Peggy Noonan

When you think aloud for a living you’re lately getting a lot of wry comments like “It must be hard to come up with a topic with nothing going on.”

“It’s drinking from a fire hose,” the journalist will reply. Meanwhile, normal people are asking: He doesn’t really think he’s a king, right? I’ve grown tired of saying, “Well, that was insane,” and we’re barely a month in.

The most charitable gloss on the administration style—here we’re thinking of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s blithe announcement that he wants to cut defense spending 8% a year for the next five years—is that they’re simply riding high and have grown full of themselves, as opposed to clinically insane. The other day I remembered an old story about Muhammad Ali. The great boxer was flying to a championship bout, feeling on top of the world. As the plane taxied down the runway, a dutiful stewardess kept coming by: “Sir, please fasten your seat belt.” He smiled. “Superman don’t need no seat belt.” She said, “Superman don’t need no airplane. Buckle up.” And he did.

But that wouldn’t fully explain things.

The president’s remarks on Ukraine this week were wild and destructive. He isn’t wrong to wish to end that conflict—war is brutality and waste. Everyone knew that it would end on unsatisfying terms. But Ukraine didn’t start it, Russia did, in defiance of international law. The war isn’t Volodymyr Zelensky’s fault, he isn’t a dictator, he isn’t loathed by his people—all those things President Trump said were untrue. And the vast majority of those listening to these charges know they are untrue. Asking “Why does Trump do this?” is a decade-long cliché, but really—why does he do this?

Ukraine is a sovereign nation. Its citizens put everything they had on the field to defend themselves. Mr. Zelensky entered world history with spirit and guts, refusing to flee Kyiv: “I need ammo, not a ride.” After the Cold War Ukraine agreed to relinquish the nuclear weapons housed there for a promise the U.S. would always have its back. They trusted us. Must American presidents honor the honestly made vows of their predecessors? In this case surely yes, at pain of announcing to every friend we have, “You’re on your own, Uncle Sam has left the building.” Trump supporters think they want that message sent. It is a careless and destructive one.

It isn’t bad to tell Europe’s leaders that they have lost touch with their own people and no longer seem protective of them or their nations’ longstanding political principles, as Vice President JD Vance did last week. Candor is a compliment, as they say, it implies you can take it. It isn’t bad to tell them they’ve only grudgingly paid for a fraction of their own defense and need to step up. But long history should temper your approach. We and Europe have been friends a long time. We came from them. Their blood was our starting blood. It may be quaint to note this but it’s true: We go back. You can and will have disagreements with such friends, but when you speak to them publicly it can’t be casual or without warmth. It must take the past into account, even when they don’t. Especially when they don’t.

This is a matter not only of grace but of practicality. The future will be a hard place. All the unfortunate aspects of man’s nature will be sped up and made more fateful by technology such as artificial intelligence. In that world we will need old friends. There is a speech by St. Thomas More in “A Man for All Seasons”: “Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned round on you—where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country’s planted thick with laws . . . and if you cut them down—and you’re just the man to do it—d’you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then?” Replace “law” with “friend.”

We won’t easily get through the future without them. Estranging them isn’t a safe thing to do.

On Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency, anyone seeing how he’s presented himself to the public the last few years would conclude with justice that he is brilliant and impulsive, has penetrating insights and arguable judgment, seems both sincere and calculating, and is trying to create something stable while loving drama too much and exciting the audience too much.

All my adult life the answer to “let’s find waste, fraud and abuse within the federal government” has been, “Whatever you find will be a rounding error, it isn’t worth the pursuit, the money is in the entitlements and defense, all else is nonsense, don’t even try.” I never thought that true and never saw it only as a question of saving money but of assuring citizens that their government can be trusted. It is heartening to see DOGE attempt reform—exciting, actually. Mr. Musk comes in and zaps bad programs here and silly spending there and suddenly the good parts of the previously more-or-less unaccountable U.S. Agency for International Development are being blended into the State Department, and the bad parts are being shuttered. This allows citizens to feel they can direct their government. Which cheers them. They didn’t know it was possible.

But judgments about the definition of good spending seem to be up to Mr. Musk and his young men, who are assumed to know fat from muscle. Do they? We don’t know. Mr. Musk may be a freedom-loving American idealist who’s deeply grateful for what our founders created and who’d give all to protect it. But then for all I know, he could be a secret operative for a Liechtenstein-based cartel. He and his underlings are political novices. There is no one Mr. Musk need answer to but Mr. Trump, and Mr. Trump likes what’s playing well with the base but is changeable. As aides sighed of Richard Nixon when he became enraptured by an intellectual like Daniel Patrick Moynihan or was taken by lessons gleaned from Robert Blake’s biography of Disraeli, “the boss is in love again this week.”

Everyone knows DOGE will make mistakes, but that isn’t the point. You have to be a fool to think there won’t be dreadful mistakes with broad repercussions. To take on seemingly all parts of government at the same time is to unsettle and confuse the entire government at the same moment. That is dangerous. It was a mistake to announce going in that they’d find $2 trillion in savings. Now anything less and their foes will paint them as failures, so they’ll want to meet their target, which will increase the chance they make or recommend cuts that shouldn’t be made.

In a larger way, all the movement and action of the first month of the Trump administration means that every president after Mr. Trump will have to show wild boldness in pursuit of his aims or be called weak. Presidents can’t stand it when you call them weak, so they’ll be wild too. Rightists, you won’t like this when it comes from the left. We’ll veer dramatically back and forth.

Like Muhammad Ali, buckle up.

We aren’t in a constitutional crisis. If the administration takes an action, a court holds it unconstitutional, and President Trump defies the court, then we will enter a constitutional crisis.

The president said this week he will obey all court orders as he did throughout his first administration, and appeal if necessary. But he said that Tuesday, and next week it may be different. As Mark Halperin has observed, no Trump decision is ever really made because every Trump decision may soon be reversed, by Mr. Trump.

But if you go by two things—the temperament of this White House and the ability of its adversaries to launch innumerable cases within all levels of the judicial system—odds are good a crisis will come.

What then? A hellacious struggle. I’ve been going back to Andrew Jackson’s presidency (1829-37), which can be seen as a nonstop constitutional crisis. Trump supporters used to trace parallels between Mr. Trump and the seventh president, whose portrait the 45th president displayed in the Oval Office and the 47th brought back. Now they natter on about William McKinley. But their spirit isn’t of the placid McKinley, it is Jacksonian. They are denying their own spirit, burying it in a well-dressed, even-toned professionalism. The outsider Elon Musk in his jeans and his jacket bragging about feeding federal agencies into the wood chipper—that is Jacksonian.

Having been cheated out of the 1824 election—he really was, in grim bargaining between Secretary of State John Quincy Adams and House Speaker Henry Clay—Jackson defeated Adams four years later after an embittering campaign marked by “slander, slight and innuendo.” That is H.W. Brands in his excellent “Andrew Jackson: His Life and Times.” Jackson saw the theft of the 1824 election as “emblematic of a deeper corruption that undermined American liberty and prevented the ordinary people of America from controlling their government.”

What a showman he was. He rode a white stallion down Pennsylvania Avenue after he was sworn in. A longtime Washingtonian quoted by Mr. Brands was shocked. “Such a cortege as followed him! Country men, farmers, gentlemen, mounted and dismounted, boys, women and children, black and white.” No one called them “deplorables,” but that’s how official Washington viewed them. The White House reception was famously overwhelmed by “the rabble mob,” in the long-timer’s words. China and glass were broken, fights broke out. “Those who got in could not get out by the door again, but had to scramble out of windows.”

The nation had been a constitutional republic only 40 years. Jackson saw much that had settled in and needed undoing. His trained his fire on the federal workforce, moving against permanent tenure. “No one man has any more intrinsic right to official station than another.” He favored “rotation”—employees should work a few years and make way for new ones. Mr. Brands put the best estimate at “between one-tenth and one-fifth of federal office holders replaced during Jackson’s tenure other than by ordinary attrition.” Jackson didn’t mind that they feared being fired. Mr. Brands sums up his thinking: “A little fear would have a sobering effect on the tipsy, a vivifying effect on the lazy, a straightening effect on the wayward.” Replaced workers saw their slots filled by Jackson enthusiasts. “To the victor belongs the spoils,” Jackson is often quoted, but it was a friendly observer, Sen. William Marcy (D., N.Y.), who said it.

In Jackson’s terms there were two major clashes between the executive branch and the judiciary. The first was what came to be called the Bank War. The charter of the Bank of the U.S. was expiring in 1836. Jackson didn’t like the bank. I think as a once-impoverished frontiersman he just didn’t like banks, but his arguments came down to a populist trope: The bank favored a moneyed elite over common people. In December 1829 he informed Congress, with a faint air of menace, that not only did he oppose the bank, so did “a large portion of our fellow citizens.”

Congress voted in 1832 to recharter the bank. Jackson vetoed the bill. As a struggle ground on, he was re-elected in a landslide.

The Supreme Court had held in 1819 that the bank was constitutional, and its charter hadn’t expired. Jackson pulled all federal deposits from the bank and disbursed them to state banks. His first Treasury secretary refused to make the transfer and Jackson fired him, hiring a more compliant replacement while the Senate was in recess. Clay, by then a senator, said Jackson had no constitutional authority to do what he was doing. The Senate censured the president.

The transfer of funds went through and was followed by financial panic. Jackson claimed there was no real distress beyond that felt by speculators and fraudsters. It was bitter. The president of the bank said just because Jackson had “scalped Indians and imprisoned judges” didn’t mean he’d succeed here. Jackson said the Bank was trying to kill him, “but I will kill it!” Federal money flowed into the states, liquidity eased, and the bank was blamed for the panic. Jackson left the White House in triumph. But his successor, Martin Van Buren, buffeted by continual economic aftershocks, was thrown out after one term

Mr. Brands: “Politics in the age of Jackson wasn’t for the faint of heart and especially not for the weak of mind.” In 1835 a man aimed a pistol at Jackson’s heart from 10 feet. The gun misfired. So did a second pistol. Afterward, when police tested the pistols they fired perfectly. Jackson’s supporters came to see his survival as the work of Providence.

The other crisis revolved around the Supreme Court case Worcester v. Georgia (1832). Samuel Worcester, a white Christian missionary living in Cherokee territory, opposed Georgia’s imposition of its laws removing Cherokee control from their lands. He brought suit on their behalf. The justices found Georgia’s efforts unconstitutional because the Cherokee nation was a sovereign entity.

Jackson refused to enforce the decision. He literally ignored it, seeing it as undemocratic. He is often misquoted as saying, of the court’s chief justice, “John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it.” It was New-York Tribune editor Horace Greeley who used those words to capture Jackson’s attitude. What Jackson said is that the decision “fell stillborn.” The court “cannot coerce Georgia to yield to its mandate.”

Jackson allowed Georgia to annex Cherokee lands and pursue the Cherokee, contributing to the forced relocation of the American tribes to the west of the Mississippi—the catastrophic Trail of Tears in which thousands perished from disease and exposure.

But a precedent, of sorts, had been established: The Supreme Court had limited power in enforcing its decisions without the executive branch’s support.

It was the anti-Jacksonian Sen. Daniel Webster of Massachusetts who grasped the underlying dynamic of the age. Though the Constitution specified a separation of powers, day-to-day democracy could override it. “Were it not for the fear of the outdoor popularity of General Jackson,” he wrote, “the Senate would have negatived more than half his nominations.” Congress feared or was tempered by Jackson’s support.

That is where Trumpism puts its bet, on his popularity “outside.” Though Jackson’s election victories were landslides.

I want to talk about a simple thing. It’s a preoccupation that came again to mind as I watched President Trump sign, in an East Room ceremony on Wednesday, the executive order ending federal funding for educational programs that mandate biological males be allowed to compete on girls’ or women’s sports teams.

The mood in the room wasn’t triumphal or mean, but grateful and joyous. If you still seek to understand the depth of the president’s popularity with his voters, you need look no further than that ceremony, all or parts of which were on cable and broadcast news. It is still amazing to me that the Democratic Party put itself so firmly on the wrong side of this issue. I ask donors and party leaders why, and they can never say how it happened.

My simple thought: that in our politics now we consistently go too far and ask too much. It has become a major dynamic in the past 20 years or so. It manifests in a kind of ideological maximalism. You must get everything you want and grant your foe nothing. In terms of the issue above, you don’t ask society to give you something you deserve—good and just treatment of all transgender folk. Instead you insist that others see reality exactly as you do—that if a man experiences himself as a woman, then you must agree that he is a woman, and this new insight must be incorporated into all human activity, such as sports.

Reaction to the Trump executive order from those who disagree with it has been curiously absent. The reason is that they know they went too far.

The biggest and most politically consequential example of going too far, in the past generation, has been the Democratic Party and illegal immigration. Everyone knows this so I’ll say it quickly. If you deliberately allow many millions to cross the southern border illegally, thus deliberately provoking those who came here legally or were born here, Americans will become a people comfortable with—supportive of—their forced removal, certainly of those who are criminals.

America was usually pretty chill about deportations in the past: They’re not how we roll. We stubbornly admire those in our family lines who acted up when they got here, and while there’s always been a lot of finger-waving, we’ve traditionally given new immigrants wide latitude and sympathy. A century ago Irish immigrants filled the paddy wagons, which weren’t called that for nothing, and Italians imported an entire criminal organization, the Mafia. Americans have always quietly bragged about the mischief and mayhem in their families way back, but they’ve grown stricter and less reflexively sympathetic. That’s because the Biden administration went too far.

Jump to what has been going on the past few weeks in Washington, with the unelected Elon Musk reorganizing, if that’s the word, the federal agencies. Here I pick on him, in part to show fairness. He is surely a genius, a visionary, a titan, but there is something childish and primitive about him. He has wild confidence in his ability to engineer desired outcomes, but unstable elements have a way of exploding in the beaker, and like everyone else from Silicon Valley he lacks a sense of the tragic. They think human life can be rationally shaped and perfected, that every problem just needs the right wrench, and in any case they all think they’re God.

My fear, here we switch metaphors, is that Mr. Musk and his young staffers and acolytes are mad doctors who’ll put 30 chemo ports in the sick body. They’ll not only kill the cancer, they’ll kill the patient.

But they are up against, or trying to reform, a government whose agencies themselves were often maximalist and went too far.

Of all the agencies being batted about the one we will remember first when we recall this period in history is the U.S. Agency for International Development, so much of whose line-item spending was devoted to cultural imperialism. You have seen the lists. USAID produced a DEI musical in Ireland, funded LGBT activism in Guatemala. It spent $426,000 to help Indonesian coffee companies become more climate- and gender-friendly, $447,000 to promote the expansion of atheism in Nepal, and on and on.

When you look at what they were pushing on the world you think: They’re not fighting anti-American feeling, they are causing anti-American feeling.

Who is defending these USAID programs? Nobody. Obviously not Republicans, but not Democrats either. Everyone knows the agency went too far.

In the past, USAID stonewalled lawmakers when they asked for information. If it had been forthcoming, or even moderately clever, it would have allowed Congress to find, scream about and remove its zanier items and avoided being shuttered, with the job losses that will entail.

“We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper,” Mr. Musk tweeted on Monday. Earlier, he called it “a criminal organization.” Mr. Trump called it an agency run by “radical left lunatics.” Having seen the line items, who would mourn?

In general, the public seems to be paying attention and accepting, or cheering. Natalie Allison of the Washington Post went to a diner in Plains, Pa., where she asked Tammy Malloy, a waitress who voted for Mr. Trump, how she felt about the first 10 days. Ms. Malloy said she was glad the Pentagon would move against DEI. She added: “There’s two genders. I don’t care if you identify as a monkey, you’re still either a male or female. The last four years shoved it down our throats.”

But the Trump White House had better hope there are no catastrophic effects from shuttering USAID efforts that actually help people, contribute to our safety, and enhance our standing in the world. Monitoring and studying Ebola in Africa is one example.

The White House should worry too about what is reportedly happening in other agencies, such as the FBI and the CIA. It looks like chaos, which always entails individual injustice, in this case to some of those who’ve served the U.S. well, and it will be surprising if there aren’t at least some negative national-security consequences. You can’t build the plane while flying it.

I circle back to where this column began. An odd thing is that Democratic donors, strategists and party professionals seem incapable of taking offending issues seriously. They think they’re arguments being engaged in by those who are about five status-levels below them. This shows disrespect for those who feel the victim, for the 10th-grade girl on the volleyball team who’s up against hulking guys or the woman treated roughly by the illegal immigrant with a record. It’s as if they can’t be bothered to shut down the actual radicals in their party who cause the problem. When things get like this—when the wise men and powerful women refuse to do what they must that the party would survive—parties fail.

Advice for everyone: The big domestic political lesson of the first quarter of the 21st century is “Don’t go too far.” That way lies loss, potentially of more than you can imagine.

I would like to point out a simple fact. A major and unnoticed part of Donald Trump’s power is that 100% of Americans know who “the president” is, including children above 5 and nonnative speakers. I base this on personal interactions with strangers of all sorts. Since I made up “100%” because there’s no way to prove it, I will guess at some other numbers I believe to be true. Eighty percent know, in some broad sense, what his policies are, and more than 60% have some sense of an action he took last week: “He fired everybody.”

No modern president has achieved this level of complete cultural saturation. It gives him power in this ill-educated, broken-up, low-attention-span country. You remember “Jaywalking,” Jay Leno’s comedy bit in which he’d ask people on the street, “Who was Abe Lincoln?” (“A singer?”) When was the American Revolution? “Um, 1970?” We haven’t become more historically literate.

You have to keep this in mind to understand the moment we’re in. Mr. Trump has pierced American consciousness in this way. He has broken through as an instantly recognizable, memeable, cartoonable figure—the hair, the red tie, the mouth—but he also provides, deliberately and not, iconic moments that connect to other iconic moments. The tech barons arrayed behind him as he was sworn in, and the White House meeting hours later in which the president promoted artificial intelligence. As I watched them at the inauguration I abstracted. It was like Elon is passing the solid gold phone to Mark Zuckerberg, who nods and passes it to Jeff Bezos, who passes it to Sam Altman, who marvels at its weight and shine.

That of course is taken from the scene in “The Godfather Part II” in which the American business behemoths sit at a conference table in the palace of Cuban President Fulgencio Batista, as he communicates they’re safe with him because he loves business. Almost every American adult has seen a “Godfather” movie. I believe that as they watch the second Trump administration they occasionally connect it to themes of that great drama. When Mr. Trump fires the inspector general, when ICE gets the illegal-immigrant child molester, when Mr. Trump tries to get rid of the federal workforce—he’s settling all family business. His second term can be understood as an attempt to change his image from Sonny to Michael.

Last week I had four days in Washington with members of both parties, many elected officials. The only subject was Mr. Trump.

Republican lawmakers, including those most supportive of the president, are beside themselves with anxiety. When you speak to them—off the record, between friendly acquaintances—and ask how it’s going, they shift, look off, shrug: You know how it’s going. A GOP senator who supports the president had a blanched look. “He doesn’t do anything to make it easy,” he shrugged.

What is the meaning of the averted eyes and anxious faces? It means Trump 2.0 isn’t better. It means for all the talk of the new professionalism in the Trump operation, they have to get used to the chaos again and ride it, tempting the gods of order and steadiness. After one week they concluded the first administration wasn’t a nervous breakdown and the second isn’t a recovery; instead, again they’re on a ship with a captain in an extended manic phase who never settles into soothing depression.

In a general way, also, there is something big I sensed. Among those who think about foreign affairs and world history, the great story of the past dozen years or so has been the collapse of the postwar international order that created systems and ways of operating whose dynamics and assumptions were clear, predictable, and kept an enduring peace. You can say the fall began when Russia invaded Georgia in 2008 or Ukraine in 2022. Take your pick, it’s over.

I saw a broad and growing sense in Washington that American domestic politics, or at least that part of its politics that comes from Washington, is at a similar inflection point. That the second rise of Donald Trump is a total break with the past—that stable order, healthy expectations, the honoring of a certain old moderation, and strict adherence to form and the law aren’t being “traduced”; they are ending. That something new has begun. People aren’t sure they’re right about this and no one has a name for the big break, but they know we have entered something different—something more emotional, more tribal and visceral.

There is the strong man, and the cult of personality, and the leg-breakers back home who keep the congressional troops in line. In 2017, a lot of people who watch closely and think deeply, thought: We’re having an odd moment, but we’ll snap back into place. Now they are thinking something new has begun. American politics was a broad avenue with opposing lanes for a very long time, at least a century, and now we have turned and are on a different avenue, on a different slope, with different shadows.

There’s a sense we’re living through times we’ll understand only in retrospect. But the collapse of the old international order and the break in America’s old domestic order are shaping this young century.

So far Mr. Trump is governing by executive order. This contributes to the uneasiness. Such orders are legitimate, sometimes necessary. Barack Obama used them heavily—“I’ve got a pen.” Mr. Trump increased their use, Joe Biden more so, and Mr. Trump is turbocharging their use. The heavy use of executive orders makes all politics personal, having to do with the man who orders and signs with a flourish. Making it personal distorts our understanding of what a leader can and should do. Executive orders ignore the branch of government called Congress and work against its authority, its role in the republican drama. They give the impression we are a government of one branch. Doing all this habituates the public to the idea of authoritarianism, of rule by the strongman. We will pick a new caudillo and he will save us with his pen! When you do away with branches and balances you cause trouble.

Has it hurt his popularity? No. People back boldness when they think a lot has gone wrong and needs righting. They’d expect a certain amount of mayhem. And with Mr. Trump, chaos is baked in.

A word to Democrats trying to figure out how to save their party. The most eloquent of them, of course, think the answer is finding the right words. We need to talk more like working people, we need Trump’s touch with popular phrasing.

The answer isn’t to talk but do. Be supple. The Trumpian policies you honestly support—endorse them, join in the credit. If you think violent illegal immigrants should be removed, then back current efforts while standing—firmly, publicly—on the side of peaceful, hardworking families doing no harm and in fact contributing. Admit what your party’s gotten wrong the past 15 years. Don’t be defensive, be humble.

Most of all, make something work. You run nearly every great city in the nation. Make one work—clean it up, control crime, smash corruption, educate the kids.

You want everyone in the country to know who you are? Save a city.

What is the honorable way to oppose while hoping for the best, to oppose while being as quick to recognize progress as to see failure, to oppose while appreciating any outcomes that are healthy for and helpful to the United States of America? And without forgetting why you oppose? We’ll find out. This is our goal. History is long and our moment within it short. Play it straight and say what you see.

As for the past week, where to start?

It was another Trumpian triumph. Talk about energy in the executive. President Trump is flooding all zones, throwing whole pots of spaghetti against the wall. The spirit is Teddy Roosevelt, high dynamism and canny show business, though the new president has taken to referring to TR’s more orderly predecessor, William McKinley.

Mr. Trump successfully turned the page. He established this feeling: The past is sodden, the future electric.

As he sat at the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office Monday night, holding an impromptu news conference—this was after he gave an inaugural address, a long, ad libbed postinaugural speech to the overflow crowd, a Capitol One Arena speech accompanied by the public signing of executive orders, and before the sword dancing at the first of three inaugural balls—as he sat at the Resolute desk simultaneously taking questions and signing more executive orders—this one makes clear the United States owns Saturn—I realized three things:

I once wrote of him as Chief Crazy Horse but as he signed, I thought of . . . an old nickname for Tom Brokaw. Years ago his producers marveled at his stamina—he could sit in that anchor chair and go live all day and all night, he was indefatigable, never lost focus, he didn’t even have to use the bathroom. They called him “Duncan the Wonder Horse.” That was Mr. Trump this week.

He is going to utterly dominate our brainspace. He is a neurological imperialist, he storms in and stays. In his public self, Joe Biden asked nothing and gave nothing. Mr. Trump demands and dominates: Attention must be paid. It was said years ago that Fox News viewers were so loyal that they never changed the channel and the Fox logo burned itself into the screens. Donald Trump won’t be happy until he’s burned himself into the nation’s corneas.

He is at the top of his powers, top of his game. He used to be testy and aggrieved with reporters because he yearned for their admiration. Now he treats them with patience and calm because he doesn’t care about them. He’s got his own thing going. If they don’t like him it’s their problem, with their puny little numbers and shrinking networks.

Finally, my optimistic thought. I found myself wondering if the first Trump administration was Mr. Trump’s public nervous breakdown and his second administration will be his recovery. Is that possible? His first was chaos and fury, ending in 1/6. What we’re seeing now is a person who presents as even, collected and commanding, who isn’t wholly uninformed and has a plan. We all tell ourselves stories, and that, this week, is mine.

His inaugural address was exactly like a speech by Donald Trump. He fleetingly asserted a golden future and quickly reverted to insulting the presidents who’d shown up to maintain form, most pointedly his immediate predecessor, who listened impassively. A friend said of Mr. Biden, sweetly, “At least he won’t remember.” I include the insult because it is deserved after he pardoned his family for any crimes they might have committed. This was a scandalous act that embarrasses America in the eyes of the world—you with your moral pretensions and your skeevy elites on the take. It was the act of someone who doesn’t care anymore.

His friends were encouraged by the celebrations of Jimmy Carter when he died—“In time, history will be kind to Joe.” It will not. He took a torch to that possibility in his last official act.

Of Mr. Trump’s executive orders, some were sound, such as the crackdown on illegal immigration. But let me tell you what happens when you pardon virtually everyone who did Jan. 6: You get more Jan. 6ths. When people who commit crimes see that their punishment will be minimal they are encouraged. It was a wicked act. Conservatives are tough on crime because of the pain and disorder it causes. In that case it pained an entire nation. Jan. 6 too shamed us in the eyes of the world. This pardon was not a patriotic act.

What the president’s appointees have to balance in their minds is two opposing thoughts. One: They just won an overwhelming victory—the presidency, Congress, the popular vote—with almost all the institutions of the country arrayed against them. The other: Mr. Trump won 77 million votes and Ms. Harris 75 million. The margin of victory was 49.7% to 48.2%. We are a split country. The victors had a stunning victory but half the country opposed them. The point isn’t to advise gradualism or moderation, which in Mr. Trump’s case is absurd and already overtaken by events. It is to say: Know your position. For all the triumphalism of the moment Trump staffers shouldn’t feel impervious or unhurtable. Their position can change overnight.

An example: the tech billionaires in the front rows at the inauguration. It was a Trumpian power-flex: Look who’s on my side. But they aren’t kissing the ring, they’re tough and willful men who do what they must to get what they want. What they won was a live White House event in which the president excitedly prompted them, like a yokel, on how artificial intelligence will cure cancer. That’s not all it can do, read a little Geoffrey Hinton. AI doesn’t need a cheerleader; it needs caution and gravity. But it seems to have just won the formal imprimatur of the new administration. To be taken in like this by subtle high-class hustlers wasn’t promising and fresh but embarrassing.

Democrats so far are nonexistent as the opposition. In the long term their passivity is a strategy: Let Mr. Trump control immigration and kill woke; that will remove the issues people most hate about the Democratic Party. Once he solves them, the issues are gone. In the short term this isn’t a strategy but another indication of lostness: They don’t know what they believe in and have no leader. The idea that Barack Obama will swoop in to save them is ridiculous. That selfish man isn’t interested in a fight that would expose him to fire.

It will be interesting to see how the world arranges itself. Eight years ago when Mr. Trump rose, Europe thought it was witnessing an aberrational freak show, something visited on them like a spaceship. It would disappear in four years. The only ones who saw the implications of his rise were themselves slightly nutty, like Nigel Farage. Now they’re watching the Republicans in Washington and seeing: In four years Mr. Trump will be gone but Trumpism will stay, it is entrenched. Even rising Democrats will take cues from it. This is a new dispensation. It will be interesting to see how they adjust.

For four years it’s going to be non-stop, 24/7 rock-’em-sock-’em. God bless our beloved country. History ahead, everybody hold on tight.

When I was a teenager my family’s house burned down and every possession but our car was lost. This was in Rutherford, N.J., in 1969 on a Saturday night in May. At some point before midnight a lamp without a shade fell over on a bed upstairs, and a fire started that no one saw or felt until the room was fully engulfed, as the entire house soon would be. My parents had been watching television downstairs. My sister Dorian, 6, was asleep in the bedroom she shared with Patty, 8. Our sister Kathy, 14, came into their room, they remembered this week, and said get up, put on your clothes, the house is on fire. Commotion all around. Patty and Dorian tried to put on the same robe. Dorian remembers the noise, Patty the smoke: “You couldn’t see your hand in front of your face.” They all ran downstairs and out of the house. “I just felt shock,” Dorian said.

They watched the fire from the sidewalk across the street and saw the volunteer firemen rush in.

Neighbors took them in for pudding and Jell-O. The next morning they walked through the debris. Dorian found only an old Barbie, singed and bent. Patty remembers the dining-room ceiling was on top of the table, and the basement was a swimming pool.

We were a family of nine, two parents and seven kids ranging in age from 6 to 21, so it was a busy place, a lot of moving parts. The afternoon before the fire I’d gone down the shore with school friends. In those pre-cellphone days no one knew where I was or how to reach me. We returned the morning after the fire. As we pulled up my father stood in the street. He leaned in the car window and said: “The house burned down last night.” I looked—the facade of the first floor was there, but there was nothing behind it.

I too went through the debris. In what remained of my room there were papers and paperbacks in a corner, nothing else.

My parents didn’t know if we had insurance, weren’t sure if they were paid up, and because it was the old days there was no way to find out until Monday morning, when offices opened. They had to wait 36 hours to find out if they’d lost everything. They finally got word—the insurance was included in the mortgage payments, we were OK. But imagine those 36 hours.

To this day we almost never talk about what happened, and if we do we call it “the fire” and not “the time the house burned down.” But all of us find ourselves thinking of it when there’s a terrible story, like California. Because you never get over a fire. It’s serious, it’s sobering. Losing what you have changes you, the precariousness and impermanence of things enters you in a new way.

And it will change California.

If your first thoughts during a catastrophe are political then maybe something in you has gotten too tight and reflexive, but if your thoughts don’t come to include the political then maybe something in you has gotten too unreflective and rote. All disasters have political reverberations. I suspect for California this will in a general way involve a new shift, a reorientation toward reality.

Government, on whatever level, exists first to keep citizens and their property safe. That’s the bottom line: keeping people and what they have in one piece. Safe from fire and from crime, safe within a criminal-justice system that works and protects people. People need an electrical grid that works, a clean water system, sufficient police. It is hard to do these primary and essential things, hard to see to them every day and improve them wherever possible. It takes concentration and focus.

In California as elsewhere ideology has allowed—and encouraged—unrealism about the essential responsibilities of government. It encourages a dispersal of forces and attention. But even though ideology and philosophy are a part of the California story, I want to focus on the practical. California’s political and governing classes have for decades been preoccupied not enough by the primary responsibilities of government and too much by unquantifiable secondary and tertiary issues—world climate change, notions of equity.

Their attention was consumed by the abstract and theoretical, not the concrete and fully present. This is true of all states and cities that don’t work well. It is reflected in their budgeting and staffing decisions.

Citizens must insist governments focus on the primary, essential things.

A one-party state will yield one-party rule that encourages sloth, carelessness and corruption. People on a team cover up for their own. Good government comes from competition. Los Angeles hasn’t elected a Republican mayor in this century. California hasn’t had a Republican governor since 2011. It is a Democratic state. But where there is no competition for excellence in which two parties attempt to gain and keep a good public reputation, there will be no freshness—just the same party drones performing the same tasks founded on the same assumptions, over and over.

You can’t govern successfully for long as a one-party state. I suspect part of the new realism will involve coming to terms with this fact.

The current facts of California were memorably reported this week by Sean McLain, Dan Frosch and Joe Flint of this newspaper. In Altadena, where the lemons hanging from trees look like lumps of coal, where almost 3,000 structures were lost, scores of residents “have defied orders to evacuate, staying behind to protect what is left of their properties from looters and more fires after losing faith in authorities.”

They have lost faith because they are realists: State and local government have proved unequal to the crisis. Residents patrol the streets and question strangers while living in “a Hobbesian world without electricity or clean drinking water.” Some are armed. The authorities may not let them return if they leave, so they arranged for friends to bring them food at checkpoints. Authorities then ordered supplies not be let through.

Nothing speaks of a failure of government like this: that citizens are forced to function as police, and when officials find out someone is doing what they’ve failed to do, they shut it down. It is an unbelievable breakdown in the right order of things.

In Pacific Palisades, according to the Journal, some neighbors hired a private water truck in case buried embers or sparks raining down start another fire. Their effort too was blocked by law-enforcement officials. The citizens were well-connected and called someone who knew the governor to ask the truck be allowed in. Apparently it was. They have been criticized for this online, unjustly. In a time of peril you use everything you have to keep things safe. Too bad the government didn’t.

When you have been through a fire it leaves you determined that things around you be sturdy and grounded. It reminds you that government must be driven by respect for one thing: reality. It must focus its greatest energies not on second- and third-tier issues but primary and essential ones.

Two big speeches are coming up, President-elect Trump’s Inaugural Address on Monday, Jan. 20, and President Biden’s farewell address, expected in the days just preceding.

To Mr. Trump: Turn the page on this historical moment and how people see you.

Last time you gave an inaugural address, it was grim and dark. “Mothers and children trapped in poverty in our inner cities; rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation.” American strength and confidence had “disappeared over the horizon.” The “American carnage” must stop. It was stark, and it landed with such a jolt that a startled George W. Bush was widely reported to have turned to Hillary Clinton in the stands and shared his inner literary critic. “That was some weird s—.” It was.

There was a sense conveyed that you were grabbing corrupt political elites by the lapels and naming facts they would never name, facts they had created and actively obscured. But it rattled rather than roused, in part because you were understood to be a reality-TV star who, in some bizarre, psychedelic twist of American fortune, had become president. You are no longer understood that way. You are understood as a political phenomenon putting his mark on an age.

And O God, life is hard enough. People need hope. Five years of the pandemic, its aftermath and angers, of cultural furies, of inflation and endless politics—people feel beat, like they were through something bad and still aren’t sure what it was. Young men and women need to feel, as they enter American history, that they’re part of something rising, not falling. The latent optimism the young always feel—they need to know it’s grounded in something real. Everyone needs to feel we can come back, turn it around, light the world, be the beacon again. “Where we’re going we don’t need roads.” We’re off to Mars, gonna dig that black gold from the ground, Dow’s soaring, we’re the jobs-making machine that’s the family-making machine that’s the envy of the world.

In public appearances you sometimes refer to a “golden age.” Paint it. The country needs a mood shift. Paint a bright future that is achievable—put a name on it, a stamp on it, send it out there.

Your first inauguration was all brass. Make this one gold. Someone who works with you has said, “This is the best possible Trump.” That after almost being shot to death, after having been politically dead, too, and having roared back and risen from the ashes, that after all these near-death experiences followed by triumph, something’s shifted in you. He didn’t say “changed”—Trump doesn’t change—but it’s affected your thinking, attitude, approach.

In the speech that begins your presidency, be the best possible Trump. It will be good for the country.

As for Mr. Biden, presidential farewells are a long tradition stretching back to George Washington and a unique opportunity, while laying down power, to say what you weren’t fully able to say before—to warn, to advise, to explain a problem coming down the pike that we need to think about now. You’re leaving, you’ve got a parting gift, it’s wisdom.

Some farewells have been prophetic. Mr. President, take some time this weekend and read Dwight Eisenhower’s, which was a little masterpiece. He spoke to the nation from the Oval Office on Jan. 17, 1961, and even though he’d been president for eight years and commander of Allied forces in World War II, he spoke briefly—just under 10 minutes—and didn’t brag about anything in his personal or public history. His legacy wasn’t on his mind.

He spoke soberly, in a way that was dry but straight and clear. Each word had a reason for being there. Eisenhower had once drafted speeches for Gen. Douglas MacArthur and knew how to do it.

He called his farewell “a message of leave-taking.” He wished the President-elect John F. Kennedy “godspeed.” He said America was strong—“the most influential and most productive nation in the world.” But we faced a unique challenge in Soviet communism, which he characterized as “global in scope, atheistic in character, ruthless in purpose, and insidious in method.” He implied we’d face that problem a long time.

Now he gave the first of three warnings.

To meet the pressures of the moment, we need “not so much the emotional and transitory sacrifices of crisis” but the ability to move forward “steadily, surely, and without complaint.” For Americans, “there is a recurring temptation to feel that some spectacular and costly action could become the miraculous solution to all current difficulties.” But no, what we have to do is “maintain balance” between conflicting needs and power centers. No matter the pressure, don’t go off half-cocked.

He was warning against a kind of emotionalism in setting public policy. And it was a right warning: in the years since we have become more emotional in our politics, and not necessarily more effective or constructive.

His second warning had to do with the military. It is crucial to keeping peace. “Our arms must be mighty” lest aggressors be tempted. But something important in the military sphere has changed. Before World War II, “the United States had no armaments industry.” When war came, the producers of plowshares learned to make swords. But in the nuclear age, we can no longer risk “emergency improvisation”: “We have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions.” It worried him. “This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience,” and we have to keep our eye on the implications. “We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.” Only an alert citizenry “can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals.” We need security, but we can’t sacrifice liberty to get it.

Eisenhower’s third warning had to do with what he recognized as America’s technological advance. It was going forward every day, and with it came the rise of scientific research. The federal government was increasing its role in that area, directing and funding research. He was gravely concerned that with “task forces of scientists in laboratories” and universities receiving government contracts, there would be a “domination of the nation’s scholars by federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money.” “Public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.”

He shared that still-pertinent caution 64 years ago.

Then the 70-year-old man who’d won the war and built the highways on which America sailed thanked the public for the opportunities they had given him “for public service.”

What a speech.

Mr. Biden, be useful. You’ve been observing America up close, as a political figure, for more than half a century. Any wisdom you can give, any unknown problem you can highlight? What trouble is coming that we aren’t seeing?

Don’t brag and insist on your place. Say something deep and true that we need to hear. It will be good for the country.

I start the year with some things I know because life and a few geniuses taught me. They’re things often at the back of my mind.

An Italian grandmother was stirring the sauce on the stove as I, age about 10, and my friend, her granddaughter, fantasized about how a local family must be rich, millionaires, they just bought a big car. “Don’t count other people’s money,” the grandmother said. You don’t know all the facts and it’s none of your business. “Don’t catalog other people’s sins.” That came from somebody then, and the spirit was, “You want a catalogue, go to Sears.”

It never left me when I read Samuel Johnson’s dictum “Men more frequently require to be reminded than informed.” Don’t imagine you’re telling them big things they don’t already know, or sense.

I once read that Abraham Lincoln said if you asked most people to put all their troubles in an open sack and place it down next to their neighbors’ sacks and then everyone was told to pick one up and keep it, most people would hesitate barely a moment before they picked up their own sack and took it home. Everyone thinks they have it worse than everyone else but they don’t, and anyway their own troubles are at least familiar, and tolerable, and theirs.

Public figures often want to be understood. This is a mistake. People don’t want to understand you, they’re ornery. Do your job, that will explain you.

The only truth to tell a young couple about to get married: God is real and babies are everything. The only advice for a college graduate: Honest work makes the world go round, bring your talents to market. The important thing to tell a student entering college or high school: Read.

Reading deepens. Social media keeps you where you are. Reading makes your mind do work. You have to follow the plot, imagine what the ballroom looked like, figure the motivations of the characters—I understand what Gatsby wants! All this makes your brain and soul develop the habit of generous and imaginative thinking. Social media is passive. The pictures, reels and comments demand nothing, develop nothing. They give you sensations, but the sensations never get deeper. Social media gets you stuck in you. Reading is a rocket ship, new worlds.

A century ago in a short story, F. Scott Fitzgerald said the rich are different from you and me. Ernest Hemingway is said to have mocked him: Sure, they have more money. But Fitzgerald’s point wasn’t a romantic one. He said that something in the experience of the rich “makes them soft where we are hard” and hard where we are soft. That’s true, can be unpacked forever, and applies even to our politics. On crime and illegal immigration, the private-school-educated bail-reform scholar or the wealthy donor to nonprofits is soft where we are hard. Crime and chaos can’t hurt the rich the way they hurt others. Money changes people because it changes experience.

A paraphrase of C.S. Lewis: Empires rise and fall, great nations come and go, but the man who poured your coffee this morning is immortal, because his soul is immortal. That is a world-altering thought and one that, if you keep it in the center of your mind, will modify how you treat others.

Clichéd phrases endure for a reason. Don’t be embarrassed by them. The other night a big-brained writer texted to tell me about a packed theater as the movie neared its end. “You could’ve heard a pin drop.” Some genius made that up centuries ago, and people still use it because it says it all.

A professionally successful artist told me how he handles invitations and requests for his time. He put a Post-it on his phone: “Do I have to? Do I want to?” Is it a matter of personal or professional obligation? Would the event be a source of joy or pleasure? If either is yes, then yes. If neither, no. Oscar Hammerstein said you can’t let the nice people of the world engage in a conspiracy that keeps you from doing what you should be doing and do well.

We all assume “the professionals” are taking care of things and deep down fear they aren’t. My eyes tell me we’re suffering a decline of professionalism pretty much across the board—in our ability to execute, to keep systems up and going, even to look and act the part. We should respect our fear more here.

The key to surviving the 21st century will be religious faith—you won’t get through it without it—and situational awareness. Always know where the exit is.

From a journalist friend this week: “You are never sorry you took a walk.” Another writer told me a few weeks ago of his New England Yankee mother, who believed there are no problems that aren’t made at least slightly better by a long walk, and none that are made worse.

People listen impatiently these days. Maybe it’s the cumulative effect of the media-interview culture of the past 50 years, which convinced people you look bright and in command if you interrupt; maybe the scrolling of the present has left us less able to hear something more sustained. Whatever the cause, don’t take it personally. We’re all being taught not to take in calmly and absorb.

Often people trying to tell you something use too many words, or jam in extraneous information, or forget their point as they take side trips. A genius, in conversation, will make many edifying digressions. Most people aren’t geniuses. A story is the Mississippi River. Don’t wander off and get caught in the tributaries. Stay on the river.

“Nothing is written.” This is from Robert Bolt’s screenplay of “Lawrence of Arabia,” in which he urges Ali not to be fatalistic—nothing is predetermined, human effort can change things. You have agency; you were given a brain for a reason. Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it, / Boldness has genius, power and magic in it. That’s a loose translation of Goethe.

We pay too much attention to our emotions now. They are important, part of our human makeup, but at some point in the 20th century we got the balance wrong. We inspected our feelings endlessly and considered their meaning, their origin. Now I would say pay greater attention to thinking, your own and others’. When someone tells you what he really thinks—his undefended, not normally offered thoughts—that is true intimacy. What people really think and why, that’s the true heart of things.

A man in his early 80s told my friend, who was his psychotherapist, that what he really wanted to do was learn Italian, but that’s absurd, he’ll likely be dead in 10 years, what would he do with it? The therapist said, “Well, you can die knowing Italian or die not knowing Italian. Which is better?” So the old man studied Italian, happily. It’s never too late. On a piece of paper above my computer is a quote from David Foster Wallace: “Good writing isn’t a science, it’s an art, and the horizon is infinite. You can always get better.”

Go forward this year, whatever your field, like an artist.

We button up the astounding year with the scandal of 2024, which won’t take on its true size and historical significance until some time passes. Its facts—who did what, starting when, how it worked—will be fully reported not by journalists but by historians.

The story is the decline of Joe Biden’s mental acuity, a word we use because it sounds both clinical and polite, and by which we mean the president has been in apparent cognitive decline for some years, perhaps since before taking office, and wasn’t fully up to the job. His family and friends, top White House staff and other administration officials covered it up. Some no doubt thought his presidency was good for the country and some, perhaps, good for them.

In a front-page story this month, the Journal’s Annie Linskey, Rebecca Ballhaus, Emily Glazer and Siobhan Hughes spoke to nearly 50 people in and around the presidency and outlined how the White House adapted to the needs of “a diminished leader.” He met infrequently with cabinet members and congressional leaders, and the president’s staff seemed to be running things. This system “insulated him from the scrutiny of the American public.”

The whole thing came crashing down on June 27, during the presidential debate in which the country finally saw what those in the White House saw every day: Mr. Biden had lost more than a step. He was too old to function as a fully engaged and hands-on president.

This resurrected the story of Woodrow Wilson, who in 1919, almost three years into his second term, was incapacitated by what was likely a series of strokes. His wife and top aides misled the public as to his condition, which forever colored Wilson’s legacy and darkened the historical reputation of First Lady Edith Bolling Wilson.

The historian A. Scott Berg is among the biographers who trace the conspiracy to suppress accurate information to Mrs. Wilson. In his judicious and comprehensive “Wilson,” published in 2013, Mr. Berg writes that she failed to acknowledge that during the president’s illness “she executed the physical and most of the mental duties of the office.” She “enshrouded the Presidency in as much secrecy as possible.” Some of those around her assumed duties the president had once performed himself. The president grew depressed, his thinking “faintly delusional.” Some of his actions were “highly questionable.” American foreign policy grew rudderless.

Mrs. Wilson told it differently in “My Memoir,” published in 1939. The president, she reports, developed severe headaches while barnstorming the country in late September 1919 to build public support for the Versailles Treaty and the League of Nations. One night, on the train to Denver, the pain became unbearable. (It is on this journey he might have suffered a mild stroke or strokes.) The press was told he was under the weather; the presidential party raced back to Washington. In the White House, an urgent message came from an agent of the British government: he had important information for the president. Mrs. Wilson said he wasn’t feeling well, she’d take the information and tell it to the president, and later she would make his response available.

And so it began. On the morning of Oct. 2, the president collapsed unconscious in the bathroom. He’d had an ischemic stroke, a blood clot in the brain. “For days life hung in the balance,” Mrs. Wilson writes. She doesn’t say she informed the vice president. When she thought her husband out of danger she asked doctors whether he should continue as president. “Many people, among them some I had counted as friends, have written of my overwhelming ambition to act as President.” No, she says, she pressed doctors for an assessment “so as to be honest with the people.” The doctors, she writes, “all said that as the brain was as clear as ever, . . . there was every reason to think recovery possible.”

He’d need complete rest. He must be released from every disturbing problem. She says she noted that presidents by definition face disturbing problems. She puts responsibility for what followed on Francis Dercum of Philadelphia, a neurologist. She quotes him: “Madam, it is a grave situation but I think you can solve it. Have everything come to you; weigh the importance of each matter, and see if it is possible by consultation with the respective heads of the Departments to solve them without the guidance of your husband.” She says she pushed back: Shouldn’t the president resign and get “the complete rest that is so vital to his life”?

No, says the stout Dr. Dercum. “For Mr. Wilson to resign would have a bad effect on the country.” Also on his recovery: he lived for his mission. “As his mind is clear as crystal he can still do more with even a maimed body than any one else.” The president had surely discussed public affairs with her, the doctor said. She’ll be good at it.

She was quick to take his guidance. “So began my stewardship.” She studied every paper, report, communiqué, translated them into “tabloid form,” decided which should go to the president. “I, myself, never made a single decision regarding the disposition of public affairs.” (Interesting use of commas.) She decided “what was important and what was not.” The president, she says, gave her verbal replies, and she would take care of “transmitting his views” to cabinet members and lawmakers.

She closed the house and grounds to the public. She was with the president when an official was allowed in so there would be no “misunderstanding” on what was said. But a “whispering campaign” fanned by enemies never stopped. The Wilsons departed the White House on Inauguration Day, March 4, 1921. (Mrs. Wilson found Florence Harding loud and highly rouged.) Woodrow Wilson lived another three years, but the Wilsons’ historical reputation was never the same.

Nor will the Bidens’ be.

I end speculating on why the Biden White House and those close to them might have felt justified in misleading the public about the president’s true state. It isn’t only “Trump,” and “Biden’s the only one who can unite the party and beat him.” It was Ronald Reagan. It is Democratic Party gospel, their deep belief, that Reagan while president, certainly in the last years of his presidency, was neurologically damaged, that his Alzheimer’s had already begun, that he was an old man of 77 who was barely there.

Here I ask those reading online to hit on this link to Reagan’s last news conference as president. For those not online, it’s available at the Reagan Library site. Watch it.

That news conference took place on Dec. 8, 1988, six weeks before he left office. It was live, in prime time, wide-ranging, and covered the world. Compare it with what you have seen of Mr. Biden the past few years.

Political parties, like people, must beware the stories they tell themselves, the stories they weave and come to believe that just are not true. The not-true ones can get you in terrible trouble, especially the ones you use to justify your actions and that make poor personal motives seem noble.

I closed the year with a book tour that ends as Christmas comes. It was sheer pleasure to talk to journalists about their preoccupations, to go to bookstores and signings and meet readers and hear what’s on their minds. When asked why I wrote the book I’d say it was because I wanted to give a second life to columns that gave me special pleasure in the writing or subject matter. But many questions reflected the political moment we’re in, and often circled back to Donald Trump.

Which was the more important election, 2016 or 2024?

Absolutely ’24, and it felt that way even on election night. It felt fateful. The 2016 election was a Hail Mary pass, voters didn’t know if he’d catch it, weren’t even sure he knew where the end zone was. Mr. Trump had a presidency, it ended with “stop the steal” and 1/6, he was gone for four years, and finished. Then the voters take the field in ’24 and call exactly the same play, throw the long ball, but this time they know exactly who the receiver is, how he’ll catch it, how he’ll run and in what direction. Twenty sixteen always felt like something that happened. Twenty twenty-four was a decision.

Is Mr. Trump an irrevocable break with the past?

He isn’t the old-style president who allows you to say to the kids, “I’d like you to be like that man.” Jimmy Carter with his personal rectitude, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush with their virtues—Mr. Trump is a break with that, and the way he spoke when he first announced in 2015 made it clear. When he spoke of Mexican immigrants as criminals and rapists, “and some, I assume, are good people,” which is a very Trumpian formulation, I thought, that’s not how presidents talk, you have to be measured, thoughtful, kindly.

I thought: That’s bad. But my sister and uncle thought it was good. They understood what he was saying and why he was saying it, they agreed with him, but they also knew he couldn’t walk it back. He couldn’t be elected and then say, “Oh, I changed my mind, on second thought we need more illegal immigration.” They felt the crudeness of his language meant that he was actually telling them the truth. It was a relief to them. “Forget eloquence, close the border!” They felt if the right policy requires a brute, get the brute.

Could a Lincoln become president today, a Reagan?

Our current politics came from extremity. Things this century seemed so extreme—the wide open borders, DEI, boys on the girls’ team. The American people would love it if in the future their top candidates classed the joint up. Mr. Trump and his generation of political followers came from broken politics and a broken culture and things not working. With all that breakage, politics got outlandish. The American people would love to see the return of a certain kind of elegance and dignity. But things would have to get more settled down first, more regular and normal.

What do you expect from Trump 2.0? Nonstop 24/7 Hellzapoppin.

What would be your advice to Republican senators in the cabinet confirmation battles?

Take it seriously. It isn’t about short term loyalty to MAGA, it’s about life-and-death appointment to such critical American agencies as defense, intelligence and health. Senators would best show loyalty to Mr. Trump by voting down those who are unsuited to various roles and would cause harm. They would best serve him by operating in a way that shows they are people of stature, not vassals. Urge him to find assistant-secretary jobs for some of those who don’t deserve confirmation.

Mr. Trump should show his new cool and calm by doing what he did when Matt Gaetz was forced to step down from his nomination: accept it as if it were nothing. He took his shot, it didn’t work, he offered a better replacement, next. In the end he looked good. But Republican senators must approach the hearings with gravity because, again, they’re life-and-death appointments. If Mr. Trump is making a mistake save him from it, as a friend would.

Advice for Democratic senators?

The confirmation hearings will be the first time people see you since the November defeat, after which you got drunk and hid behind rocks. Now you’re out in the open again, in clean shirts and leaning into a mic. You think you’ve got a bonanza—all these rich targets, all these sketchy nominees! You hope to carpet-bomb Pete Hegseth, Tulsi Gabbard, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. That would be a mistake. You’ll look obstructionist, vengeful, merely partisan. The country won’t be in the mood for it. Democrats too should be cool. Draw the nominees out with respect, get a real handle on their views, bring the research and receipts. Accept who you can, giving due deference to a new president. But again, life and death. Be serious.

The biggest threat to the coming administration? “We have a huge mandate, we can do anything!” They’re high on their own supply. It was a mandate, not an overwhelming one—popular vote carried, narrowly, both houses of Congress won. But we’re a 50/50 country, and claiming otherwise doesn’t make you look bold, it makes you look cruisin’ for a bruisin’. They are going to make bad mistakes here. They’re making them.

What’s a helpful attitude going forward?

Trump supporters should shock themselves with magnanimity. Victors should grow taller, not smaller. They shouldn’t act like losers—truculent, resentful. If that’s how you act, everyone else will think you’re just losers at heart, losers who won’t last. Accept not triumphing in some of the confirmation battles, some of those battles deserve to be lost, and if they’re not they’ll come around and bite you later, badly.

For Mr. Trump’s opposition, if you believe in democracy you accept with as much good grace as you can muster—and after more than two centuries of this you ought to be able to muster a lot—the decision the people have made. If you’re an American you wish America to prosper, and part of its prospering will involve successful presidential leadership, so you want Mr. Trump to be successful. In the Catholic faith you take a moment during Mass to pray for leaders at home and abroad. It has to be sincere when you say it or you’re messing with God. Don’t do that.

If you’re an opinion columnist you should watch for what’s good and say so, watch for what’s bad and say that, and be afraid of neither observation. If you lose your temper, lose it; if you find yourself unexpectedly moved, admit it. Keep your tools, compass and gyroscope, clean, dry and level.

Are you an optimist?

Optimists tend to think the right, nice thing will happen, and I don’t necessarily. But I have faith and I have hope. Life takes guts. Don’t let all the bad news enter you and steal your peace. Keep the large things in your head. Two millennia ago a baby was born and the whole ridiculous story—the virgin, the husband, the stable, the star—is true, and changed the world. Compared to which our current concerns are nothing.