Peggy Noonan

White smoke. The cardinals moved quickly, after only four or five ballots. Is that a good sign? But the smoke is white, and people came running, and the crowd in St. Peter’s Square burst into sustained cheers, with chanting and then laughing, and the huge ancient bells began to ring.

On the Vatican feed the camera panned the crowd and you could see the flags of all the different countries, and get a sense the whole world was coming, and in spite of myself I felt moved and hopeful because you never know in life, it renews itself, surprising things happen. The crowd was dominated by young people wanting something to follow, something to love. If that isn’t moving—the old church trying to renew itself—then nothing is moving. “Oh let it be a great man,” I thought, so many thought. “Let him cheer the world up.”

As I watched the networks’ live shot of the Vatican balcony, I remembered a conversation with a businessman 28 years ago. He wasn’t interested in religious things, was nominally Protestant but didn’t get a headache about it, and we stood in a friend’s kitchen as John Paul II’s last visit to America played out live on a screen in the background. He kept turning to it. “I don’t know what it is, but when I see him, I get moved,” he said. Many felt that way in those days, and it’s what I hope they’ll feel with the new pope.

I texted around to see if anyone knew anything. Nobody did.

You know, because you are an adult and not a child and have read a bit of history, that maybe the new pontiff will be a nullity, maybe a place-keeper—history has been full of such popes—maybe he’s a good man, maybe a great one, and maybe mischief from day one.

But you know this too: “And I tell you that you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.”

And as dusk approached, the velvet-draped balcony filled and Cardinal Dominique Mamberti proclaimed, “Habemus Papam!” We have a pope.

And he is an American.

And he will be Leo XIV.

And he has a nice smile.

Just before the “habemus” a friend had texted, “I hope it’s a big surprise—someone we’ve never heard of.” Meaning someone we’re not tired of knowing. Very soon afterward he texted, “He’s an American!!”

It has shocked the world, and it has shocked America too. There’s something moving in it, to see this suppleness in the ancient institution, to see its continued ability to surprise. The first American pope in the history of the Catholic Church.

But to those who watch the Vatican closely, the choice of Leo wasn’t a massive surprise. Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost had been on the lists of possible popes since Pope Francis died, and he’d inched up on those lists in the past week. He is an American, age 69, but is probably best understood as an international figure. He was born in Chicago, bred in the suburb of Dolton, attended parochial schools there, was an altar boy, graduated from Villanova University and received his master’s in divinity at Catholic Theological Union in Chicago in 1982. Then off to the world, in a missionary order. Most of his priestly life, with some brief stints in America, has been spent on other continents, in Peru and in Rome. This makes him something new, more a cardinal from the world than a specific place. He was made a cardinal by Pope Francis in 2023 and headed the Vatican office responsible for choosing bishops of the Latin rite. In a conclave this week where many of the cardinals didn’t know each other, they knew him.

He will be the first pope in history to speak English as his native language.

We will find in coming days what the thoughts of the members of the conclave were, and how they chose him. But it isn’t a big jump to assume part of the story is that the Vatican is in grave financial crisis, and the Roman Curia has never faced a boss who is assumed to be versed in the general principles of American management.

What is most important and revealing is the name he took: Pope Leo XIV. The name a pope chooses is a signal, always. I had been hoping he would choose Leo but didn’t expect it.

The two big Leos were Leo the Great and Leo XIII. Leo the Great, whose papacy lasted from 440 to 461, was known for a refined intelligence: He was a diplomat good at stopping trouble. This came in handy when he met, in 452, with Attila the Hun. Attila intended to take and pillage Rome. Leo persuaded him not to, and Rome was spared. In 455 Leo met with a Vandal king and negotiated to save the city’s basilicas and the many taking shelter there. He also battled back against many heresies. He was an especially capable man, was sainted, and is buried not far from St. Peter’s tomb in Rome.

Leo XIII was an equally important character, serving as pope from 1878 to 1903. He saw the church into the 20th century, and his great work was his 1891 encyclical “Rerum Novarum,” which outlined what would become Catholic social teaching, including the rights of workers (fair wages, safe conditions, a right to unionize) while blending it with support for property rights and free enterprise. They called him “the pope of the workers.”

The new Leo’s choice of his name is already considered a subtle continuation of Francis’ general leadership, and I suspect it is, but wonder if it is also more than that: Catholic social teaching is embraced by modern political categories of left, right, and center, and Leo XIV may be signaling respect for the idea of synthesis—you can feel respect for both people and systems, things don’t have to compete, they can go hand in hand.

We’ll see. Onward into history. One of our countrymen has been raised high, a Midwestern boy, a Chicago kid raised to the throne of Peter. Did you ever think you’d see a Yank there? Really?

There are words attributed to Pope Benedict XVI that seem appropriate to the moment. “The keys entrusted to the successor of Peter are his for only a speck of time, and as steward, the pope is not answerable to the here and now.” He can’t solve all the ills of the world. He can only do his very best, with the help of God.

What stays with me after this momentous Thursday of the white smoke is the kindness with which the huge crowd cheered Leo, the encouragement and ready affection they showed. Other great faiths don’t do it this way, don’t present their leaders with everyone cheering and half of them weeping and all of them together in the great square. There’s a deep sweetness to how the Catholics do it, inviting the world. It reminds me of James Joyce, and his definition of the church’s universality: “Here comes everybody.”

Donald Trump, an overview:

America continues divided into two groups. One thinks, “He is something that happened to us.” The tone is shocked, still, and bewildered: Did I live in this country all this time and not understand it? The other thinks, “He is something we did.” The tone is pride and, still, surprise: I didn’t know we could seize things back.

He happened because the American political establishment in the 21st century failed, to an epic and shattering degree—two long unwon wars, embarrassing in their execution and humiliating in their ending; the 2008 financial crisis, which no one in charge foresaw or took pains to prevent; a southern border open and overrun; and a destructive cultural revolution that seized the commanding heights of public and private institutions.

After those failures the American people stopped even pretending to respect the political, academic, media, financial and legal establishments. They saw them as self-seekers driven by no protectiveness toward the people at large or sense of responsibility for America. The nation said to its establishments: You’re fired. Mr. Trump, an outsider and rather unique individual, was both their revenge and their last attempt to right things.

This crucial beginning of the story is always in danger of being lost. Mr. Trump is so vivid he always seems the cause of things. But he came from something, and we shouldn’t forget it because it contains a lesson for all time: If you are given power, as establishments are, you must be equal to it; you must be protective, a steward, and care for the people. You can’t be selfish and look only to yourself and your glittering world, which is what our establishments did.

You know what they acted like? The new rich, that old American put-down. No one likes the new rich because they haven’t learned the lesson of the old rich, which is that you have to show responsibility for others. We put this down as “noblesse oblige.” We came to miss the idea of noble obligations.

Among Republicans, a decisive moment in the rebellion was March 18, 2013, when the GOP establishment, searching for the reason their party lost in 2012, announced in its famous “autopsy” that the party must be more liberal in its approach to illegal immigration. “And what rough beast, its hour come round at last . . .” Donald Trump slouched down the escalator a little more than two years later.

Now he has had his first hundred days in his second term. They confirm what we learned in the first administration. He goes too far. He’s a fearless man with bad judgment. He lacks internal calibration. I imagine him with an eager aide. “On this issue, Mr. President, there are two clear choices. We can make history by moving forward 6 inches, in which case we’re guaranteed to secure victory and improve America. Or we can try for 12 inches, but the opposition will be aroused, the battle long and bloody, the outcome uncertain.” Trump looks, blinks. “Twelve is bigger than 6, right? Go 12.”

He doesn’t spy what he can gain, move swiftly (silently!) and gain it. He declares war on all fronts.

He’s Berserk U.S. Grant. Gen. Grant wanted to wear down the enemy, stun them, kill them, use his armies as the steamroller that squashed them. He looked at the big maps, contemplated the field, the terrain, the gettable object (the train junction, the weapons depot) and decided to move or not move, with what divisions. What troops were rested and could get there, where the artillery was and where to place it . . .

Mr. Trump is presented the maps, he commands all forces forward and assumes the chaos will demoralize the foe, they’ll all run for the hills. This is not strategy but lack of strategy.

In many battles we haven’t yet reached the point beyond “they had it coming.” On Mr. Trump’s many fronts—against the universities, the big law firms, the illegal immigrants, old international allies, bureaucrats wasting international aid money, the tariffs, the boys on the girls’ team—he is still largely supported by regular people, who look at his foes and think, “They had it coming.” Which is why his polls, which are going down, are not really so bad. We haven’t yet reached the point of “Whoa, they didn’t have that coming.” We will. And if the tariff effort is a boomeranging disaster we will reach, “Whoa, we didn’t have it coming.” Which will be his danger area.

It is bad for Mr. Trump that he allows or encourages his cabinet members to praise him so fulsomely in public. It’s real “Dear Leader,” “Great Helmsman” stuff. It diminishes them: They look obsequious and frightened. It diminishes him: He needs the lackey’s subservience. From his cabinet secretaries at Wednesday’s meeting to mark the hundred days. “It’s been a momentous hundred days with you at the helm.” “Mr. President, your first hundred days has far exceeded that of any other presidency in this country ever, ever.” It is embarrassing. We let the world see this?

At that meeting Secretary of State Marco Rubio offered the truest summing up of the administration’s actions and intent. “This president inherited 30 years of foreign policy that was built around what was good for the world. In essence, the decisions we made as a government in trade and foreign policy was basically, ‘Is it good for the world? Is it good for the global community?’ And under President Trump, we’re making a foreign policy now that’s ‘Was it good for America?’ ”

Asking if a policy is good for the world is a very good thing, especially in the nuclear age. The administration has alienated allies while not clearly impressing competitors and foes. In the short term our old friends will step warily, in the long term they’ll wish us ill. We are ruining an international reputation that took more than a century to build: that even when wrong our intent was to do good, that we were generous, long-viewed, responsible.

This reputation was a major force in maintaining world peace after 1945. That is a long time, and it is a big thing, whatever arguments in favor, to give up. Especially by those who never showed a deep understanding of what had been its power. Mr. Rubio said the ultimate aim is to make America safer, stronger, and more prosperous. Those are necessary aims that, with creativity, heart and a sense of history, can be achieved without such damage.

Something impressive: The second term is different from the first in that it has a sense of what it’s about. The people in this White House believe in the president. They didn’t in the first term; they thought they were a political accident. This team sees itself as a political decision.

Here is the uneasiness of thoughtful people on all sides who watched things closely the past hundred days. They realize it won’t go back to normal when he is gone. Our politics won’t snap back to the olden days of carefully patrolled constitutional boundaries and expectations of right political behavior. Donald Trump is what he wanted to be, a world-historic figure, and we have entered a new time. It sounds dangerous. This is what it looks like when establishments fail.

Pope Francis’ great contribution was to present the Catholic Church as a lover of all people. He called it “a field hospital after battle,” a refuge and place of repair. It must “go to the peripheries, which are often filled with solitude, sadness, inner wounds and loss of a zest for life.” Many saw in him humility and simplicity. The photo I’ve thought of since his death is from a general audience a few months into his papacy, when he kissed and embraced the man whose head and neck were severely deformed by the tumors of neurofibromatosis. It was beautiful because it was Christlike.

It mattered a great deal that he made clear—he underscored—that if you are in trouble, if you are trapped in circumstances from which there is no escape, if you are living an irregular life, if you have been told you must feel shame and the shame leaves you feeling unworthy, then come in, come in. None are beyond the love of Christ or unwelcome in his church.

It is impossible that message didn’t spread, didn’t enter hearts, didn’t change lives. That he was generally understood, at least in time, to be of the liberal part of the church, gave cheer, after two consecutive conservative papacies, to those in liberalism’s precincts, and a sense of change and vitality to the church itself. Things, if they’re alive, go back and forth.

But if we are in mourning, it is dry-eyed. There is broad appreciation for the man and his efforts but not deep sadness at the end of his papacy. In its dozen years, Francis was often confusing, with striking impulses followed by unexplained silences, with a lack of doctrinal clarity. For me the whole blur culminated in the Synod on Synodality, essentially a conference on having conferences. His liberalism seemed uncertain except when it was aggressive, even belligerent, such as in his suppression of the Latin Mass.

It was my sense when he died that the Vatican was filling a smaller place in the world, that the papacy—damaged by the sexual scandals of the past 40 years, demystified to some degree by Pope Benedict XVI’s 2013 retirement, diminished further by Francis’ blur—had grown weaker, seemed less august and towering. Smart words came from Ross Douthat of the New York Times: Francis, like his predecessors, policed deviations from his authority, “except this time the targets were dissenting conservatives and traditionalists instead of progressives and modernizers.” Conservatives were used to being on the same side as the Vatican—“the last believers in the imperial papacy, the custodians of infallibility’s mystique.” By “stirring more of them to doubt and disobedience,” Francis “kicked away the last major prop supporting a strong papacy.” That is true.

What’s next? I find myself hopeful. When institutions weaken or recede, interesting things (some bad but some good, too) can fill suddenly freed-up space. Power blocs move.

There will soon be a new presence, and possibly a fresh voice. Something good might come this spring, something that wakes us up. “Hope springs eternal in the human heart.” Why shouldn’t it?

A great theme of the 20th- and 21st-century popes was one of grappling with modernity—not, as modernizers said, fighting modernity, resisting it, but encountering it, having a dialogue with it, coming to grips with the church’s responsibilities in the conversation, meeting people where they are. My goodness, enough. It is played out.

The world we live in is lashed by knowledge of the instability of its traditions and institutions, the inadequacy of its governments; it sees artificial intelligence coming and fears machines escaping the control of man; people see unaccountable autocrats lobbing nuclear threats; they worry for their children. More and more I think people know that no one will get through the future without deep faith in God.

The church should go back to the beginning, shift from modernity to eternity, ask the world to train its eye on Christ. Tell it what his mother said at the wedding at Cana: “Do whatever he tells you.”

This is the time for a great teaching pope whose mission is telling the world the meaning of the faith, its history, how it came to its dogma, what it believes and why. How personal faith can come and be won, and what you do to hold on to it. The church must speak to the human heart, which is always hungry.

It would be good if the soon-to-be-chosen pope could be summed up, 20 years from now, on his passing, with these words: The man who was in love with Jesus.

Connected to which: When you’re in love, you are happy. Your happiness shows. It is so important that the next pope radiate something like joy—the joy of knowing there is a God and he is good and he is always with us. Let the world look and think, “He seems happy. He must know something.” Really, they should drop the stricken look.

The coming conclave should keep in mind St. Philip Neri, patron saint of joy, sometimes called even the patron saint of laughing. Born in Florence in the 16th century, lived in Rome. A scholar and poet who studied philosophy, became a priest, founded great holy communities, fought Rome’s corruption but always with good cheer. He loved the arts, loved music. The prostitutes and street urchins to whom he ministered loved him; it wasn’t enough he converted them, he took them for picnics on the lawns of the rich and had musicians play. Rome’s royalty and elites cared for him too. His general approach: leave outward, worldly things alone, reform your own heart, this, heart by heart, leads to external reforms. He kept a distance from ecclesiastical controversies yet was somehow a force in their resolution.

“Cheerfulness strengthens the heart and makes us persevere in a good life,” he said. “The servant of God ought always to be in good spirits.”

There were stories of his lighthearted holiness: A glum young man came to him for spiritual help. Philip told him, “Sadness is no companion for the ones who wants to follow Christ. If you can’t be joyful, at least be ridiculous. God can work with that.”

A parishioner was upset at losing his hair. Did Philip know a remedy? “Be holy, then people will look at your soul and not your scalp.” Someone asked if he could perform a miracle. He said yes, “I just had a conversation with someone and didn’t interrupt them. That’ll do for today.”

He is said once to have walked through the streets of Rome with a basket of oranges on his head, whistling and making faces. He told a friend the reason was he was coming to be known as wise. “I need to remind them—and myself—that I’m not.”

Joy, to him, didn’t counter reverence, it was an expression of it.

Wouldn’t it be great if they chose “the man who was in love with Jesus,” which love brought him transparent personal joy, which he transmitted into the world? The Vatican should shake off the gloom and sideline the Church of Endless Argument.

As the nuns in America used to say, “Christ is coming—look busy.” Bring a boost to this old world.

This being Holy Week and Passover, a small reflection on Scripture. There are stories and moments in the Old and New Testaments that grab hold of us, some from the first time we heard them, and stay. One, for me, is the story of the good thief.

Christ is on the cross, being put to death between two common criminals. The soldiers jeer. The thief on the left bitterly mocks him. “Aren’t you the Messiah? Save yourself and us!” The criminal on the other side rebukes him. “Have you no fear of God, when you are subject to the same condemnation? And indeed, we have been condemned justly, for the sentence we received corresponds to our crimes, but this Man has done nothing criminal.” He looks at Christ and says, “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.” And Jesus answers, “Amen I say to you, this day you will be with me in paradise.”

Always hits me like a punch. They’re minutes from death. One thief goes out the way he’d always likely been, insolent and mean. The other thief has a heart for justice—we deserve what’s happening to us, but he doesn’t—and asks for mercy. Christ tells him, essentially, you’re not forever alone, soon we’ll be together in Heaven.

The story, in Luke’s Gospel, is understood as a moment of grace and redemption, and it is those things, but it’s also a story involving the simple idea that it’s never too late. Famous words—we say it’s never too late to learn physics or go to Machu Picchu—but this story is about the infinitely more important idea that it’s never too late to become a better human being.

When I asked New York’s Cardinal Timothy Dolan why the story moves so many of us, his response sounded like a merry devotional poem. “I’m ecstatic at your interest / In my buddy St. Dismas.” (The good thief became known as Dismas, no one’s sure why, and has been called a saint from the first centuries.)

“I love him,” the cardinal said. “I’ve always had a deep devotion. When I was a kid at Catholic school, Sister called him ‘the thief who stole Heaven.’ ”

It isn’t just that Christ comforted the thief, the thief comforted him. “Here is Jesus at the most desolate moment of his life. He was alone, the apostles had run off. He thinks, ‘This thief professes faith in me. He’s asking me to perform a miracle and get him into Heaven.’ This is an immense consolation to Jesus.”

“Pope Benedict once said it’s the only time in the Gospels someone calls the Lord just by his first name—Jesus, not ‘Jesus, son of God’ or ‘Rabbi Jesus.’ This thief felt so close to him he uses his first name.” For Christians the story resonates because “we’re talking about all of us—if the thief got in, we could all get in; if he receives mercy, we all got a chance.”

“As a priest, I hear those at the end of their life, reconciling with God, talking about things they’ve done. They are asking, ‘Will he remember me?’ ”

He asks if I know the old story about what happened to Joseph, Mary and Jesus as they journeyed to Egypt to escape Herod’s murderousness. “The legend is that a band of robbers and brigands descends on them. A little boy with the bandits sees Jesus and goes to his father, the band leader, and says, ‘Please let them live, there’s something about that child.’ And the Holy Family was spared. And that little boy—was Dismas!” Who spared Christ, who later spared him. “As the Italians say, if it ain’t true it oughta be true!”

Afterward I found a medieval poem: “Let them pass, the young one said / There’s light around that baby’s head.”

But what about the idea that people don’t change? In your years of spiritual counseling, do they?

“Do they ever. Every Christmas I get a card from a woman, now in her 90s. She came to me, I was a young priest 49 years ago, she was an alcoholic without hope. I get a card every year saying, ‘I’m still sober.’ ”

“We have Easter in springtime. Nature is changing, new growth coming. We think winter has the last word but no, springtime comes, life trumps death. The change in nature connects to changes that happen in the human heart, there’s a desire for renewal. We turn to the beyond, we say, ‘Lord, help me.’ ”

“Look at what he did for the Jews fleeing Egypt. He turned a sea into dry land so they could pass on dry ground. He leads them and sends them food, manna.”

“When we turn to God and ask for some renewal, some rehab, some reform—once we turn to him in our need, We’re like Dismas.”

A few blocks from St. Patrick’s Cathedral is Central Synagogue. People don’t think of Midtown Manhattan as a spiritual powerhouse, but it’s been a busy place this week and last, and Rabbi Angela Buchdahl had thoughts on how people deepen themselves.

“I absolutely believe people can change, and Judaism makes it very clear that it’s always possible for people to change.”

“In Hebrew we call it teshuva. It has to do with repentance, but it literally means ‘return.’ You can ‘make teshuva’—it is returning to the pure soul you were born with, you return back to that original goodness.”

We often resist. “Look at the story of Jonah in the Hebrew Bible,” she says. “God asked Jonah, who was a prophet, to go to the city of Nineveh, and tell them to reform. Jonah says he doesn’t want to go, not because he thinks they can’t change but because he’s sure they’ll repent, and he doesn’t think they deserve it! After he flees God’s command he ends up living in solitary confinement in the belly of a whale.” Freed, he goes to Nineveh, they repent, God forgives them, and Jonah is . . . still upset. “Human beings can be resistant to give people an opportunity for a second chance. But in our shared textual tradition God wants people to change.”

She spoke with someone at Central Synagogue’s Wise Aging group. The woman said she thought the decade between 60 and 70 is the time of the most growth in a person’s life. Rabbi Buchdahl demurred: Studies emphasize adolescence. “But the woman said, ‘When you’re 60 you’re at the peak of your power—running the law firm, the most respected doctor. At 70 you’re having to grapple with transitions, with who am I, and the aging of the body. It is the time of confronting the big questions of life. It is then you can change your spiritual outlook, your character.’” And the rabbi reconsidered and thought yes, “the big questions are the things that cause us to change.”

“Christians believe this season is one of resurrection, Jews a time of rebirth—a rebirth in the natural world, but also coming out of Egypt into freedom. This is a fruitful time to ask the questions about what we want to be. We are on a journey, all of us leaving a narrowing, constricted place for a place of freedom. This is a narrative that happens in every generation, and in each of our lives.”

Some thoughts on a climbdown for the ages.

The reaction was widespread relief in America and the world. Americans want their country to be the world’s growth engine but not, as a former Reagan administration official put it, through policies “that risk the collapse of the global financial system.”

Donald Trump scared people he hadn’t scared before. He didn’t use to scare his policy allies—small-business people, workers, retirees. He did this week. Fear dampens reflexive support. Politicians need reflexive support from the bottom of their base as a platform from which to move. The president weakened his position.

It is hard to see how it helps him with Republicans in Congress. It demonstrated to them that his judgment can be wrong about big things. So he can be wrong about the “big, beautiful bill.”

His own top staffers look as if he made them afraid in a new way. Fear doesn’t solidify relationships.

The tariff regime made the world doubt his constructiveness and good faith. It would have been understood if he’d gathered allies and taken a big swing at China. Instead he took a big swing at the world, including China. It damaged America’s credibility.

It wasn’t good to let the world know, or to remind it so vividly, that the way to get America to back off is to tank its bond market. Those bonds, as Zanny Minton Beddoes of the Economist put it, are “the ultimate faith asset.” The world has been reminded they could become the ultimate weak spot.

Administration cheerleaders say the whole drama shows yet again the president will be bold to get what he wants. Who doubted that? What the drama really showed is that Mr. Trump will blink—that when the moment is forced to its crisis, he can back off and climb down. That’s news, and takes the edge of terror off.

Possible good news: Did the American establishment just make a comeback? I think it did. Its name has been mud since the financial crisis of 2008, which it caused or allowed. But in this crisis, business, Wall Street, people in power centers such as journalism—they mounted an opposition that was more impressive for appearing not concerted but a natural organic reaction to destructive policy. An example: JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon on Fox Business Wednesday morning said recession was the “likely outcome” of the new regime. The White House heard it. Hedge funders and historians were all over social media.

It is good for America that its business and economic establishments can still be a force for moderation and stability. May they maintain their sobriety. In any case things righted themselves, meaning our righting mechanisms still work.

The president’s overall strategy was never clear beyond “scare everybody.” Mr. Trump puts stock in the madman theory—that a leader gains an edge when foes fear he’ll do something insane. Richard Nixon sent Henry Kissinger out to be reasonable in negotiations, knowing Kissinger, on his direction, was confiding, despairingly, that Nixon might be less so: We’ve got to make a deal, this guy may get out the nukes and bomb Paris!

As China is now the main focus for the next 90 days, something Mr Trump told the Journal editorial board in an October interview seems pertinent. Candidate Trump was asked if he would use military force if China blockaded Taiwan.

“I wouldn’t have to, because [Xi Jinping] respects me and he knows I’m f— crazy. I wouldn’t have to. . . . No. I would do economic.”

Meaning what? “I would tell [him] that if you do this, I’m going to put tariffs on all of your stuff coming in and I’ll slowly, maybe quickly, stop trading with you, and they go bankrupt in two minutes. See, I can do things with tariffs. . . . I would say. ‘If you go into Taiwan, I’m sorry to do this, I’m going to tax you at 150% to 200%.’ ” He might tell China, “ ‘I will put a tariff on everything you send and I’ll even stop trading if you keep it going.’ Because stopping trading is even worse. We’ll go cold turkey.”

According to the White House, as of Thursday the tariff on Chinese imports is 145%.

Mr. Trump’s thoughts on past dealings with Mr. Xi also take on resonance:

“He’s a very fierce person,” Mr. Trump said. “I’m not allowed to say brilliant” because the press will pounce, “but of course he is brilliant.” Mr. Trump said that in his first administration, he imposed “hundreds of billions of tariffs on China” steel dumping. The result? “They stopped dumping steel.” “Hurt my relationship with Xi for about three days, then he realized Trump is smart.” Then China started selling steel through Canada. “Oh, they got more tricks, they got more tricks.”

It is generally thought that China wouldn’t move on Taiwan in a way that demands a U.S. response while trade between the U.S. and China is crucial to China’s well-being. It is reasonable to ask what would restrain Beijing if that trade relationship were blasted to bits. Might Beijing feel a need to present to its people a win as their financial position deteriorates?

*   *   *

Three closing thoughts:

History arises under many forces and from many causes, but the psychology of leaders has its place. Mr. Trump is a gambler by nature. He places big bets, has all his professional and political life, and the thing about gamblers, as a lifelong player once said, is that all gamblers are looking to lose. They want to win, hope to win, but need the possibility of catastrophic loss to excite them, to keep them interested in life.

Mr. Trump this week placed one of the biggest bets of his life, but it was the world’s money that was in the pot. That was some kind of ugly, reckless thing to do.

The Republican majorities in both houses of Congress have been irresponsible in relinquishing their authority on tariffs to the executive branch. It amounts to an insult to history, and even to themselves. They are a coequal branch of government, and it is their job to protect their own standing. Instead, as Jonathan Martin notes in Politico, they have reduced themselves to “doing color commentary up in the booth.” Gosh, I hope the president is right. They spoke gently of their reservations, acting like “a parent praising a toddler about what a big boy he is in hopes he won’t melt down and ruin dinner.” They should stop this. It’s embarrassing to witness.

A correspondent sent the best idea of the week. In 1993, during the debate over the North American Free Trade Agreement, Vice President Al Gore and Ross Perot, the anti-Nafta business titan, went on CNN’s “Larry King Live” to face off over the issue. It was helpful to democracy, two intelligent people duking it out on a matter of such consequence. Some cable network now should invite Vice President JD Vance and, say, Lawrence Summers to argue their sides on the efficacy of tariffs. Many thinking Americans would tune in for that, and considering public reaction to this week’s drama, there are more thinking Americans than politicians and TV producers imagine.

In a news conference in Ottawa on March 27, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney reacted to developments in what he called “the trade crisis” with the United States.

President Trump, he said, had violated existing trade agreements by imposing on Canada “unjustified” tariffs. “We will respond forcefully. Nothing is off the table.” “We will fight the U.S. tariffs with retaliatory trade actions of our own that will have maximum impact in the United States.” “The road ahead will be long. There is no silver bullet, there is no quick fix.” “But I have every confidence in our country because I understand what President Trump does not: That we love Canada with every fiber of our being.” “The old relationship we had with the United States, based on deepening integration of our economies and tight security and military cooperations, is over.”

Even though it was a week ago, was followed by a telephone call both sides called productive, and has been superseded by this week’s tariff news—Canada isn’t included in the new regime—I can’t get Mr. Carney’s words out of my head. “The old relationship we had . . . is over.” They mark, at the very least rhetorically but not only in that way, the end of an era. And it was a good era.

“How did things ever get so far?” asks Don Corleone in “The Godfather.” “It was so unfortunate, so unnecessary.”

Since Inauguration Day the White House has treated Canada (and other countries—Greenland, Panama—but we’ll stick with Canada) with an attitude of public disrespect. In statements and dealings the president has been offhand, cavalier, belittling. While still prime minister, Justin Trudeau was addressed as “governor.” Canada has been informed it should be our 51st state. This isn’t news, but I want to get to a particular aspect of the story.

It of course matters diplomatically who your allies are, who votes with you in international tribunals, who you can rely on to hear your views with warmth and respect. Regarding Canada it matters also who shares pieces and portions of your heritage, beliefs, past, and shares also the English language. (Winston Churchill always put special emphasis on the importance of who literally speaks your language.) As for our border, Churchill again, in 1939: “That long frontier from the Atlantic to the Pacific oceans, guarded only by neighborly respect and honorable obligations, is an example to every country and a pattern for the future of the world.”

But things mattering “diplomatically” is not the only thing. It matters how people, regular citizens, feel about another people nearby, because this helps them situate themselves in the world, understand it, perceive their position. Is that nation next to us our friend? Has it been our friend, can we rely on this?

On Canada a million examples say yes, but my first thought goes to reading in the New York tabloids how the other night in a bar in Manhattan a guy walked in and when they found out he was Canadian they cheered him—drinks on the house. Those stories were all over town. It was the end of January 1980, during the Iran hostage crisis, and news had broken that the Canadian ambassador to Iran, Ken Taylor, had for months and under threat of exposure, hidden American diplomats in his residence in Tehran. Canada’s top immigration official there, John Sheardown, was in on it too. When the Americans first went to him he said, “Hell yes. Of course. Count on us.” (The whole story was famously presented, with license, in the movie “Argo.”)

Later the U.S. Congress struck a gold medal in Taylor’s honor. Its first words, in a nod to Canada’s bilingual tradition, “Entre amis.”

It has always mattered that “our friendly neighbor to the north” was more than a friend and a neighbor.

There was that day in June 1944, in Normandy. We always talk about what the American troops did that day but Canada was there too, storming one of the five invasion beaches, Juno Beach. The 3rd Canadian infantry division took heavy losses but held their beach by day’s end. Maj. David Currie, his South Alberta Regiment isolated and outnumbered, rallied his troops, directed fire, himself took out a German Tiger tank, and walked from the war with a Victoria Cross. For sangfroid there is Doug Hester of the Queen’s Own Rifles of Canada, who remembered being crammed into a landing craft searching for sight of the beach. The din was terrible from artillery and rifle fire; he and the soldier next to him broke into, “The Bells Are Ringing For Me and My Gal.”

You say that’s long ago. Yes, so I guess at this point it’s in their DNA. You say I’m playing your heartstrings. Yes. Heartstrings are history too. You say, well, their trade policies are not completely fair to us. Fine, make them better, work it out. But always show respect, and more. And accept a little—I’m not sure the right word for this but sometimes friends in a slightly inferior financial condition allow friends in a somewhat superior one to pick up the dinner check consistently. Why? They have a little more, you both know it, you’re friends, you would do it for them if roles were reversed, as someday they may be. Friendship supersedes a strict accounting. Tariffs are a form of war and war is always bloody. If they must be imposed it should be done reluctantly and with dignity.

The administration’s roughness is in pursuit of what? Alienation? In what way could that benefit us? We’re becoming a nation of preppers, fearing the fragility of complex systems and seeing the particular talents of our foes. It is odd, at this moment, to alienate the people next door, who have fewer enemies and, in case of hacked grids, lots of electricity.

The new American aggression is a terrible mistake. We are making the world colder. We are making our world colder. And that in time and in ways we don’t anticipate will make us more vulnerable. Which means weaker. In any case it is gross and ignorant to throw old affection away, and to think the only day that counts is today.

I close with March 1986, a White House state dinner for Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney—there would be two in Ronald Reagan’s eight years. Mulroney and his wife Mila had over the years become close friends of the Reagans. The president in his toast called the bond between America and Canada “a treasure.” He urged new agreements to spur prosperity. “Nothing less of course should be expected of two free peoples who live so close.” In his response, Mulroney said he felt he spoke “not only among friends but, in a very real sense, among family.” He urged more liberalized trade. “Friends may sometimes disagree, friends may diverge in opinion, friends speak frankly, but they give each other the benefit of the doubt.“

Nations get into the habit of affection and regard, but the habit takes time to build. It is wicked to break it when it’s already built.

We are not bringing our friends close and our enemies closer. Too bad, when the world looks more and more like a mob war every day. We won’t come away from this new time looking stronger and more commanding but dumber and weaker—less like the Don, more like Fredo.

The Signal mess is a real mess, not something that will fade away quickly, because it’s one of those scandals that give the world a picture of a new administration.

At just about this time in John F. Kennedy’s presidency (April 17-20, 1961) came the Bay of Pigs disaster, the failed invasion of Cuba by U.S.-backed and trained exiles who had been assured of American air support but learned on the beach it wouldn’t be forthcoming. It shadowed JFK for a long time. The Soviets concluded he was a dilettante and inferred from his actions an ambivalence about the use of force, which led Premier Nikita Khrushchev to rough him up at their first summit, that June in Geneva. JFK wasn’t prepared for such treatment. He confided to the journalist James Reston that it was “the worst thing in my life”; Khrushchev “savaged me.”

In August the Soviets erected the Berlin Wall; a year later they put missiles in Cuba. Kennedy’s mastery in the latter crisis, in October 1962, had a reordering effect on his international reputation. Good things followed, including his American University address in which he felt free, having proved himself, having established a more grounded relationship with the Soviet government, to unveil a new plea for nuclear arms control. His speechwriter, the great Ted Sorensen, told me years later that of all the speeches they worked on—the Inaugural Address, the announcement of the missile crisis—the one at American University was the most important.

An opposite example: It was at almost exactly this point in the new administration of Ronald Reagan, on March 30, 1981, that the president was shot outside the Washington Hilton. His aplomb, the warmth of his gallantry as he joked with doctors and nurses—“I hope you’re all Republicans”—even though his wound was nearly fatal, also carried immense implications. Among world leaders: This cowboy star is both tough and lucky. (Some of them hated a lucky American president, but all saw the luck as a major factor: Politicians are among the most superstitious people on earth.) The shooting also cemented Reagan’s relationship with the American people. Even Democratic House Speaker Tip O’Neill’s Massachusetts voters were impressed: Tip, don’t be too tough on my Ronnie. That was the beginning of serious bipartisan progress between the White House and Congress, when O’Neill realized you can’t ignore this guy or try to roll him every day, you’d better play ball.

The Signal mess lacks the size and depth of both these events. But it too will have implications for the reputation of this White House because, again, it gives a picture that is not so forgettable.

Every government in the world, even those with the best intelligence services, has wondered exactly what it’s like in there, how exactly it works. To see the transcripts of the now famous “Houthi PC small group” is to conclude it’s pretty ad hoc. Pretty messy. The word jejune comes to mind. So does callow. There’s a lot of freelancing. The vice president questions what appears to have been a presidential decision, and the debate is conducted on a publicly available encrypted app. No one on the 19-person call said, “Guys, should we be doing this on Signal?”

They don’t come across as steely-eyed pros, and often express themselves in ways that are emotional (JD Vance: “I just hate bailing Europe out again.” It made me think of a 1950s housewife in a Rinso commercial: “I just hate those stubborn stains!” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth: “I fully share your loathing of European free-loading. It’s PATHETIC.” There was also a lot of drama: “We are a GO for mission launch. . . . (1st strike package),” Mr. Hegseth texted. A Trump-supporting congressional veteran referred to this privately as the defense secretary’s communicating “in his chesty, boastful way.”

The effect will be to push tensions with Europe more toward estrangement. None of this will go unnoticed in any foreign capital. I found myself startled but not entirely disapproving of the use of emojis. I’m glad they’re not above it all, that they’re happy team America successfully moved on some serious bad guys. Then again I’m not sure Xi Jinping was impressed, or Vladimir Putin; I’m quite certain they’re sprinkling their texts with clown emojis in Beijing and Moscow this week.

There was a real bro-culture feel to some of the texting. The young are constantly texting, with different threads going—the fraternity thread, the Vegas Buds texts, the groomsmen at the wedding threads. We just saw the government bros thread.

They should have admitted the blunder from the moment the first batch of texts were published in the Atlantic. Instead they denied the obvious and attacked the character of the reporter who unearthed it. What a mistake! They misread their position and misread what Jeffrey Goldberg would do if they challenged his accuracy or interpretations: He published the whole lot. Which made them look stupid twice. They didn’t look like clever folk who are good strategists.

Sometimes the truthful path is also the practical and pragmatic one: Completely admit you did something stupid, take it in the face, absorb the abuse, and keep walking. This administration’s character, in the aggregate, is too proud, and its personality too snot-nosed, to take that right route.

Everyone sounded like himself. Mr. Vance griped about Europe in a shallow way, Mr. Hegseth came across like an excitable morning-news anchor with a lot to prove. Chief of staff Susie Wiles was reticent, and had the good sense not to hold forth in front of 18 people. Steven Miller, who tends to conduct himself with Saturnian authority, had the authority to shut down debate, and did. “As I heard it, the president was clear: green light, but we soon make clear to Egypt and Europe what we expect in return.”

It’s not a scandal of hypocrisy but of indiscretion, dumbness, and denial. They are obsessed with messaging. Every White House is. But the central conceit of this White House has been “he-men do what’s right whatever the cost.” The president acts as if he doesn’t care. It was startling to see how much they care. Mr. Vance: “Let’s just make sure our messaging is tight here.” Mr. Hegseth: “I think messaging is going to be tough no matter what—nobody knows who the Houthis are—which is why we would need to stay focused on: 1) Biden failed & 2) Iran funded.”

The semantic tap dance over “war plans” or “attack plans” is absurd. They were talking about the policy and operational aspects of a U.S. military attack on a terror haven in a sovereign nation halfway around the world. If that isn’t classified, what is?

They should take it as a gift that this happened so early, and they can learn from the embarrassment. Advice? Stop acting like kids, like bros, like the last honest man. You are the top officials of the government of a great nation in a dramatic and crucial era. You can conduct yourselves the way John Fetterman wears clothes, loosely and sloppily, or you can grow up, control your mouth, and lean on forms and processes that have gotten this lost old ship through many gales.

Every big Trumpian news story, and there are five a day, is a dot in a pointillist painting. The whole picture hasn’t yet emerged but became fuller this week.

The most powerful, in terms of implications, is in the courts. A federal district judge in Washington issued a temporary restraining order to pause deportation flights carrying Venezuelan nationals, including members of the Tren de Aragua criminal gang, to El Salvador. President Trump quickly launched a Truth Social rant calling the judge a “Radical Left Lunatic” who “should be IMPEACHED!!!” Chief Justice John Roberts issued a statement that was pointed but appropriately dry: “For more than two centuries, it has been established that impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision. The normal appellate review process exists for that purpose.” It was a nice way of saying: Hello executive branch, we are the third and coequal branch, the judiciary. We are here and watching and not a potted plant. A district judge in Maryland then ordered Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency to cease dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development on grounds that it likely usurped Congressional authority. These and other cases will make their way to higher courts.

None of this will register with the public until some case reaches the Supreme Court. If the justices rule against the administration, and the president defies the decision, and he’s just the man to do it, then we have our crisis. We’ll again quote the statement attributed to Andrew Jackson in 1832: “John Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it.” (Editor Horace Greeley who likely wrote those words, accurately reflected Jackson’s stand.)

What happens then? Nobody knows. Jackson got away with it, but no president has tried it since. It takes time for nations to gel and mature and have an agreed-on way of operating. But once they do, and we do, people don’t like a disturbance.

On Thursday the president, unslowed, signed an executive order to begin dismantling the Education Department. Was there waste, fraud and abuse in that agency? There is no way there wasn’t. Did it, as is inevitable when something is so large and busy, probably achieve some demonstrable good? Of course. Wishing reform, can you laser in and, with time and patience, cut muscle from fat? Probably.

But DOGE is in a race with the courts. From the first days of the administration it was all shock and awe. Take an agency everyone knows is a problem, such as USAID, and kill it. Tell employees to go home, put a guard outside and lock the door, cover the agency’s name in gaffer’s tape, have a functionary send an email terminating employment, then disable email accounts. Staffers can’t reach each other, can’t find the reporter’s address—confusion kills the will to resist. Other agencies watch, and it puts the fear of God into them.

It’s all a race to get as much accomplished now as possible. Once something goes to the Supreme Court, there will be clear limits. Until then, maybe months, maybe a year, get it done.

*   *   *

I talked this week with a veteran of 40 years of Democratic Party wars. The general context was that the party is still unsure how to respond to Mr. Trump—play possum or stand and scream? In the meantime, there is no central and fully resourced, shrewdly strategic and toughly tactical apparatus to which Democrats can go to be intellectually armed in the battle. You fight fire with water, with a hose and a great stream of information and facts. You persuade the American people that this is all getting reckless, mindless, destructive. You assert the good that specific programs are doing, and you have the receipts. You tell parents what education money that was being spent actually helps them and their school districts.

The Democrats aren’t doing this. They have forgotten Americans are fair. They will listen and are open to persuasion. My Democratic friend said, in the language of his party, that they need “a war room.” He meant they need an information room and persuasion room. Because public opinion is everything.

Here I confess my conservative lizard brain likes seeing unhelpful and destructive parts of any organism, very much including government, cut and sometimes obliterated, and for the usual reasons. But the non-lizard parts—those that are analytical, involve experience, and have observed human nature and seen who’s doing the cutting, and at what size and speed—recoil, and see great danger ahead.

*   *   *

A final point on this week. The scandal in the just-released remaining JFK assassination papers isn’t any specific revelation, but that they kept all this nothingness secret for more than 60 years. It’s meaningless stuff—obscure and unconnected factoids, memos that go nowhere and look like make-work. Anything revealing in those files met a shredder long ago.

In the public imagination there was always the sense the government was withholding crucial information, and because of that the searing debate over who killed JFK would never die. It would appear they were withholding nothing. Which means the real scandal is that in the past 60 years there was no wise old hand to take the time to have aides review the material, conclude it was nothing, and say, “America, this is all we got, it’s over.” So the endless argument continued.

Decisions to withhold documents are made by the human mind, which works on many tracks. Conscious: “We must be prudent, we can’t betray our sources and methods.” Subconscious: “Many of us, not all but enough, are lazy, time-serving clods, and if we show all we have the public will know it. But if we soberly withhold documents we’ll look—competent! In command. As if we know the truth but the American people can’t handle the truth. Secrecy will bestow on us an air of sound stewardship. And we like that! So we will, in every revealed tranche over the decades, withhold certain documents.”

Your tax dollars at work.

*   *   *

We end with something happy. The SpaceX return of astronauts after nine months at the International Space Station was both a humanitarian achievement and a technological marvel. It was also a design marvel. The capsule, the uniforms—and here I must have a happiness freak-out about the parachutes that eased the capsule down. They were gorgeous as physical objects and beautifully designed, like high art, like a Christo installation, with their red and white and deep-hued, elegant markings to enhance visibility. At certain points before and during splashdown they moved like huge jellyfish in the sea. They were made with new stitching method and with a specialized polymer called Zylon, developed by researchers at Stanford.

It is a hard thing in life to do something so difficult and technical, so demanding of expertise and boldness, and still pay attention to beauty. It matters that this is done. Beauty can be natural (the rings of Saturn, a baby’s ear) or man-made (the rising view of Manhattan from the Brooklyn Bridge), and we must take it where it presents itself, and enjoy. And tip our hats.

At the height of its fabled Gilded Age he held a mirror up to America and said, “Not all so pretty, is it?” And the vital, burly citizens of that age peered in and felt shock. It was a distorted mirror, to be sure—the writer who created it was a leftist crusader with the soul of a propagandist—and yet in the reflection one could trace a general outline and detect, too, a florid and emerging disfigurement. I’m overwriting. I’ve just reread Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle,” and its prose, lurid and yet somehow plodding, has worked its way into my mind. But what an important novel it was, what a breakthrough. And it contains a reminder for today.

“The Jungle,” serialized in a socialist journal in 1905 and published in book form the following year, was, famously, an exposé of the harrowing practices of the Chicago-based meatpacking industry. Sinclair went undercover for seven weeks to investigate the Union Stockyards. He presents a teeming city of slums, street urchins and screaming tenement fights between recent immigrants (Poles, Lithuanians, Slovaks) who could barely understand each other’s insults. The soundtrack of their lives was Chicago’s constant hum, “a sound made up of ten thousand little sounds,” which they came to understand was “the distant lowing of ten thousand cattle, the distant grunting of ten thousand swine.”

They worked hard in the stockyards under brutal conditions. In the “chilling rooms” the men contracted rheumatism. The wool pluckers’ hands were ruined by acid. The arms of those who made the tins for canned meat became a maze of infected cuts; their illness was blood poisoning. In summer in the airless, stifling fertilizer mill, phosphates would soak into the workers’ skin, causing headache and nausea. In winter in the “killing beds” the rooms were so cold the animals’ blood froze on the flesh of the workers, who stumbled about like monsters.

There were no worker protections. Unions were shakedown operations for the city’s political machine. In mad pursuit of profits, owners sped up production lines until men broke down, then fired them and hired someone younger and stronger. The workers came to understand they weren’t working for competing companies, it was all “one great firm, the Beef Trust.”

Sinclair meant to indict capitalism’s abuse of innocent men and women who had come to America with dreams in their hearts. Those charges would have political reverberations. But when the revelations came out—advance copies of “The Jungle” had been provided to the wire services and the Hearst newspapers, which front-paged them with howling headlines—the public was most outraged by the unsanitary conditions in which their food was made. (Sinclair said wryly, “I aimed at the public’s heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach.”)

The meatpackers “doctored” rotting meat. “It was the custom . . . whenever meat was so spoiled that it could not be used for anything else, either to can it or else to chop it up into sausage.” Tubercular steers, hogs that had died of cholera on the trains—their meat was processed and sold. There was contamination from sawdust and rat dung. Inspectors were paid off.

All this caused a sensation.

Here enters Teddy Roosevelt, in his second term as president. He’d initially resisted the book: Sinclair was a socialist and a crank. In a letter to William Allen White, TR called Sinclair “hysterical, unbalanced, and untruthful.” But Sinclair had hit a nerve, and Roosevelt conceded some “basis of truth” in the allegations. He sent investigators to Chicago. There was a government probe and report. Congress enacted landmark legislation, the Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act. The latter expanded the power of a Bureau of Chemistry, which became the Food and Drug Administration.

The whole story—isn’t it something? That they got it right, that it started with a zealot who captured truths others had ignored. That journalism can work as a public benefit, and government make things better.

So now we jump to this moment. Conservatives and Republicans are, as always, impatient with governmental cost, overreach and waste, only more than usual because it’s been a while since these things were any administration’s top priority. In that time, some federal agencies, maybe many, have run wild.

But it’s good to remember now that government employs many people who help us, whom we couldn’t do without. The example always used, justly, is air-traffic controllers. They have to be cool, analytical, know their stuff, or 500 people in a jumbo jet will plunge to their deaths. Those jobs must go only to those who can take the pressure. Food inspection, obviously, is another. Seeing to the proper and safe disposal of nuclear waste. Properly coding Social Security checks.

So many crucial jobs! And it’s helpful to remember they’re usually done well. Their holders must be treated with respect as the professionals they are.

It is also true that the size and scope of government is always growing and requires sharp oversight. The arc of the moral universe is long but bends toward mischief. In our time the political left has grown adept at finding ways to support, employ and give standing to its political allies. They use government to buy off constituencies within their coalitions. That’s how you get the absurdist U.S. Agency for International Development programs Donald Trump and Elon Musk speak of so often. Their existence makes you mad. Which keeps the base stoked. And as all but children know, you can’t do nuthin’ without a stoked base.

But we have to keep our heads straight about what’s important and what’s not. And we can’t demonize government work. Some public servants really are servants.

Internationally, once we won wars and saved people. In the past half century we’ve shifted in big ways to profound generosity. We give food and bandages and help cure diseases. It matters that we are a great and generous nation, and known as such. I asked the leader of a great do-good organization if, in the clinics in South America or Africa, they showed the American flag. Yes, as do the wrappers of the food they give. That is good for us. It matters to have friends in the world. Someday we’ll be in a fix. Someday we’ll need them.

But if you are a taxpayer-funded agency or entity right now, you had better be able to say in a clear, sharp sentence what you do that helps America. Do you protect it from ptomaine poisoning? Do you enhance its reputation in the world? If you can’t produce that clear, sharp sentence, maybe you have a problem. Maybe you aren’t helping. Maybe taxpayers don’t have to pay for you.

It’s good to remember in a time of cutting that not everything is bad, that right-wing propaganda, like left-wing propaganda, often gets carried away, that the libertarian impulse is beautiful but dreamy. A libertarian would have told Upton Sinclair that the market corrects all, that a company that sells bad beef won’t survive long. That’s true. But it’s in the way of things that the rich have the resources to be discerning, and the middle careful, but the poor get sick before the butcher shop shuts down. And we have to take care of each other.

Democrats looked like fools Tuesday night. We don’t need to dwell on how they sat grim-faced, seething, or walked out while the president spoke. One stood, yelled, brandished his cane and was removed by the sergeant at arms. Others held up little paddles bearing little insults. Some wore special color-coded outfits. Almost all refused to show normal warmth or engagement. From my notes, as the camera turned and dwelled on the furious faces: “They look like the green room in hell.”

All while Donald Trump romped.

Three thoughts. One, these aren’t serious people. Two, their job was to show they are an alternative to Mr. Trump, and instead they showed why he won. Third and most important, they will continue to lose for a long time. I hadn’t known that until Tuesday.

Sometimes a party takes a concussive blow, such as the 2024 presidential loss, and you can see: They’ll shape up and come back, they’re pros, they lost an election but not their dignity. But now and then you see: No, these guys don’t know what happened, they are going to lose over and over before they get the message.

What I saw Tuesday night is that the Democratic Party in 2025, as evinced by its leaders on Capitol Hill, is too proud and stupid to change. I saw 1981. The Reagan era had begun, the Democrats had taken quite a drubbing—a landslide loss by a sitting Democratic president, and the loss of the Senate majority they had held since 1955. It was the kind of blow that reorders the mind: Democratic policies weren’t popular! They had just been massively repudiated! But the blow didn’t reorder their minds. They kept doing the same thing, as if they had a secret death wish. They lost in another landslide in 1984, and again in ’88. Finally, as 1992 approached, they realized: We need to readjust our policy stands to be more in line with those of the American people. They did, and Bill Clinton squeaked in.

We are in “Death Wish II.”

In this space we believe two strong and healthy parties vying for popular support is good for the country, and we offer advice for the Democrats.

I will start with something they won’t believe. In politics, there is bringing the love and bringing the hate. When the 13-year-old boy who had brain cancer and has always wanted to be a cop is appointed as an honorary Secret Service agent, laminated ID and all, and the child, surprised by the gesture, hugs the normally taciturn head of the Secret Service, the only thing to do, because you are human, is cheer that child. And when the president honors a young man whose late father, a veteran and policeman, had inspired his wish to serve, and dreams of attending West Point, and the president says that he has some sway in the admissions office and young man you are going to West Point—I not only got choked up when it happened I’m choked up as I write. The boy with cancer high-fives the young man, and the only response to such sweetness is tears in your eyes.

That moment is “the love.” It was showing love for regular Americans. To cheer them is to cheer us. It shows admiration for and affiliation with normal people who try, get through, endure and hold on to good hopes.

The Democrats brought the hate. They sat stone-faced, joyless and loveless. They don’t show love for Americans anymore. They look down on them, feel distance from them, instruct them, remind them to feel bad that they’re surrounded by injustice because, well, they’re unjust.

Mr. Trump says: No, man, I love you.

Which is better? Which is kinder, more generous? Which inspires? Which wins?

Democrats have to understand where they are. They have completely lost their reputation as the party of the workingman. With their bad governance of the major cities and their airy, abstract obsessions with identity politics and gender ideology, they have driven away the working class, for whom life isn’t airy or abstract. Democrats must stop listening to the left of the left of their party. It tugs them too far away from the vast majority of Americans. They have been radical on the border, on crime, on boys in the girls’ locker room. They should take those issues off the table by admitting they got them wrong.

Why do they allow the far left to punch so far above its weight? It’s not only money. “They play dirty, make threats, make people uncomfortable,” a Democratic elected official said. Normal Democrats want to dodge a fight with them. But the fight has to be had. The sooner you have it, the sooner it’s over and the party makes itself into a fighting force again.

In the near term, James Carville says the party should play possum—“roll over” and make believe they’re dead when the predator approaches. (It almost worked for Joe Biden.) I’d add play shrewd possum—align with what the Trump administration is doing that might be productive, but with a variation that shows you have a heart, you are protective of the excellent and the diligent and deserving of protection. Help Elon Musk fight waste, fraud and abuse, but make clear you are protecting essential programs and peerless professionals. Mr. Musk is going to make bad mistakes; he’s new to government and doing everything everywhere all at once. When he does, the possum should become a lion.

Know your stuff, have the data. “Trump bad” isn’t enough to win. You have to start realizing how popular he is with your own voters. He’s a masculine presence, he’s funny, and he likes Americans. Those are three powerful qualities in America right now.

Democrats on Capitol Hill are pushed to act like jerky drama queens by activists in their base. Leave that to Nancy Mace. If they need behavioral role models: Take the seriousness of John Roberts and Amy Coney Barrett, who present themselves as even-keeled adults and speak thoughtfully, and add in the public good cheer and capability of Elena Kagan. Sen. Elissa Slotkin was calm and plain-spoken in her response. Emulate her. It will help retrieve and rebuild your party’s reputation.

Taking all bait won’t work. The administration is throwing new chum in the water every day, you’ll look disorganized, insatiable and desperate if you endlessly swim to it.

Be strategic. Mr. Trump is a man who goes too far. He confuses boldness with wildness, can’t see the line. He’ll give you opportunities. Take the big ones.

Stop listening to your consultants. They know the Democratic Party but not America. They’ve always had the media in their pocket and it’s made them lazy and lacking in insight. Keep going to town halls in small and medium-size towns and listen, listen, listen.

If Democrats don’t wise up and sober up, Mr. Trump and the Republicans will know there is no major party to slow them, temper them, stop them. This wouldn’t be good. They need an opponent. The Democratic Party’s not reporting for duty is a dangerous thing.