked him, is the difference between a Shiite and a Sunni? Mr. Bush gave a brief, broadly accurate answer. “You’re partially right,” she said, and then delivered a precise lecture on the history of Islam, ending with the observation that if American policy makers really knew history they wouldn’t be throwing around phrases like “carpet bomb.”

They have complete democratic confidence. They’re not shy. They’re doing due diligence.

I would look at them in the audience: the frail old lady with thin white hair; the big, rough biker-looking guy; the pleasant middle-aged teacher; the silver-haired accountant with two young kids; the beat-up middle-aged woman with rheumy alcoholic eyes who is sweetly gracious, modest, as she moves to give you a seat; the obese, wild-haired man bursting out of his torn, cracked leather jacket; the giggly, chatty middle-aged redhead in the NoLabels.org sweatshirt; the Patti Smith-looking woman, tall, pale and austere; the hunky football player; the skinny hipster girl in architect eyeglasses and torn jeans. Everybody listening so closely to the candidates. Beret guy, too, with a white bandage on his eye and a beard that went down to the third button of his shirt. What a crew we are.

“They’re professional voters,” said a campaign operative at dinner. No, it is more than that. It is more like, “We may be a field hospital, we may be high, we may be damaged by the collapse of the American culture, we may be the prime victims of deindustrialization, but we are: citizens. And we do our job.”

“We will pick a president.”

Choked me up as I witnessed it. No joke. Choked me up.

Sarah Palin’s public performances continue to be distinctive. Her endorsement of Donald Trump was less speech than podium jazz scat, with some early Elvis thrown in. “Trump’s candidacy, it has exposed not just that tragic, the ramifications of that betrayal of a transformation of our country, but too, he has exposed the complicity on both sides of the aisle that has enabled it, okay?” Essentially: Bee-bop-a-lula he’s my baby. She was scattered, rambly; at moments she foraged through her notes in a way that was almost endearing, looking for lines that would connect and explode. But it’s not as interesting as it used to be because it’s not new.

If you’re in the mood for irony, here’s one. The great foes of Sarah Palin now are the people who made her a national figure in 2008, defended her and attacked her critics. It is the GOP establishment that now most furiously disses and denigrates her. Everything has switched around in the GOP the past eight years. It is a world turned upside down.

In the short term her endorsement is said to help in Iowa. It would have helped Ted Cruz if she’d chosen him, because for the first time it would have drawn a line, for some people, between real conservatives and Mr. Trump. So it’s good for Mr. Trump she’s off the table and on his side. But in the long run it’s probably a wash. Mrs. Palin brings her own mad excitement, but at this point she sort of helps you with people who already like you and hurts you with people who already don’t.

She may become a distraction from Mr. Trump’s daily appearances and statements, which will probably get on his nerves. I wonder if his people are already telling her: Thanks, you’ve done exactly what we wanted and you can go home now. She won’t want to—this is her comeback tour. If she stays on the stump Mr. Trump’s people may ask her to stay on message. She’s heard that before. She was invented by an establishment playing Dr. Frankenstein; the monster could turn on Dr. Trumpenstein too.

The clever thing she did in her remarks was to bring up Phyllis Schlafly, still a generally uncredited force in the making of modern conservatism and a brave woman. Mrs. Schlafly supports Mr. Trump because she believes the conservative thing to do about a rotting edifice—the Washington political establishment—is to tear it down. Mr. Trump will “defeat the king-makers,” Mrs. Schlafly told Breitbart.com. I’d note that for those who admire the conservative philosopher-statesman Edmund Burke, this sounds radically at odds with his frequent counsel of restraint and respect for history.

But Mrs. Schlafly’s view, too, has Burkean antecedents. When he thought something so corrupt as to be destructive of British character and national life, he went at it root and branch, as he did with the East India Company, which existed at the heart of and was a symbol of the British establishment. He challenged imperial practices, which is to say imperial corruptions. The point here, again, is that what is at issue in the party right now is not the end of conservatism but what a conservative approach would consist of at this point in history.

What Mr. Trump really needs is to be endorsed not by Mrs. Palin but by a political figure with stature, some sane member or members or administrations past who could lend him credibility. He needs a gravitas injection. Trumpism suffers among its critics for a reputation for intellectual carelessness—it’s all political joyriding. Mrs. Palin’s presence does nothing to knock that criticism down, and in fact underscores it.

To a larger point. Eventually in this campaign some candidate is going to have to address Donald Trump and his rise in a thoughtful, serious way. The obvious one is Jeb Bush, by virtue of his name and its association with the way the party used to be—the old, orderly conservatism. Why doesn’t he do it? He insults Mr. Trump—“a jerk,” “unhinged.” He told the Journal’s Mary Kissel this week: “Donald Trump’s not a serious candidate.” Mr. Bush uncorks witless, prefab soundbites: Mr. Trump is a “chaos candidate.” What does that even mean? Mr. Trump’s burly supporters wouldn’t mind a little disruption, an exploding of the elites—that is, chaos.

Why not make a serious argument? Jeb especially has little to lose—Mr. Trump’s people will never like him—and, potentially, much to gain in terms of his own standing.

Here’s where he could start:

What is Trumpism? Define it.

What’s wrong with Trumpism? Tell us. Is it a threat? To what?

Is it an attitude and not a plan? In a country split down the middle between leftish and rightish, why would it be harmful to have a new category?

If Mr. Trump is not a conservative, why is that bad? That is, what’s good about conservatism? Why is it pertinent and necessary? If the GOP base is a big, broad jumble that includes people reliant on entitlements who also see progressive social ambitions as destructive to the nation, how does conservatism speak to them?

What do you imagine a Trump presidency would look like? His supporters think he’ll go in there and clean out the stables. Would he? Could he? Can you?

What’s wrong with a little disorder? Does Trumpism enliven our political life with zest and unpredictability, or does it diminish our political life with unthinking emotionalism and shallowness?

Why is it important that a president have previous governmental experience? (Here I will add that I have seen longtime officeholders start out with fire and idealism, only in time to learn too well what isn’t possible. “We can’t get that through.” “We lost on that one last time.” They quietly give up; their sense of reality becomes a lethargic pessimism. Mr. Trump, new to political office, would not know what’s impossible. Leaders like that, if they also have talent, wisdom, popularity and organization, can occasionally make the impossible happen. Is it worth the chance?)

Most important, did Mr. Trump come from nowhere? Did the GOP establishment make any mistakes the past 15 years? If so, how can the damage be repaired? Was the Republican elite, like the Democratic one, essentially uninterested in the eroding power and position of the American working class? Were GOP leaders insensitive, cynical and selfish regarding public disapproval of and anxieties about illegal immigration?

What do you see when you look at Trumpism? Aside from what Robert Oppenheimer saw when the bomb exploded: “I am become death, destroyer of worlds.” Is Trumpism in part a hopeful tendency, or just a throwing in of the towel?

Imagine such a speech—a serious, respectful, historically grounded one.

And why not? History is serious. It isn’t just the beeps and bops of daily events in a political year, it has to do with major outcomes in the life of a people. This moment is part of the political history of the United States.

Have some imagination! Sarah Palin just entered the picture. This will make people hungrier than ever for thoughtful, candid, sober reflection. Someone has to be as big as history.

This isn’t what the column’s about, but should be said: It was strange Tuesday night to see the Republican chosen to give the State of the Union response go after the front-runner in her party’s presidential primary. But then this is a strange year. South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley said that during “anxious times,” the party should not follow “the angriest voices.” She didn’t name Donald Trump but later said her remark was “partially” aimed at him.

It was equally strange to see Ms. Haley so bitterly criticized afterward by Trump’s supporters. Ann Coulter tweeted: “Trump should deport Nikki Haley.” (The governor is the U.S.-born daughter of immigrants from India.) Some oafish congressman said Ms. Haley is insufficiently conservative but at least “beautiful.”

Here’s why the criticisms are strange. Ms. Haley has every right to her reasonable and mildly stated views. Mr. Trump is no victim—he dishes it out, he can take it. And Ms. Haley is a popular, moderate-conservative woman who is a successful two-term governor. Do Republicans not realize they need more such women, who put up with a great deal and deserve respect, and that for years as a party they’ve had a woman problem? More immediately, do they not realize it is good to have a sunny, well-balanced woman as the momentary face of their party? The other faces, the presidential contenders, are running around like rabid squirrels throwing nuts at each other in the dark. It’s not a good look. In appearing to be and acting like a normal human being, Ms. Haley did more for the party in 20 minutes than they have in two months. So go Nikki

With one caveat. She later revealed that, like an obedient person not quite in tune with the spirit of the times, she had cleared her remarks with Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell. Ugh. Never clear your work with the guys in Washington, and if they tell you that’s the price of making the speech, don’t make it—and tell people why. Clear your thoughts with no one, like a classy independent woman.

What this column is about starts with how Hillary Clinton and Ted Cruz have both recently learned the same two lessons. The first is that it is not at all pleasant to face a competitor who’s as tough and mean as you are. In each case that competitor is Donald Trump.

For Mr. Cruz the lesson hit home with the damage, however small or significant, caused by Mr. Trump’s putting forward the issue of Mr. Cruz’s constitutional eligibility, due to birth in Canada, for the presidency. Mr. Trump was particularly devilish: He didn’t insist Mr. Cruz was ineligible but simply said, with an air of mock concern, that a President Cruz could bog the country down in years of court challenges. This was primo Doubt-Casting, aimed at giving potential Cruz supporters reservations.

As for Mrs. Clinton, she has clearly been rattled by Mr. Trump’s merciless resurrection of her alleged complicity in the sometimes brutal handling of women involved in her husband’s dramas. This reminds everyone of—and introduces young voters, who were children during the Gennifer Flowers through Monica Lewinsky stories to—the whole sordid underside of Clintonism. Mrs. Clinton clearly wasn’t expecting it, and she bobbled. She has never gone up against a competitor like Mr. Trump.

The second thing she and Mr. Cruz are both learning, I suspect, is something most people learn by their 20s: It matters what people think of you. It’s important that people have a high opinion of your essential integrity, trustworthiness and good faith. It matters that they like you. Mr. Cruz, when challenged by Mr. Trump, could have used some backup from prominent Republicans, but they didn’t throw him a lifeline. John McCain: “I am not a constitutional scholar on that, but I think it’s worth looking into.” You know why Mr. Cruz had no backup? Because almost no one who works with him likes him. They haven’t experienced him as a trustworthy person of good faith. They waited, as people do, for a chance to hurt him, and when they got it they did.

Mrs. Clinton’s reputational problems are evident in this week’s polls. On Tuesday, Monmouth University had her trailing Bernie Sanders by 14 points in New Hampshire. Quinnipiac had her down by five in Iowa. The Des Moines Register poll has her ahead there, but by only two points. The caucus is still two weeks away, but if Mrs. Clinton’s campaign isn’t sinking, it’s obviously struggling.

Democrats who like her all say the same thing: She’s having trouble because she’s not really good at campaigning. That’s true as far as it goes. She is especially poor at the podium, where, when she wants to emphasize an applause line, her voice becomes loud, flat and harassing to the ear. She lately reminds me of the landlady yelling up the stairs that your kids left their bikes in the hall again. Literally that’s how it sounds: “And we won’t let them roll back the progress we’ve made. Your kids left their bikes in the hall.”

But a lack of talent isn’t all of it. Bernie Sanders isn’t all of it either. His appeal has three parts. The first is ideology. Barack Obama’s party has become a more leftist one, and Mr. Sanders’s leftism is sincere, long-standing, and has a kind of clarity to it, a lucid crudeness. He’ll break up the banks and make Wall Street bleed. The second is antipathy to Mrs. Clinton, even a lack of the old affection. I’m not seeing the fervor for her one saw in 2008. Where is the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pantsuit? The third appears to be affection for Bernie—the underdog, the guy who doesn’t have a machine, who genuinely seems to hold the views he claims to hold. Even I like him. He’s like some old guy in Clifford Odets’s “Awake and Sing!”: “I’ve got the answer, it’s in this book by Karl Marx!”

The real problem for Mrs. Clinton is that so many people do not find her to be a person of reliable integrity. It’s not more complicated than that, really—her character is not admired. It’s all in the polls. In August, a Quinnipiac poll had 61% of respondents saying they do not consider her honest and trustworthy. In October, Quinnipiac reported that swing-state voters regarded her as the least trustworthy of all the candidates, in both parties.

After 23 years at the highest levels of public life, Mrs. Clinton has become encrusted by scandal, from her part in her husband’s dramas straight through to Benghazi, the Clinton Foundation and the emails, in connection with which she may be indicted. She brings scandal with her, always has. I would be surprised if many people were not thinking: “Do we really want to go back to all that again, knowing it never ends, knowing there will be another scandal, that all we have to do is wait?”

Maybe she’ll gut it out. But maybe it’s like 2008 again, a reverse Sally Field: They don’t like me, they really don’t like me.

What everyone’s waiting for is the winnowing. New Hampshire and Iowa will force some Republican candidates out. When we know who’s still in we’ll have a surer sense of the contours of the race.

It is still true that the party has never had a year like this, with the ground shifting beneath its feet. It’s hard to see this clearly because on the surface the things you expect to see happening are happening.

The candidates are starting to throw hard punches. They’re all trying to show they can float like a butterfly and sting like a bee—a necessary talent if you make it to the general election. No point in hand-wringing or telling them to stop on the grounds that what they’re doing will produce, for the Democrats, a badly bloodied GOP nominee.

Best and worst have come from Chris Christie, who has a way of keeping things lively. Earlier he counseled his fellow contenders not to savage each other—don’t waste your ammo, keep your eyes on the prize. Good advice. This week Marco Rubio’s PAC unloaded a spot slamming Mr. Christie on the old charge he embraced President Obama during Hurricane Sandy. The governor answered Wednesday on Laura Ingraham’s radio show. He called Mr. Rubio “a first-term United States senator who has never had a tough race.” He continued: “This guy’s been spoon-fed every victory he’s ever had in his life. That’s the kind of person that we want to put on stage against Hillary Clinton? I don’t think so. She’ll pat him on the head and then cut his heart out.” It was wonderfully colorful and malicious and reminded me of Sen. Bob Kerrey, who said of Bill Clinton in 1992 that he wouldn’t win in November because he hadn’t served in Vietnam: “He’s going to get opened up like a soft peanut.”

Democratic presidential primaries in those days were fierce. They’re not anymore, because the new Democratic Party, the one of the progressive left, has only a single unifying principle: winning. Hillary Clinton’s opponents haven’t laid a glove on her, and won’t.

Mr. Rubio has turned stern and indignant, as if he’s decided the base is angry so he’ll enact anger too. Ted Cruz and Rand Paul, he darkly alleges, are “isolationist candidates” whose intent is “weakening our military and intelligence capabilities.” Mr. Paul responded by comparing Mr. Rubio to Rahm Emanuel.

More touchingly, Jeb Bush again warned the base about Donald Trump. “It’s very fun to talk about the theatrics,” he said on “Morning Joe.” Mr. Trump has tapped into “angst and anger,” but “his views are not the views of a conservative.”

Mr. Trump’s supporters don’t care if he’s classically conservative. Doctrinal purity is not the story this year. The GOP base is a big jumble.

Democrats are likely less unified than they think. On the rightward and leftward edges of both parties they hate political correctness, illegal immigration, Wall Street.

A new playbook is emerging while some contenders seem to be reading from the old playbook and wondering why the plays they’re calling aren’t working.

And the GOP is struggling. In Virginia the state Republican Party wants a so-called loyalty oath in the March 1 presidential primary. Virginia is an open-primary state—any registered voter can vote in either primary—but the GOP apparently wants to discourage independents and Democrats from voting for Mr. Trump. So they’ve decided voters should sign a statement of affiliation with the GOP before they get to cast a ballot. This is so idiotic it’s almost unbelievable. When Democrats and independents want to vote in your primary you should be happy. Politics is a game of addition! You want headlines that say “Massive GOP Turnout.” You don’t greet first-time voters with an oath but with cookies, ginger ale and balloons. Ronald Reagan reached out to Democrats in 1984: “Come too, come walk with me.” We still speak of Reagan Democrats.

I do not understand the inability or refusal of Republican leaders to take Mr. Trump seriously. They take his numbers seriously—they can read a poll—but they think, as Mr. Bush said, that his support is all about anger, angst and theatrics. That’s part of the story, but the other, more consequential part has to do with real policy issues. The establishment refuses to see that, because to admit it is to implicate themselves and their leadership. Political consultants can’t see it because they don’t think issues matter—not to them and certainly not to the dumb voters.

But issues do matter, and Mr. Trump has functioned this year not as a great communicator or great compromiser but as the great disrupter. He brags that he has brought up great questions and forced other candidates to face them and sometimes change their stands—and he has. He changed the debate on illegal immigration. He said he’d build a wall and close the border and as the months passed and his competitors saw his surge, they too were suddenly, clearly, aggressively for ending illegal immigration.

Mr. Trump touched an important nerve in opposing the political correctness that has angered the American people for a quarter century. He changed the debate when he asked for a pause in Muslim immigration until America “can figure out what’s going on.” In the age of terror, that looked suspiciously like common sense. Americans do not want America to become what Europe is becoming.

You only have to look at what is reported to have happened in Cologne, Germany, on New Year’s Eve to get a sense that Europe’s establishment, with its politically correct thinking, is losing control. Angela Merkel is a great lady and most of her leadership has been sound as a drum, but she will probably lose her job eventually because of her epic miscalculation in accepting more than a million Middle Eastern refugees.

Her decision was no doubt driven by heart and sympathy, but it reminds me of the fall of Margaret Thatcher. In 1989 Thatcher moved to impose a change in the British tax system. This caused resentment and then unrest. She wouldn’t back down, and the next year she fell. Years later she told me what she’d learned. People are afraid, she said; they live closer to the margins than we understand. When you propose a big change you can leave people feeling as if the rug is being pulled from under them. That’s a big thing to learn, and she spoke of it with humility.

She lost her job by being too tough. Ms. Merkel has imperiled hers by being too soft. But the lesson is the same: know how close to the edge people feel, how powerless, and respect their anxiety. Don’t look down on it, and them.

Back to the Republicans. It reflects badly on the party that Donald Trump—whom one journalist this week characterized as a guy running around with his hair on fire—had to become the party’s 2016 thought leader.

Bernie Sanders has, in a way, had the wit to see this, which is why he said he is reaching out to Trump supporters.

Reaching out. What a concept.

In 2016—soon, in just about a month—we’ll find out if Donald Trump voters vote. They say they’re voters and not just rally-goers. In Iowa on Feb. 1 and New Hampshire on Feb. 9, we’ll know if it’s a movement or a moment.

We are going to learn a lot pretty quickly.

In the next few months we’ll find out who emerges as the not-Trump, or not-Trumps. We’ll see a battle. If it is not resolved we’ll have a clearer sense of whether this thing is going to go to the floor of the convention in Cleveland in July. In Washington, what we sloppily but handily call the GOP establishment refers to this possibility as a “brokered convention.” They do this because they think they’ll be the brokers. Will they? Or will they be combatants? If it gets to the floor the correct term will be “open convention,” in the Katie-bar-the-door sense of wild and woolly.

If at some point Mr. Trump appears to be on a sure glide path to the nomination, will the party establishment begin to bolt? If so, what will that look like? If Mr. Trump is done in and his supporters perceive it as the dark work of an underhanded establishment, will they bolt? What will that look like? Will it mean they go home, stay there and refuse to come out in November? Or will they mount a third party with Mr. Trump, having changed his mind once again, at the top? If that happened—here the unknowables and the potential for drama begin to spin out in creative and unexpected directions—could each of three parties garner enough support to produce an Electoral College deadlock? That would be resolved by the House, where Republicans will likely continue to control the majority of state delegations. Would GOP representatives go for the establishment Republican or the third-party Republican?

I have not seen a political cycle so confounding in my lifetime, and it could continue into a year of the most historic kind. If you love politics—the excitement, the unknowability, the to-and-fro—this is the year for you. If you take unhappy U.S. political trends seriously—the shallowness, the restiveness, the division of our polity—you will feel legitimate concern.

We could see a great party split in two. That, I think, is what I’m seeing among the Republicans, a slow-motion break. The question is whether it will play out over the next few cycles or turn abrupt and fiery in this one. Some in Washington speak giddily of the prospect, wondering aloud if the new party’s logo should be a lion or a gazelle. But America’s two-party system has reigned almost since its beginning, and it has kept us from much woe. It has provided stability, reliability and, yes, progress. The breaking or splintering of one of those parties would be an epochal event. Ross Perot in the 1990s was a one-off; the party soon enough healed back into one. Mr. Trump may be a one-off, but the divisions he’s revealed—on how on-the-ground and unprotected people feel about illegal immigration, on the deeper and more dangerous implications of political correctness, on a host of economic and cultural issues—will not, I suspect, be resolved so easily.

If the GOP breaks it will be bitter. The establishment thinks they are saving the party from the vandals—from Trumpian know-nothingism. But Republicans on the ground think those in the establishment were the vandals, with their open borders, donor-class interests and social liberalism.

The distance between the top of the party and the bottom has been growing for years, at least since 2008. The bonds between the two have stretched and stretched, and this year they began to snap. That’s the story of the year, that the snapping became obvious. Mr. Trump and the Trumps of the future are the result, not the cause. The establishment does not see this. They think it’s about him. It’s about them.

Finally, briefly and befitting an end-of-year column, what did I get right and wrong in 2015?

A year ago I said Mitt Romney should not run. “This is a moment in history that demands superior political gifts. . . . Mitt Romney does not have them. He never did. He’s good at life and good at business and good at faith. He is politically clunky, always was and always will be. His clunkiness is seen in the way he leaked his interest in running: to mega-millionaires and billionaires in New York. ‘Tell your friends.’ ” I still think that was right. Whatever is ailing the party now, he is not the answer.

A month later I said I didn’t see Jeb Bush as the front-runner but just another candidate, and one making “a poor impression.” Mr. Bush at that point was “spending much of his time in The Rooms—offices and conference rooms—with millionaires and billionaires.” He spoke their language, his family name provided entrée, his fundraising prowess was impressive. However: “There’s something tentative and joyless in Mr. Bush’s public presentations. He isn’t mixing it up with voters or wading into the crowd. So far he is not good at the podium. His recent foreign-policy speech was both bland and jangly, and its one memorable statement—‘I am my own man’—was the kind of thing a candidate shouldn’t have to say.

“What is most missing so far is a fierce sense of engagement, a passionate desire to lead America out of the morass, a fiery—or Churchillian—certainty that he is the man for the moment. In its place we see a softer, wanner I’m smart, accomplished, know policy, and it’s my turn.”

An October column said: “Jeb just isn’t very good at this.” I said his victory was impossible for me to envision. Still is.

In July I thought Scott Walker would be “highly competitive” for the nomination. He was not. In August I said Ted Cruz would get “deadlier as the number of candidates winnows down.” That seems to be bearing out.

When Mr. Trump announced in June, I knew he’d hit a powerful nerve but did not see him lasting as long as he has. He was a product of voter anger, contempt and lowering standards: “We’re entering Weimar, baby.” In time I saw his power. In August I noted: “The traditional mediating or guiding institutions within the Republican universe—its establishment, respected voices in conservative media, sober-minded state party officials—have little to no impact on Mr. Trump’s rise. Some say voices of authority should stand up to oppose him, which will lower his standing. But Republican powers don’t have that kind of juice anymore.” Traveling around the country, “my biggest sense is that political professionals are going to have to rethink ‘the base,’ reimagine it when they see it in their minds. . . . America is so in play,” and the base is “becoming a big, broad jumble that few understand.”

I asserted his appeal was not limited to Republicans. My highly scientific reason is that in talking to Trump supporters it often emerged that they were Democrats or independents.

Happy New Year; let’s get through it together.

A long time ago in a country far, far away, America had less of everything and holidays were easier and more modest.

Only 50 and 60 years ago, well within human memory, Christmas was a plainer, simpler affair. Everyone—even the rich, but certainly the poor and in-between—had less. Because America had less. You’d get a sweater and socks instead of five toys, or five toys instead of 10. Technology was something that existed at places like NASA. No one’s wish list had a hoverboard, an iPad, or a brightly wrapped drone. There were more big families, whose children understood that even Santa couldn’t cover them all.

You could make gifts. Or you could buy one after saving up, and the recipient could guess the sacrifice involved. And because there were fewer gifts, the one you got made a big impression.

And so a nod to the more modest Christmases of years past. These memories came with a declared or implied, “We didn’t have much, but . . .” And this was said not with resentment or self pity but a kind of pride and wistfulness.

For the New York businessman Vin Pica, one Christmas stands out. “All I wanted was a wooden Daniel Boone ‘musket,’ ” he says, like the one Fess Parker slung over his shoulder as he walked through the woods. “I mentioned it at dinner Christmas Eve, and my father mysteriously disappeared, and magically, the next morning, on Dec. 25, 1959, it was under the tree . . .”

Here is a friend of mine, from a large Irish Catholic family in New Jersey—seven kids, no money. She is in her 60s now, but still shy about revisiting those days. She doesn’t recall any specific gifts she received—“It wasn’t like we were going to get a smartphone, it wasn’t like that”—but she remembers the time the baby of the family, Cathy, age 5, let everyone know Santa was going to give her something very special.

But Cathy wouldn’t tell anyone what it was. On Christmas Eve, her resourceful mother finally told her to write Santa a thank-you note and put it under the tree. She did, and later her mother peeked at the note: Cathy thanked Santa for the “bride doll” that he had hidden for her in the bookcase. But it was Christmas Eve—the stores were closed. After Cathy went to bed, one of my friend’s other sisters remembered a pile of old dolls down in the basement. “We found a doll, cleaned it, found a dress, washed and ironed,” my friend recalls. “We combed the hair, we gave it earrings and jewelry.” At dawn, Cathy ran down the stairs and found in the back of the bookcase the beautiful doll she knew would be there.

Susan Woodbury and I were best friends in Massapequa, N.Y., when we were 12. All she wanted when she was 10 or 11 was a wooden guitar. In the weeks before Christmas, she ransacked the house, looking under beds, steeling herself for disappointment. “My mother rarely gave me what I wanted, but what she thought I should have,” Susan says. Then she found it, in the back of her parents’ closet: “It was a blond-wood guitar with this great knotty finish on the back, and simple strings.” Christmas morning it was under the tree, covered by a towel. Susan enacted surprise. “I should have won an Academy award.”

The New York attorney Lloyd Green was a kid in the 1970s in Borough Park, Brooklyn. “My favorite Hanukkah memory was my folks gave me Strat-O-Matic Baseball as a gift, a stats-filled board game. Come Shabbat afternoon, my friends and I would play it for hours, until we had to attend afternoon worship. The game gave me a lifelong appreciation for baseball, and for numbers telling a story. . . . Mom, Dad, and Hanukkah, thank you.”

Kathy Enright and I were in high school together. Her father was in the Navy and often away. “When I was 8 years old in Hacketstown, N.J.,” Kathy recalls, “there was a Pink Lady bike by Schwinn in the window of a store. I wanted it so badly and my mother said, ‘We can’t afford it, we can’t afford it.’ Mostly I got shoes and socks and underwear, things that we needed that were practical.” And yet that Christmas Eve, “I walked into the living room and my Pink Lady bike was in front of the Christmas tree. I rode it until I graduated high school.”

The stories got me thinking this week of the little book that has the best Christmas scene since Charles Dickens, “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn,” by Betty Smith. Francie and her brother, Neeley, are in grade school. Their family can’t afford a Christmas tree, but then a chance arises. The guy who sells Christmas trees down the block always has a few scrawny ones left by midnight Christmas Eve, and to get rid of them he has an annual Christmas Tree Throw. Poor kids and poor fathers gather on the street every year, and the salesman heaves a tree up in the air—if you can catch it and don’t fall, it’s yours. Francie and Neeley stand on the cold, snowy pavement, steady themselves, catch a tree . . . and keep their footing. It’s theirs. They march it triumphantly upstairs to their tenement apartment, and on the way the neighbors, hearing the commotion, poke their heads out their doors, saying, “Congratulations!” and “Merry Christmas!” And Francie’s family stood the tree in a big tin bucket. There were no ornaments, “but the big tree standing there was enough.”

My favorite gift of childhood was so surprising and moving and big. I was 9 or 10 and badly wanted a desk. I needed a desk because I had been selling neighborhood subscriptions to a local weekly newspaper called, as I remember it, the Massapequa Post. My success convinced me that I would someday be a great newspaper executive. I noticed in the old movies that played on channel 9 that what were then called career women—Rosalind Russell and Katharine Hepburn played those parts—often had a long, triangular nameplate on their desks. I made one for myself out of cardboard at school. Now all I needed was the desk. But such a piece of furniture was too expensive, too much to ask for in a family of nine.

I was in a religious phase, however, and prayed. And on Christmas morning, there beside the tree was a rough, oblong piece of beige plywood stapled or nailed to two pieces of plywood supporting it on either side. And if you looked at it with imagination, it looked exactly like . . . a desk. I was in heaven. I got a kitchen chair, sat at the desk and closed my eyes and thanked God. Then, suddenly, with my eyes closed, in my imagination, I saw it. Everything. There was a manger in the darkness and a man and a woman, and it was cold and there were stars in the sky, and hills, and wise men came with staffs and gazed in wonder. I saw it all, as if on film in a newsreel. It hit me like an electric bolt. I thought: “It’s all true. It really happened. I just saw it.”

I never forgot it, of course, and in later years, teaching catechism classes, I’d say at the end, “All you have to do is remember: It’s all true. It really happened. Just keep that in your mind.”

To be given a moment like that and take it through your life—that was some kind of gift.