Peggy Noonan

Like Donald Trump or dislike him, hate him or love him, doesn’t matter: You have to see that what we are witnessing right now is truly remarkable, with no precedent.

He is essentially functioning as the sitting president. In the past, a man was elected and sat in his house, met with potential cabinet members, and courteously, carefully kept out of the news except to make a statement announcing a new nominee. The incumbent was president until Inauguration Day. That’s the way it was even in 2016; Barack Obama was still seen as president after Mr. Trump was elected. All that has changed.

Mr. Trump is the locus of all eyes. He goes to Europe for the opening of Notre-Dame. “The protocols they put in place for his arrival were those of a sitting president, not an incoming one,” a Trump loyalist and former staffer said by phone. He holds formal meetings with Volodymyr Zelensky and Emmanuel Macron. There he is chatting on a couch with Prince William. Why not the prime minister? Because the British know Mr. Trump is enchanted by royalty and doesn’t want to be with some grubby Labour pol. Mr. Trump talks of new tariffs on Canada, and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau rushes down to Mar-a-Lago. After their meeting, Mr. Trump refers to him, on Truth Social, as “governor” of “the Great State of Canada.” (The Babylon Bee follows up with a headline: “Trump Tells Trudeau He Won’t Annex Canada if They Admit Their Bacon Is Just Ham.”)

The government of Syria suddenly falls and the world turns to America for its stand. Naturally it comes, quickly, from Donald Trump. “THIS IS NOT OUR FIGHT. . . . DO NOT GET INVOLVED!” The next day, Joe Biden characterizes the moment as one of “risk and uncertainty” for the region. Was there ever a moment that wasn’t one of risk and uncertainty for the region?

Mr. Trump tells Vladimir Putin that now that he’s abandoned Syria, he should make a deal to end the war in Ukraine. “I know Vladimir well. This is his time to act. China can help. The world is waiting!”

Mr. Trump’s cabinet picks—especially the highly questionable ones!—dominate the discourse in a country that hardly ever notices a cabinet nomination below that of secretary of state. His representatives, most famously Elon Musk, are greeted on Capitol Hill with a rapture comparable to past visits by heroic leaders of allied nations.

Donald Trump hasn’t overshadowed Joe Biden; he has eclipsed him. A former senior official in Mr. Trump’s first term told NBC News a few days ago that Mr. Trump “is already basically running things, and he’s not even president yet.”

To some degree the status shift is expected. Mr. Trump is the future, Mr. Biden the past; Mr. Trump wide-awake, Mr. Biden sleepy. The 46th president is a worn tire, the tread soft and indistinct. With the pardon of his son he lost stature. Also, Mr. Trump makes other leaders nervous, as he enjoys pointing out. They can neither predict him nor imitate him, so they can’t take their eyes off him. And Mr. Biden’s been rocked by something he knew in the abstract that’s become all too particular: after 50 years at the center of public life he’s been dropped, cast aside, because it was about power all along, and not about him.

A president, however, still has the machinery—the National Security Council, the State Department, the nuclear football. I can hardly believe our biggest adversaries don’t capitalize on this split presidency, this confusion. For all our woes you sometimes forget what a lucky country we are.

Here I mention a part of the amazing interregnum that I think is important, one that his friends and staffers speak of. Mr. Trump is calmer and more confident than he has been in the past. It is a commonplace to say that his surviving a shooting—that a bullet came within an inch or so of his brain—would change anyone, even a man in his eighth decade, even a man with fairly brittle ingrained views, even Donald Trump. But all of his friends go back to this as they speak of the Trump they’re seeing now. They think it took time for it to be absorbed and settle in. They see him as at least presenting himself in an altered way.

The former staffer said by phone, “Right now he is extremely relaxed.” It isn’t only the assassination attempt. “Everyone thought he was gonna change in a way that would be normal for most people to change—an outward reflection, more humble. I laugh when people say, ‘Normally, a president would—.’ Don’t use ‘normal’ with him.”

But, he said, after the second assassination attempt was thwarted, at Mr. Trump’s golf course, it had real impact. “Trump began to recognize, not in an unappreciative way but in a reality way, that he’d been spared. It gave him a stronger sense of confidence, some extra level of relaxation and of determination. He feels the American people are in trouble and if he can be a small part of fixing that, he must.”

The former staffer said Mr. Trump feels that “this wasn’t an election, it was a vindication.” The court cases, the indictments, the impeachments—“all these things against Donald Trump, and he doesn’t just come back, he roars back in a way that defies logic, reason and history. Few can fathom this.” He meant the history, but also its effect on Mr. Trump.

Something else, he said. When Mr. Trump was elected in 2016, his policy priorities and intentions weren’t fully clear. They are now, and have been popularized. “He knows the mission he laid out to the people—sane border policy, unleash energy, monetize ‘the liquid gold,’ make the tax cuts permanent—there’s an air of confidence about his mission now, and an understanding of the systems in place.” He is living something few get to live: “If I could do it all over again.”

A different observer, who’s seen Mr. Trump up close, said this week, “This is the best version of Donald Trump we will see.”

Back to the former staffer: “The gravity of this historic moment cannot be overstated. He has a level of swagger, a new level. People say, ‘Can I get the policy without the personality?’ No, you need a certain level of ‘I don’t give a damn.’ If you think he had it the first time, Katy bar the door.”

He had a prediction: “This has the potential to be historic in a way that only a handful of administrations have been. We remember some administrations with a level of history-altering moments. This one’s gonna have a lot.”

What about the potential for wrongdoing, such as using government to suppress or abuse foes? “He’s said a million times his revenge is going to be success. When Trump wins, he lets bygones be bygones.”

He paused. “Some of the people he’s hired aren’t that way, so there’s a chance some people may take it upon themselves to do some stuff. I don’t know.”

We’re seeing bipartisan slippage of standards.

It is embarrassing as a citizen to see the president of the United States pardon his son, and in such an all-encompassing way, for any legal transgression going back nearly 11 years, which feels like a concession to the assumption that his more interesting law-stretching or -breaking may be yet unknown. The president had promised frequently and explicitly that he wouldn’t pardon his son, that he’d play it straight and let the course of justice play out. Which means he knew it was important to people, to how they viewed him, and so he lied to reassure them. All this did what others have said: lowered trust in political leaders, made the cynical more cynical.

The nature of Hunter Biden’s bad actions is famous in the public mind because it involves videotaped depictions of decadent behavior—guns, drugs and sex, all memorialized by him and stored on his famous laptop. It became an emblem of the assumption that the elites of our nation, the people pulling the strings, are wholly decadent—dope-smoking lowlifes, abusers of others. It’s looking very Late Rome among our leadership class. Anyway, by pardoning his son the president makes himself look part of all that.

The pardon struck me as a bitter action, too. A president who cared about public opinion, or even that of his own party, wouldn’t have done it, or quite this way. It’s the president flipping the bird to an ungrateful (and also rather decadent!) nation that coldly turned on him after a single debate, and then elected that tramp Donald Trump—they deserve what they get.

Will the pardon, as some of the president’s friends say, be forgotten tomorrow? No. People still remember Bill Clinton’s late-night pardon of Marc Rich for tax evasion, wire fraud and other charges. People who like Mr. Biden and those who dislike him will always end the telling of his political story with “And then at the end he pardons his son!”

What an act of disrespect.

As to the Politico report that the White House is considering pre-emptive pardons for officials not yet even accused or convicted of breaking the law, wow. If that is true it makes you wonder. What have our leaders been up to the past four years that they require such unprecedented forgiveness? Even with fears of a vengeful Trump Justice Department, pre-emptive pardons are an excessive move.

Now to the incoming administration’s slippage of standards, the exotic cabinet picks that veer from “that’s a stretch” to “that’s insane.” The more exotic nominees—Robert F. Kennedy Jr. at Health and Human Services, Pete Hegseth at Defense, Kash Patel at the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Mehmet Oz at Medicare and Medicaid Services—don’t have backgrounds that fit the jobs. Taken together they look like people who want to blow things up.

It is one thing to look at the huge and sprawling federal government and figure out what parts need most urgently to be to be reformed and remade. The Pentagon, for instance, can’t pass an audit; no one is sure of procurement, of exactly what weapons are needed for the future; and on top of that young men don’t want to join anymore, and when they do, many can’t pass the physical and educational requirements. The Defense Department is in an ongoing crisis—as usual. So you could focus there.

But these nominees seem as if they want a demolition derby everywhere. That isn’t a plan for progress but a recipe for unproductive chaos—nonstop, systemwide, all agencies involved.

Mr. Hegseth vowed in these pages to fight on, but his nomination looks at the moment in greatest peril. His nomination by Mr. Trump was careless and could be interpreted as an act of contempt for government itself. But if it is true that the backup choice might be Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis—well, that would be brilliant. Mr. DeSantis is a brick wall; he knows how to execute, having been the successful chief executive of a major state; no one would think he doesn’t mean it when he says he opposes woke ways and regulations; and the Pentagon would be more inclined to fear him than roll him.

Also it would make Mr. Trump look generous to a vanquished foe and honestly alive to his talents. That would be refreshing.

Too many of the Trump nominees have said, one way or another, that they intend to take out the deep state, but they should start explaining exactly what they mean. The deep state isn’t really a conservative insight, and it isn’t a new one; Oliver Stone felt free to make movies about how the CIA killed John F. Kennedy 30 years ago. JFK himself thought the intelligence agencies and military brass jammed him into the Bay of Pigs. If you have a highly professionalized federal workforce of millions of people, and a score of agencies that hold huge power, you are going to build up over the years with levels and layers of entrenched mischief, with lifers and time-servers and career officials hoping to keep or create a status quo that benefits their agencies, or themselves.

It isn’t new. All modern democracies have them. J. Edgar Hoover was the deep state. He was appointed 100 years ago by Calvin Coolidge. “The building always wins” isn’t quite as true in Washington as “the house always wins” is in Vegas, but it’s close. The thing is to manage the mess by picking strong, seasoned, experienced people to lead the agencies, not hotheads but cool hands. Blow everything up and you’ll just wind up surrounded by debris.

It is strange for President-elect Trump to put forward such nominees in a party he really won and unified only in the past 12 months. Each sitting Republican senator has struggled his way through home-state party divisions over “Trump” or “Not Trump” to get elected. Now they’ll face explosive confirmation battles and have to pick their way through the question of how many crazy nominees they can reject without starting a destructive war with their own brand new White House. Two? Messrs. Hegseth and Patel? What about Tulsi Gabbard?

Senate Democrats may think they have a bonanza coming with all the explosive confirmation hearings, but it may not be that simple. They should probably keep one word in mind: backlash. Like the one that followed the past year’s court cases against Mr. Trump. Beating up nominee after nominee in hearing after hearing will leave some of the public thinking the Democrats are embarked on mere obstructionism, partisans shooting down every nominee for merely partisan reasons. Mr. Trump’s foes have a way of overreaching. It has turned out to be lucky for him. Democrats will have to choose their targets, too.

Which means some wholly unqualified people will likely get through. I guess that’s the ultimate strategic purpose of flooding the zone.

All this feels crazier than it has to.

By the time Donald Trump is inaugurated president on Jan. 20, 2025, a lot of people will think he’s already been president for a year. All eyes, every day, have been on Mar-a-Lago, from which have come a constant barrage of appointments, some good, some half-mad, a few promising electrifying confirmation hearings. But that is a future story.

What am I grateful for now? I’ve felt the past few weeks how I often feel after reading the history of a war: “Well, we got through that.” We got through a contentious brawl of an election in one piece. The result was accepted by all. We’re not fighting it out in court. You can say this only happened because Mr. Trump won—if he’d lost he’d be protesting and unleashing legal challenges—and that is surely true. But democracy is in part a matter of habit and expectation, and a nation full of kids and young people just saw us model, as in the old days, how to do it. You send in your ballot or line up at the polls and then they count the votes and declare the winner. The young, after this election, will more easily believe that it still works here. They’ll bring that feeling into the future, which will be good.

I am grateful to see the outcome was so peacefully received. That peace is not only exhaustion. Absorbing the big news has involved thoughtfulness and reflection, or so I have observed.

I am grateful we aren’t complacent, bored, and dying of ennui. We aren’t only stuck to our screens, we are a politically engaged nation. We go to rallies and sign petitions, cheer on political figures and invest in them through donations. We may have grown more decadent in our entertainments, but we haven’t checked out. Is that a small thing to be thankful for? Yes, and I’m thankful for it.

I continue to feel thankful we’re split but not shattered. We’re more or less a 50-50 nation, with two big parties that, however they fail us, and they do, most people find themselves able to fit themselves into. This speaks of a certain stability.

I am more thankful every day for the legal immigrants to America, the many, many millions who gained citizenship after standing in line and filling out papers and meeting the requirements. I think they’ve had a balancing effect on our politics. They came here to join a country that lived in their imaginations—truth, justice, and the American way. They have put all their chips on us. They don’t want us to become absurd, corrupt, unreliable like the nations they left. I just sense they’re more protective of us than we are of ourselves—they don’t want us to waste ourselves or be torn apart. Keep your pride and keep what’s good, all the freedoms we came for. Their children will be senators. They’re bringing a lot of love to the game.

I find myself grateful that while the national winners, the Republican Party, can fairly claim a mandate—carrying both houses of Congress and the popular vote, winning in the battleground states—it is still, yet, a modest one. The margins in Congress are real but not overwhelming, the battleground states were close, the popular vote at time of writing, with some votes still being counted, is 76,883,434 for Mr. Trump and 74,406,431 for Kamala Harris. There’s something touching and impressive in the specificity there, if you needed to be reminded that every vote counts. But what we’re looking at is a clear, close margin—49.96% to 48.35%. Even with an ultimately insufficient presidential candidate, the Democrats got almost half the votes. They’re not over, but they’re wobbling, and the things they stand for aren’t popular and don’t deserve to be.

Republicans are feeling good, and should, but the age of the 20th-century landslide is long gone; it’s always a close-run thing now.

If the Democrats continue to think their problem is one of communications only, they have more losses coming. They do have a communications problem—too many of them, certainly their activists, seem to be talking down to people. But their primary problem isn’t communications, it’s content. Most of my life, regular people on the street could describe what the Democratic Party stands for. They’re for the little guy, for generous spending, and, since the 1960s and up until the 9/11 era, were antiwar. All that territory has been stolen by the Republican Party of Donald Trump. Without those issues, the Democrats appear reduced to the party that aligns with woke, and the teachers unions. That isn’t enough, not popular enough, not pertinent to ongoing crises.

They will have to find out what they believe in and stand for. They’ll likely have to have the fight they’ve been prudently dodging the past dozen years, between moderate centrists and progressives. Somebody’s going to have to win that battle.

As for the Republicans, this would be the perfect time, while the camera’s on the GOP, for some friendly persuasion, and reaching toward potential friends and waverers.

Victors always want to be bold, because boldness shows strength and impresses people. But there is a line between bold and delusional. This isn’t time to frighten the horses. That’s what the appointment of the harebrained Rep. Matt Gaetz to head the Justice Department did, and Mar-a-Lago is lucky they had enough friends in the Republican Senate to stop it.

I suspect most people are enthused about the idea of the Department of Government Efficiency to be headed up by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy. It’s the kind of thing that catches the imagination. Mr. Musk is a genius and visionary, Mr. Ramaswamey appears to be an activist with energy, and a mind full of certainties. But Mr. Musk is also an unusual fellow, unique, and Mr. Ramaswamy has zero experience in the federal government.

I’m glad they think outside the box, but the box still exists, and for reasons. If your eyes have been at all open the past quarter-century, you know the administrative state is huge, largely unaccountable, and consists at least in part of levels of waste and sloth built on previous levels of redundancy and nonsense. Federal workers the past four years have, amazingly, made themselves look unnecessary by not bothering to show up at the office, and working at home. But some federal workers are the best we have—brilliant, unheralded, doing life-and-death work, making the wheels turn.

Real reformers have to be sophisticated, orderly, unshowy. They need internal allies.

Messrs. Musk and Ramaswamy are daring and theatrical. I’d worry that early on they’ll start running around with axes, making big pronouncements, chopping holes through doors, and putting their heads through the holes and saying, “Heeeere’s . . . Johnny!’

Progress isn’t re-enacting “The Shining.” May they be steady.

And back to our beginning. If you believe in democracy, in our democratic republic, you accept, with as much peace as you can muster, democratic outcomes. You do this out of respect for America—for those who invented it and spun it into motion—and out of respect for your fellow citizens, who’ve made a decision. We just did that. And happy 161st Thanksgiving to the great and fabled nation that is still, this day, the hope of the world.

The first wave of nominees to the Trump administration announced this week included normal Republicans—Susie Wiles as chief of staff, Elise Stefanik as ambassador to the United Nations, Lee Zeldin at the Environmental Protection Agency, Marco Rubio as secretary of state. All are grown-up players who have political histories that preceded Donald Trump and became fully MAGA.

But the second wave—it is impossible to tell if Mr. Trump is announcing appointments or trolling his enemies. Pete Hegseth as defense secretary? This is unserious and deeply alarming. He is a decorated military veteran with Ivy League degrees, but he has no serious governmental or managerial experience, no history of international accomplishment. The Pentagon is a mammoth bureaucracy overseeing almost three million employees, including those in the military services. The defense secretary is a world leader: If North Korea launched a nuclear missile, he would be in the room with the president, advising and counseling. In the past 10 years Mr. Hegseth has made his living as a breakfast TV host and culture warrior. This isn’t the right fit. At this point in his life, Mr. Hegseth, 44, lacks the stature and depth required of the role.

As for Matt Gaetz being nominated as attorney general—well, this is just straight-out trolling, right? The four-term Florida congressman has won a reputation as disruptive, divisive, aggressive, lacking in groundedness and wisdom, and dogged by ethics allegations. He seems to see politics as an offshoot of showbiz and has entertained his followers with successive attempts to take down GOP leaders in the House, on behalf of—well, it’s never quite clear. This we need in America’s top law-enforcement official?

The choice obviously isn’t meant to reassure anyone outside the MAGA base—or even those within it who are intelligent. It is an insolent appointment, guaranteed to cause trouble and meant to cause friction.

We are back to the Island of Misfit Toys. What a mistake. Mr. Trump often confuses his own antic malice for daring, his own unseriousness for boldness. How amazing that in the rosy glow of election, he will spend so much political capital and goodwill on confirmation fights he may well, and certainly deserves to, lose.

I turn now to the Democrats. Here is some advice to the party that I consider to be all wrong. It is from Elizabeth Warren in Time magazine and was published two days after the election. Her advice to her party: Back to the Future. Go back to “mass mobilization”—peaceful protests—to recharge “the resistance.” Step up oversight of Mr. Trump’s “corruption and abuses of power.” “Slow down confirmation and expose Republican extremism.” Searching for the middle ground is foolish. “Uniting against Trump’s legislative agenda is good politics because it is good policy.”

It is also a recipe for unending clash and political theater—Resistance Part II, take it to the streets. In the shock of 2016 it made sense that his opposition make itself heard, encourage itself, see itself. But a repeat isn’t in line with the mood of the country, which now isn’t electrified by politics but exhausted by it. And in some funny way demonstrations especially would make the Democratic Party look weaker. As if it has no other moves. As if it’s trying to avoid something, a sober look inward, and trying to cover it up by chanting.

It looks to me as if the rising argument in the party is for a left-wing populism, but it’s not certain what that would look like. Ms. Warren said the system is “rigged,” giant corporations get tax breaks and billionaires pay nothing. The job of the Democratic Party is to “unrig the economy.”

A few days later, in a Twitter thread, Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut said, “Time to rebuild the left.” “We are beyond small fixes.” The economic policies of the past 50 years have left places hollowed out. “Rapacious profit seeking” destroyed “the common good.” Unchecked new technologies were allowed to “separate and isolate us.” In response, the left has offered only “uninspiring solutions.” “The right regularly picks fights with elites—Hollywood, higher ed, etc.” Why doesn’t the left fight with billionaires and corporations? “Real economic populism” should be the Democrats’ purpose. But it must change its ways: “Our tent is too small.” Don’t keep out those who don’t agree on every social issue. “Build a big tent. Be less judgmental.” It tells you a lot about the party’s problems that that last part had to be said.

As to the resistance, Conor Friedersdorf in the Atlantic offered what seemed to me wisdom. After 2016, “a large faction of Americans declined to treat Trump as a president with democratic legitimacy.” He’d lost the popular vote, invited foreign actors to interfere in the election. “So they fancied themselves members of the ‘resistance,’ or waged lawfare, or urged the invocation of the Twenty-Fifth Amendment. Immediately after Trump’s inauguration, liberal groups started to push for his impeachment and removal from office.”

Now Mr. Trump returns under different circumstances. He received some three million more votes than Kamala Harris. “No one believes that a foreign nation was responsible for his victory. . . . No one alleges illegality in this campaign.” A 2016-style resistance to Trump is “untenable.”

“As a Never Trump voter who thought January 6 was disqualifying but who respects the results of this election,” Mr. Friedersdorf writes, “I urge this from fellow Trump skeptics: Stop indulging the fantasy that outrage, social stigma, language policing, a special counsel, the Twenty-Fifth Amendment, or impeachment will disappear him. And stop talking as if normal political opposition is capitulation.”

“Unaligned Americans who don’t even like Trump are tired of being browbeaten for not hating him enough.” If voters have made a terrible mistake, “that’s a risk of democracy, so we must live with it.” Mr. Friedersdorf himself doubts Mr. Trump’s character, judgment and respect for the Constitution. He fears recklessness in some areas and cruelty in others. What he urges toward Mr. Trump is in line with our past: “normal political opposition,” which is “more likely to yield good civic results.” “Our constitutional and civic checks on executive power are formidable, frustrating every administration.”

“Until 2028, normal checks can constrain Trump.”

These are wise words.

I close with this. People say they fear authoritarianism from Mr. Trump, latent or overt fascism, a reign of intolerance. My fears are in the area of foreign policy. Mr. Trump no doubt believes he’s ready for a major foreign crisis, but he’s never had one. I mean not something like the pandemic, a crisis with foreign-affairs aspects that rolled out over a matter of months and years, but a sharp and immediate crisis, a big and crucial one. He tends to think foreign affairs comes down to personal relationships, but it doesn’t. Xi Jinping, “Little Rocket Man”—he had them all wary in his first term. Who is this guy? Better not push him. But now they know him—how he operates, what he wants.

He isn’t a mystery to them anymore. He isn’t a mystery to anyone. That will have some impact on things going forward.

It is worth being moved that in our huge, restive, cynical and yearning nation we peacefully, and with complete public acceptance of the outcome, made a dramatic national judgment this week. Just about every adult citizen took part and took it seriously. All together they produced something we needed: a clear outcome, one delivered without charges of large-scale chicanery or even small-scale so far as we know. There will be a peaceful transfer of power. A lot of people had to do a lot of things right to make this happen.

It was a triumph for the Republican Party—a sweep, a rout—and a disaster for the Democrats. Much has been written about the demographic facts but when a single candidate increases his totals in almost every group but one, white women, something big happened. Donald Trump will likely receive a majority of the popular vote—the first Republican to do so since 2004. Republicans handily won the Senate and appear poised to take the House. This amounts to a legitimately claimed mandate.

Mr. Trump’s is the biggest political comeback since Richard Nixon, whose career flat-lined in embarrassment in 1962, after a failed gubernatorial race and stumbling news conference—“You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore”—only to roar back to the presidency in 1968. It isn’t enough said that Mr. Trump did this while enduring a shooting, a second, thwarted assassination attempt, and credible intelligence reports that Iran was trying to kill him. He went into all his rallies knowing that. He showed a lot of guts. Mass media didn’t dwell on this, but regular people did.

As for Kamala Harris, Mr. Trump in 2020 lost the Catholic vote. This year he carried it with a healthy 56%. That’ll teach her to blow off the Al Smith dinner.

What did it all mean? The people did what they wished. They revolted. They looked at the past four years of Washington and said no. They said “Goodbye to all that,” to the years 2020-24—to the pandemic, to the pain and damage of that era, which affected every part of our lives. That is the real turning of the page I think, from a time they hated that made them view their government as bullying and not that bright. In terms of issues it was illegal immigration, inflation and a rejection of the deterioration all around them—of drugstores locking up the shampoo and the beleaguered Walgreens employee late with the key to the cabinet and in a bad mood because he’s afraid of thieves and crazy people and it’s wearing him down. It was the woke regime, which people have come to experience as an invading force in their lives. It was Afghanistan, and other wars, and the sense Washington isn’t getting foreign policy right and perhaps barely thinking about it. They just seem to be staggering through each day. The country’s been waiting for years to hear from its leaders: What are America’s interests?

In September, pondering the race, I wrote: “This will be a path election, not a person election.” Once we chose a shining John F. Kennedy, who would choose the path. You chose dazzling Ronald Reagan, and he’d cut a path through the forest. This year I felt people would be choosing a path, not a person. “And I’m not sure they want to go down the Blue Path any deeper than they already have.”

I think that’s what happened. Tens of millions of people who didn’t like Donald Trump voted for the path he promised.

America, after its long journey through the 2010s and ’20s, is becoming more conservative again.

This was all much bigger than “what Kamala Harris got wrong.” We know what she got wrong. She was a poor candidate chosen in mysterious circumstances who, like her running mate, was a strong regional and local talent but not a national one. She was a California progressive who came to be perceived as such.

The Democratic Party just took it full in the face—rejected and rebuked. That party needs an intellectual autopsy, an audit of its beliefs; it needs a rising moderating force such as the Democratic Leadership Council of the 1980s and ’90s, which got the party off McGovernism and its losses and on to Clintonism and its victories.

What are the Democrats? What’s that party for? When I was a kid they were the party of the working man, the little guy. That’s the Trumpian GOP now. When I was a young woman they were the antiwar party. That’s the Trumpian GOP. The party of generous spending? The Trumpian party says hold my beer. What belief do the Democrats hold that distinguishes them? LGBTQ, woke, gender theory, teachers unions, higher taxes? Why not throw in cholera and chlamydia?

The party has lost its specific character and nature; it’s no longer a thing you can name. Democrats have to sit down with a yellow legal pad and figure themselves out. All defeat carries a gift: You get to figure out what you’re getting wrong.

As for the Republicans, we always feel now we’re picking a government to manage our decline. But when Mr. Trump met with the Journal’s editors last month, he spoke for a moment with excitement about how America “can be so rich and so successful.” He described watching the arms come out and catch the SpaceX rocket. “It was good old Elon. It was him, he’s amazing.”

That chord he was trying to hit—and tried to hit in late rallies—is one America yearns to hear. They want the old sense that their kids are being launched into a society and culture that’s healthy and vital. Exuberance, expansion, Musk to Mars, drill, baby, drill—we’re going to be exciting again! Then Mr. Trump would revert to American carnage. But in a funny way, almost in spite of himself, I think he communicated what he meant, I think he got the Dream Big vote, and he should continue it as a centerpiece.

As for me, I don’t like the SOB, I think him a bad man who’ll cause and bungle crises almost from day one, but he’ll be the American president, and we all deserve grace. I will pray for him, support what I think constructive and oppose what I think destructive, call it straight as I can and take whatever follows. As someone once said, the real story of American life is where you stand and the price you’ll pay to stand there.

I like what Liz Cheney tweeted Wednesday: “Our nation’s democratic system functioned last night and we have a new President-elect. All Americans are bound, whether we like the outcome or not, to accept the results.” We also have a responsibility as members of “the greatest nation on earth” to “support and defend our Constitution, preserve the rule of law, and ensure that our institutions hold over these coming four years.” She singled out the courts, the press, “and those serving in our federal, state and local governments” to be “the guardrails of democracy.”

Just so. God bless America. Onward into the mess and clamor.

I can’t shake a feeling of peace. As I said, we’ll get through it. No one knows what’s going to happen Tuesday and Wednesday, or what will follow a close election in the weeks and months to come. But yes, I believe our institutions will see us through, not because they are strong—they’re battered old things shot through with ideology and self-seeking—but because they’re strong enough for the moment. Our courts, our laws, the free press, the academy, the military—all have taken hits the past decade, many self-inflicted. But they stand, and can do the job. Many unsung heroes see to this each day. There’s more health in our sick structures than we can see.

Here is an institution we helped this year—unknowingly, without really meaning to. In this messy monster of a campaign we enlivened and perhaps even revitalized democracy. It’s the big story underneath the big story.

This campaign with the preening billionaires and the billions raised, with the proud lawn signs and the canvassers, with the old folks online donating money they don’t have to a candidate who might keep the kids safe in the future, with the volunteer door-knockers taking time off and spending weeks going door-to-door in Pennsylvania and having conversations, long ones, sometimes heartfelt, with whoever answers. A friend, a Harris supporter, wrote 2,000 handwritten letters—2,000!—during the past few months. The fundraisers, the rallies, the appropriate grinding-it-out of both campaigns at the end, the tens of thousands at the outdoor Trump rally, the tens of thousands on the Ellipse.

Do we understand what we’re saying here? We are saying we believe in democracy. Everyone, both sides, all ages, all the kids, all the old coots, all classes and colors. We are saying we are personally invested in it and implying we will continue it because it’s what we do and how we roll. We are telling 18- and 24-year-olds, who are understandably skeptical about our system, and often feel alienated from it, that they believe in it too, but actually we don’t have to tell them because they’re taking part too.

It’s a spectacular gesture of commitment. At bottom what it means is: Through all our history we have never given up on each other, and we still haven’t. There was something heartening in this fight.

For our summation of where things are we go to a highly accomplished and rather brilliant veteran of Democratic politics. Anyone who claims to know what’s going to happen is lying, he says. But people wish they had a better choice. “They don’t want him in there, and can’t see her there.” That’s why it’s close.

I found myself this week going back to the hokey and fabulous campaign metaphors of the great Dan Rather. It’s tight as a tick, hotter than a Laredo parking lot. “Are your fingernails starting to sweat?”

Is anyone undecided at this point? I think it more likely they’re just undeclared. They know where they’re going and for whatever reason don’t want to announce it, to themselves or others. I am where I was in 2016 and 2020, and where I said I’d be this summer, writing in. It feels boorish to repeat why. He’s too crazy for me, they’re too extreme. He’s mad, bad and dangerous to know. She and her party continue to move too damagingly to the left. I haven’t felt free to vote for a major-party candidate since 2012, Mitt Romney. I long for the day I can again.

There are for me two Kamala Harris mysteries. The first is why she didn’t give Republicans and conservatives any serious reassurance in terms of policy. I suppose I mean anything at all on cultural issues. She was a California progressive and was part of an administration that frequently bowed to progressives; in a special way it was on her to show to potential supporters some alignment of sympathies. There are many possible examples, but here are six words suburban mothers would have been satisfied to hear: No boys on the girls team. They’re with Ms. Harris on abortion and other issues, but they’ve got seventh-grade girls coming up on the swimming and running teams and they don’t want boys competing with their daughters or in the locker room. Because boys and girls aren’t the same and aren’t built the same. So find a new and humane arrangement. The answer to questions on this is not “I’ll follow the law,” it is, “Believe me, I think we get too extreme sometimes and I’ll push against this.”

The other speaks of something that confuses me as I look at Ms. Harris as a public figure. She slew Donald Trump in debate, live, in front of 67 million people. It was just her, the untried candidate, on a stage with Man Mountain Dean, and she betrayed no fear or tremor. This is someone who can take pressure! Who can think on her feet! If she could do that, why couldn’t she sit down and give an honest, forthright interview, or field questions thoughtfully in a way that coheres, in a live town hall? Why couldn’t she let people in on her real thinking? I don’t recall a single interview she did that didn’t seem full of doubletalk and evasion. When that’s what you give people they assume you’re hiding something. It makes them think, “Maybe stick with the devil I know.”

She veered from simplicity and struggled to answer simple questions. If asked, “Do you like to walk on the street on a sunny day?” She could not say, “Yes, I do.” Instead, she’d answer it in a way she thought a smart person would answer it, full of odd roundabouts and clauses.

“Do you like to walk on the street on a sunny day?”

“I will say that within the general context of weather, and added to that the strolling ability, whether to choose to or not, and reflecting the reality of precipitation, that such strolls, and I’ve always made this clear, are quite possible.”

She’s smart. She’s accomplished. If she loses, her not seeing the needs of potential supporters and not sharing her real thoughts will be part of why.

*   *   *

We’ll know more soon. I close with the peace I can’t shake.

This week, my own October surprise. A text message, a hospital, a baby due in November decides he wants in on the action now. The family grows, a grandson comes. I hold him for the first time and I hum to him chords and he looks at me with huge-pupiled infant eyes and the chords come from my chest and throat. They are of a song I haven’t thought of in years, “My Cup Runneth Over.”

A friend of decades calls. We started out together, were young together, and he’s just seen on his phone the picture of the baby. There are tears in his voice. “In all the chaos, all the noise, something splendid God has done.” Amen.

It’s what we all know is the real news, always: life happening.

Let’s all make it through. We’ve never given up on each other, ever, let’s not start now. Can’t let the grandkids down.

It’s exciting out there but enervating. People are spun up, nerves at a breaking point, and there’s an undercurrent.

Whatever the outcome of the election, at least half the country will feel crushed. Voters feel they are faced with a bad choice, and many millions will vote against, not for. Everyone is afraid the other side will destroy the country. If it turns out as close as the polls say, we fear a harrowing postelection time marked by accusations and aggression, with nothing clear and everything bitter.

My mind goes to something that I hope doesn’t sound facile because I don’t mean it in a rote, small way. But this country has gotten through a lot. It can take a lot of tension. It was born in it and is used to it. We made it through Shay’s Rebellion and Vietnam, the McCarthy era and the 1960s. We made it through the Civil War, and we will make it through this. We are practiced at withstanding trials. We have a way of forging through. We should take inspiration from this.

I reached for wisdom to the author Yuval Levin of the American Enterprise Institute. He reached back to the 1830s, and Alexis de Tocqueville’s “Democracy in America.” “He wrote that every presidential election is a kind of national crisis that drives people crazy, but that the madness dissipates when the election ends,” Mr. Levin says.

That last part seems less true in our times, but it’s still important to remember. “A second point is that while close elections drive us more crazy and feel more intense, close elections actually tend to be less consequential than landslides. They produce presidents with narrow congressional majorities at most, and without much of a mandate, and our system is built to restrain narrow majorities. So whoever wins is probably going to spend the next four years pretty frustrated, as our last few presidents have.” If you’re worried that the other party will transform the country in ways you hate, “you’re very likely wrong.”

He added: “America has real problems now, as always. But it still works. It’s an amazing society. And one of the reasons it works is that who our president is at any given time is generally not the most important thing to know about us. There are exceptions: We could find ourselves in a world-historical crisis, or one of these candidates really could try to break the system. But we need to see that that’s not the likeliest outcome by any stretch. This is an election between the sitting vice president and a guy who already served a full term as president. Most elections actually involve much more of the unknown than that.”

A note on something that I find ironically reassuring. We rightly decry our polarization—the distance between the edges of both parties is considerable. But this close election puts sharp focus on the fact that while we’re split, we’re split in two. It speaks of some rough health that we mostly all can still, in the end, support one party or the other, that we’re not a nation of four or seven parties, that we’re split but not shattered. Neither of these parties is worthy of us; both this year failed us. Yet their existence speaks of a continuing ability within each to be flexible, to build coalitions, to govern, however imperfectly. This suggests a stability we don’t much note.

When I speak to the young, my mind goes to basics. If your side loses, recommit to it and see that it wins next time. There’s comfort in knowing not everything’s “right now,” that the most meaningful struggles are long-term.

This intense season will pass, and when it does you might, as an individual, take your eye somewhat away from outer events and train it more toward inner events and what you can do to make your own life better.

Americans do a lot of displacement. We always have. We love to talk about outer things in part so we can ignore inner things. That’s how we got through life in desolate wilderness towns, standing on the tree stump that functioned as the town square to argue about the state legislature’s latest sins, so we didn’t have to go home and fix the lonely cabin’s roof. Americans uniquely and from the beginning used politics to avoid loneliness, and to be part of something: “I hold with the Whig faction.” Lonely Abe Lincoln did that as a young man. We use politics to solve not only public dilemmas but personal ones.

When Lincoln first ran for local office he passionately supported “internal improvements”—state and national efforts to build roads, rail lines and canals. This would increase commerce, advance the spread of knowledge, help the country know itself. But a lifetime reading his life tells me Lincoln was pushed forward, also, by something else. Those roads, those canals—they would get Lincoln out of the wilderness and to a town, a city, where what he had a feeling was his genius might be recognized. As it was.

Americans and politics—we work out a lot on that field. It’s good to remember this.

I end with a thought from Jonathan Haidt, the social psychologist at New York University’s Stern School and author of “The Righteous Mind”:

“It’s always been wrong to bet against America, and it’s probably wrong now,” he says by phone. But it would benefit our politics if we would start to fear each other less. “What I’ve observed in studying our culture is that the great majority of people are sane and decent. What has changed is that technology has amplified extremists on left and right. They have become louder, and intimidate moderates.” But they are making the statements of the fringe, they don’t represent “the other side,” which hasn’t endorsed them, and they have been sent to you by algorithms which chose them for their offensiveness. All this has created “a political optical illusion.” We are better and steadier than we think.

I close with my immediate hope, that the outcome of the election, however close, is also clear. That the battleground states won’t be won with 0.008 margins but a few points this direction or that. I hope whoever wins the presidency, at least one house of Congress is of the other party. A Democratic House or Senate will tamp down Trumpian excitements and hem in enthusiasms. A Republican House or Senate will be a coolant on Democratic attempts at court packing or doing away with the filibuster.

You say this is a recipe for “nothing gets done.” Those three words are, occasionally, balm to the conservative soul. A situation in which neither Matt Gaetz nor AOC can destabilize anything isn’t a bad situation. But also, no: Divided government will mean anything that gets done will involve winning over the opposition. Good. We’ve got to get back to persuasion, to politics as the art of the possible. That’s an old tradition too.

Meantime onward, do what you think right, feel appropriate anxiety but no crippling fear. Shoulders back. We’re the U.S.-blinkin’-A., baby, and we make our way through.

‘Let us go forth to lead the land we love . . . knowing that here on earth God’s work must truly be our own.” Those are the last words of John F. Kennedy’s Inaugural Address. To me they mean do your very best within your area to make things better.

My world has turned intense, yours too. Nobody knows what’s going to happen, everyone’s nervous, whatever latest information just showed a tick up or down, it’s neck and neck, and those who tell you to ignore the polls are right. Only later, when it doesn’t matter, will you know which ones were right. Meantime, in the aggregate, they instill a kind of fatalism. Still and always the great advice for those fully immersed in their times is in Robert Bolt’s screenplay of “Lawrence of Arabia”: “Nothing is written.” Today might change everything.

My anecdotal observation on the state of the race is this. Trump supporters are confident: They think they are more than half the country. Harris supporters are anxious: They fear they are less.

Yet since June political data men and women have told me everything will come down to each party’s ability to get out the vote, which means everything comes down to each party’s ground game. For weeks political observers have told me the Democrats have the advantage there. So that, and not the latest interview, could be the ballgame.

The other day someone said the campaign has reached its Oprah phase, where she’d have her big annual show and give gifts to everyone in the audience: “And you get a car, and you get a car!” Both candidates are promising to give money to whatever group whose love is immediately needed. This week Kamala Harris offered $20,000 forgivable loans for “Black entrepreneurs and others.”

Bloomberg editor in chief John Micklethwait brought the question to Donald Trump in their interview at the Chicago Economic Club. “You’re flooding the thing with giveaways,” Mr. Micklethwait charged bluntly. Mr. Trump, blithely: “But we’re going to grow.”

That charge and response haven’t changed in a century. It’s OK what we do, the money will always flood in endlessly!

We’ll get back to that in a moment and turn to another big interview this week, Kamala Harris on Fox News. Good for Fox—it got almost half an hour, it would be the first sustained grilling Ms. Harris faced since the campaign began, they’d have to get a lot in—and good for Ms. Harris for being game. Her campaign has clearly decided her safe-spaces strategy wasn’t working. She should have braved tough interviews months ago, she’d be a pro now. She should do more.

She was looking for a big moment—Kamala in the lion’s den facing down the foe. Anchor Bret Baier was looking to force her off her talking points and practiced answers to get to something deeper and more revealing. It was hot, sparky, fiery, she was sometimes defensive (immigration) and combative (on when she first observed a decline in Joe Biden’s mental acuity) but also scored points on the nature of Mr. Trump.

People will say it was too tough—Fox, partisan aggression. No. She is running for president, it is a tough job, she is a tough woman. It gave viewers a deeper sense of who she is. Mr. Baier showed himself, again, one of the great television news professionals of his generation.

Back to Messrs. Trump and Micklethwait. That interview too was smart and full of pushback. The subject was the economy, and you could see that whatever Mr. Trump’s economic policies are, economic issues are central to his thinking because he’s spent his life thinking about money. Mr. Micklethwait brought the courteous skepticism of the journalist who knows more economic history than his subject.

He quoted a survey of economists report: If you add up all the promises Mr. Trump is making, in terms of taxes and spending, it would add at least $7.5 trillion to the debt—and that’s twice as much as Ms. Harris’s promises. Why should business leaders trust you?

Mr. Trump: “We’re all about growth.” He’ll bring manufacturing back, protect U.S. companies with “strong tariffs.” He’ll put 100% or 200% tariffs on imports. Mr. Micklethwait pushed back. The impact of a tariff war would be “massive” since “40 million [American] jobs rely on trade.” Tariffs would push up costs and function “like a national sales tax” on U.S. consumers.

Trump’s response came down to “China thinks we’re a stupid country,” “I was always very good at mathematics,” and The Wall Street Journal has “been wrong on everything,” as has Mr. Micklethwait: “You’ve been wrong all your life on this stuff.”

In Trumpworld all debate, no matter how crucial, descends into ad hominem. And yet Mr. Trump was compelling. His stories, his anecdotes, have a constant subtext. World issues can be handled just by making Emmanuel Macron of France cry like a girl when you tell him you’re going to tax champagne. Kim Jong Un of North Korea is quieted by love letters. It’s all easy in Mr. Trump’s brain because it’s all personal, and his supporters hear this with relief. The world’s problems aren’t maddeningly complex, you just need the right application of personal force.

Some advice for Ms. Harris. If this is a close election and Mr. Trump loses he will likely reject the outcome. He won’t accept a result he doesn’t like, and he will likely push against democracy’s peaceful processes because he is angry and resentful and his feelings are hurt.

Ms. Harris should be describing all this more seriously, at greater length, with greater thoughtfulness. On Jan. 6 the Capitol was seized by an armed and angry crowd to stop a constitutionally mandated action. The president sat in his office and watched. Did he like what he saw? Why? That Constitution has kept us together for nearly 250 years, through thick and thin. He didn’t move quickly to protect it that day, and if he doesn’t accept the Nov. 5 outcome he will be failing to be protective again. If Ms. Harris thinks Mr. Trump is a danger to the Constitution then this is more than an election, it is a national emergency. In an emergency you put your own ideological purity and pride aside.

I don’t understand why Ms. Harris hasn’t made concessions to the moderates, Republicans and conservatives whose votes she needs. Why not tell them she knows their stands and views and is willing to concede to the need for a greater centrism, especially on issues where the political and cultural left have demanded too much and alienated regular Americans?

Why should Republicans who vote for her—and whom she needs to win—be the only ones bending? Why not make it easier for them? Why not say she sees them, and understands they’ve given up long-held views? Why not say she’ll give them more than a temporary home, she’ll do everything to make them comfortable there?

If she were fully sincere about the threat Mr. Trump poses, wouldn’t she have pulled the cord of the compromise alarm by now? Her party would let her—they’re desperate to win. And it would convey that she has some mastery over them.

As each day passes more eyes train on the race. You can say big things at the end.

We have been thinking about disasters, about Hurricane Helene and North Carolina, about Milton and Florida. It sent me back to the great classic on American disaster, “The Johnstown Flood” by David McCullough, published in 1968. I hadn’t remembered it contains information pertinent to the current moment.

Johnstown, Pa., in the western part of the state and the heart of the Allegheny Mountains, was a growing, thriving steel-mill and factory town in 1889, one of a string of such towns in a deep valley that McCullough likened to “an enormous hole in the Alleghenies.” The Cambria Iron Co. had giant converters going there, making steel for rails and plowshares. The place was alive.

Twenty-three thousand people lived in the valley, 15,000 of them in Johnstown, of all types, sorts and classes—doctors and lawyers, laborers and factory workers, small-business men and steel executives. There was just about every ethnicity too—Italians, Poles, Hungarians and Russians, though the majority of the population were Irish, Scots-Irish, German and Welsh. There were blacks—Johnstown had been a stop on the Underground Railroad—and Jewish merchants.

The mood of the town was the mood of the country, aspirational. There was a busy library and an opera house, and people worked hard, “not only because that was how life was then, but because people had the feeling they were getting somewhere. The country seemed hell bent for a glorious new age.”

Johnstown was built at the confluence of two rivers. Above the town was a reservoir, whose formal name was Lake Conemaugh but which everyone called the South Fork Dam. There had long been worries about that dam. It was controlled by a powerful trust whose leaders hadn’t always been interested in warnings from townspeople that it wasn’t sturdy enough or maintained. The lake was about 2 miles long, a mile wide, and in some places 10 feet deep. It was a fearsome body of water to have up there on a mountain over a town.

There had been heavy rains through the spring of 1889, and on Memorial Day more storms came in. The rivers ran high. The lake rose. On Friday the dam was breached. Then its center collapsed, and the lake fell down into the valley, and Johnstown was drowned.

Within days, McCullough writes, the Johnstown flood was the greatest story since the death of Lincoln. Newspaper reporters from Pittsburgh, New York and Philadelphia struggled to the scene, taking trains until the tracks washed out, then horses and mules, and finally slogging through seas of mud.

One by one they got there and saw: devastation.

The heart of the town was empty spaces, “an unbroken swath of destruction.” Landmarks were gone. Huge trees, whole houses, dead livestock and barns had been plunged into a huge wall of water. When the water came into sight, an eyewitness said, “It just seemed like a mountain coming.” Most of the people of Johnstown never saw it coming, “they only heard it; and those who lived to tell about it would for years after try to describe the sound of the thing as it rushed on them.” It was a deep, steady rumble, a roar like thunder, like the rush of an oncoming train.

The drowning of the city took about 10 minutes. Well over 2,000 were killed, but hundreds unaccounted for would never be found. The flood killed just about 1 person in 10 in the valley, 1 in 9 in Johnstown.

Word of what had happened electrified the nation and ignited the biggest humanitarian response America had ever seen. Within days food, water, clothing and blankets poured in. Even Clara Barton came with her newly organized group, the Red Cross. It was their first real disaster. Barton vowed, as she threw up hospital tents, to be “the last to leave the field.” She stayed five months, never left once, and when she departed the people of Johnstown cheered with tears in their eyes and gave her a golden locket. Johnstown made the Red Cross.

Newsmen spread other stories, too. Within days of the flood came reports that bands of “Hunkies”—local Hungarian laborers—were robbing, raping and pillaging. It wasn’t true but caused plenty of trouble, and it turned out the rumors were started by a local lawyer who’d lost his wife and children and gone off his head.

There were true tales of heroism. Seventeen-year-old Bill Heppenstall was at the water’s edge when a small house in the swift current lodged, for a moment, in a clump of trees. He heard a baby crying, but the house was too far to reach. He got a bell cord from a railcar, tied it around his waist, swam to the house, and came back with the child. Witnesses cheered. He’d seen a mother in the house and went back for her too, and as they reached shore together the house was torn from the trees and spun madly downstream.

Also, unbelievably, survivors organized almost immediately. They formed citizen committees to establish morgues, improvise housing, see to unclaimed children. They appointed policemen, who cut tin stars from tomato cans found in the wreckage.

The inventive rigged up rope bridges; the brave crossed them to find survivors.

What are our thoughts from this?

In great disasters rumors spread quick as fire. When you’re in one you must take this into account.

When you’ve got a feeling about something, when your mind keeps going to it, unbidden—I don’t trust that dam—listen to it, even if you don’t understand it. Act on it. Premonitions have to be followed by action or they’re just something that keeps you up at night.

We have always been a clever people but in the past we were clever not only with our heads but our hands. We made things, knew how to work wood and metal, and in a physical crisis we knew how to rig up the rope ladder and build a raft, quickly. When we lost the mills and factories we lost jobs, yes, but we also saw the lessening of a capability, a broad ability to handle the physical world when that world turns dark. We need to pay more attention to this.

History reminds us: America is and always has been a freak show. We should accept this in ourselves more, that it is in our nature as a people. When the floodwaters receded and camp towns sprang up, the region’s prostitutes came in, followed by the ladies of the Christian Temperance Union. We are cantankerous. When strangers who had survived overnight in an attic saw that a stone church next door had broken the wall of water, someone said, “The Methodist church saved us.” Within seconds a voice shot out: “Only the Catholic Church can save!”

We did something nobody ever tried before, to fill a continent with people from every country in the world, and ask them to come, build something, get along, and invent an arrangement of rules and rights by which they could operate together. It produced a dazzling, strange and gifted nation, a freak show, and a fabulous one.

To read our history is to say, “We got through that.”

We’ve got through a lot. Whatever’s coming, immediately and further out, we’ll likely get through that, too.

For the love of God, Madam Vice President, reverse your decision and come to the Archdiocese of New York’s Al Smith dinner. There’s still time, schedules free up, and announcing you’ll speak will make you look both humble (“on second thought”) and heroic (into the lion’s den).

Why would she snub the famous, ancestral, bipartisan dinner, which has taken place every third Thursday in October since 1945 (virtually in 2020), that Theodore White lauded as an irreplaceable ritual of every presidential year?

It couldn’t be disdain for institutional Catholicism. The dinner exists to raise money to feed the hungry, teach the child, heal the sick, house the immigrant.

It couldn’t be antipathy for Catholics themselves. They’re 70 million strong and the famous deciders of national politics, backing Joe Biden in 2020 and Donald Trump in 2016. They pick the winner!

It couldn’t be insensitivity toward Latinos, who compose an estimated one-third to half of the Archdiocese’s parishioners, who are its growing presence and its loving future.

It would be wrong to suggest every Catholic in America sits around thinking about who goes to the big Catholic dinner, and yet we . . . notice such things. Every four years it’s news. A simple refusal—I don’t have time—could be misinterpreted as disrespect for Catholics in general. Pennsylvania’s population is roughly a quarter Catholic. It would be sad if some of them misunderstood.

It couldn’t be fear of the audience. More than half are Democrats. The dais is the top officials of New York state, all of whom are Democrats.

It couldn’t be dislike of the archbishop—everyone likes Cardinal Timothy Dolan and he likes everyone back.

And it couldn’t be that the dinner is old. It is, but its age is its virtue. It’s stood the test of time, lasted in this world where nothing lasts.

It must be something else—a simple mistake, the kind made by fast-moving campaign advisers who have no time to reflect.

That’s what jolly Archbishop Dolan thinks. He was in Yonkers after the announcement, visiting a children’s hospital supported by the church. Pressed for a response, he said he was disappointed of course but it must be an error; Ms. Harris has always spoken so well and warmly of healing our divisions. “This hasn’t happened in 40 years,” he said, referring to Walter Mondale, the Democrats’ 1984 nominee, who declined the dinner. The cardinal helpfully recalled the outcome: “He lost 49 out of 50 states. I don’t wanna say there’s a direct connection.”

Ms. Harris’s staffers likely think she can’t be in nailed-down New York near the end of a close race, she’s got to be in the battlegrounds.

But an elegant man in a tough race of his own gave the best answer to that thinking. President Barack Obama took the podium of the 2012 Al Smith and said, “In less than three weeks, voters in states like Ohio and Virginia and Florida will decide this incredibly important election. Which begs the question: What are we doing here?” The audience roared. We are here, Mr. Obama said, not only to honor the Catholic church. “It says something about who we are as a people that in the middle of a contentious election season, opposing candidates can share the same stage; people from both parties can come together to support a worthy cause.”

The Al Smith dinner is the only occasion each presidential year when both major-party candidates come together, sit, talk, have a drink, give dueling speeches, and give them not only with wit and humor but while radiating a deep democratic regard. It is a splendid thing. Those candidates demonstrate through the fact of their togetherness that our democratic system, which often seems so frail, so ready to give way, still holds, still endures, that it has a hidden health, a latent strength that will bear us through. Politicians speak plaintively of finding common ground. This dinner is common ground.

To be dead to this tradition, to say no to it in a way that will inevitably bring more no’s in the future—the dinner is never convenient—is to contribute to the ending of something good. In that sense it is worse than a mistake, it is a sin.

Think of the fabled tradition Ms. Harris becomes part of if she comes. In the 1960 dinner, John F. Kennedy was sly, playing “the religious issue” to his advantage. “I am glad to be here at this notable dinner once again, and I am glad that Mr. Nixon is here also. Now that Cardinal Spellman has demonstrated the proper spirit, I assume that shortly I will be invited to a Quaker dinner honoring Herbert Hoover.” Quakers were a tiny minority, Hoover the least popular recent president. Under that Harvard veneer resided a tough little Boston pol.

The 2012 dinner was a triumph for Mitt Romney, formerly of Bain Capital. He was handsome and dashing in his white tie and tails, and he brought down the house when he spoke of the “wardrobe changes” campaigning entails—jeans for one event, a suit for another. “But it’s nice to finally relax and wear what Ann and I wear around the house.” He paid tribute to Mr. Obama as a man of “many gifts.”

The 2016 dinner will never be forgotten by anyone who was there. Hillary Clinton was radiant, won the crowd and, speaking after Mr. Trump, won the night. “You know, come to think of it, it’s amazing I’m up here after Donald. I didn’t think he’d be OK with a peaceful transition of power. . . . Every year, this dinner brings together a collection of sensible, committed, mainstream Republicans—or, as we now like to call them, Hillary supporters. . . . Whoever wins this election, the outcome will be historic. We’ll either have the first female president or the first president who started a Twitter war with Cher. . . . He has no policies—I keep hearing that. I’d actually like to defend him on this. Donald has issues, serious issues.”

The applause was thunderous. Mr. Trump got off a good line: “The media is even more biased this year than ever before, ever. You want proof? Michelle Obama gives a speech and everyone loves it, it’s fantastic, they think she’s absolutely great. My wife, Melania, gave the exact same speech and people got on her case.” (Critics had noted similarities between Mrs. Trump’s 2016 convention speech and Mrs. Obama’s from 2008.) The room exploded in laughter. Then he ruined it all, attacking Mrs. Clinton as “corrupt” and saying: “Here she is tonight, in public, pretending not to hate Catholics.” He was the only speaker ever to be booed.

Here is something Ms. Harris will receive if she attends: worldwide attention in the media capital of the world as she, having finished her speech, is embraced by the laughing cardinal in a picture that will be seen everywhere, and her lines repeated everywhere.

Or she can be in some grim studio on some grim podcast reciting her latest positions in a way that will move and dazzle no one.

We are a church of miracles—the water into wine, the lame man who walked, the campaign advisers healed of their blindness. The little children of New York will no doubt be praying on coming Sundays in Mass, as they put their pennies in the collection plate, “Oh God, please change Kamala Harris’s mind, let her come to us, help the nice lady avoid the Mondale Curse. Amen.”