Peggy Noonan

I don’t think we fully appreciate how much the country is descending into political violence. We aren’t seeing the speed and pitch of the descent.

It is an amazing and little-noted fact that at least four cabinet secretaries in the second Trump administration, including the heads of the State and Defense departments, have reportedly had to live on military bases because of the number and severity of the threats against them. One top staffer to the president is also known to be so situated, as is the Army secretary and one other unnamed official.

This is all unprecedented in scale. People who work for presidents have always lived in houses in Northern Virginia or the District of Columbia. They haven’t had to live surrounded by U.S. troops.

None of this is normal, but then the appearance at the home of a Supreme Court justice of a man with a gun is abnormal (Brett Kavanaugh, June 2022), as is the campus assassination of a prominent conservative activist (Charlie Kirk, September 2025), or the three known attempts on the life of President Trump (July and September 2024, April 2026).

We have entered a new, dark time, and we have to think more about how we publicly handle assassinations and attempted assassinations. There’s no reason to believe we’re going to see fewer of them. We are a country with a long history of political violence, a country with 330 million people, more than that many guns, and a mental-health crisis.

I am thinking very much of what we show on our screens as we act out our roles in the drama. In terrible moments, we should keep in our minds these thoughts: Don’t inflame things. Don’t make them hotter and more dramatic.

This gets us to last Saturday night and the would-be assassin at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. The security failures surrounding that evening have been covered elsewhere. Those immediately guarding the president seem to be hardy and quick, but the peripheries of such events are a continuing problem.

My concern is how we react publicly—what’s on the screens.

Granted that everyone was at least a little shaken, and in such circumstances people often suffer from what Tom Wolfe called “information compulsion.” You can’t stop talking.

Still, the president shouldn’t have held a news conference after almost being shot, because he never knows what he’s going to say, and members of the media never know what they’re going to ask. Also there are a lot of young reporters covering the White House, and they have energy and ambition but lack deep judgment and wisdom, and they don’t know history in a way that prompts them to see its healthier templates.

Questions were asked in the news conference and in the roughly 24 hours after that it did no good to ask: “Why do you think this keeps happening to you?” “‘I am no longer willing to permit a pedophile, rapist, and traitor to coat my hands with his crimes.’ What’s your reaction to that?”

Guys: You can’t, immediately after the event, ask an American president to parse and consider the rants of his would-be killer, to chatter on about why someone would want to shoot him.

Part of the reason is that any future would-be shooter watching will be thinking like this: I can try to kill a president and then my thoughts can fill his mind, and everyone considers my historically important opinions, everyone talks about me and my genius, and I’m a somebody, I move mountains, I shoot presidents, and this is worth it! I am finally understood as a world-historic figure!

Assassins are delusional. Delusional people think they’re extremely significant and should be item one in the national consciousness.

We are losing our judgment about what should be said and can’t be said. We need to go back to a little terseness.

Imagine it like this: It is late in the evening of April 15, 1865, and Abraham Lincoln has survived an assassination attempt, the bullet aimed by John Wilkes Booth having merely nicked his now-bandaged scalp. Lincoln meets with the press in the Red Room. Horace Greeley, the old war horse of the New York Tribune, bores in. “Mr. President, this is the second known time someone has tried to shoot you. Why do people keep trying to kill you?” “Booth is reported to have screamed ‘Sic semper tyrannis!’ as he jumped from the balcony. Mr. President, why do people think you’re a tyrant?”

The unflappable Lincoln might have been a little nonplussed. Such questions would have constituted a serious breach in human decorum. But then again Greeley wouldn’t have asked them, and Lincoln wouldn’t have called a news conference, because he’d have known sometimes reporters ask the kind of questions that seem inane but are an excitement to the unstable.

All that is needed in such circumstances is that a leader do a four-minute taped or live statement saying he’s fine, everyone’s fine, law enforcement apprehended the shooter, the Secret Service were brave, life continues apace.

After such a terrible moment, the congressional leadership of both parties should appear on screen together and in simple terms reject violence. Make one thing clear: Political assassination is a particularly grave crime because it is an attempt to kill democracy itself. The people elect their representatives but the assassin says no, only my vote counts, I annul your collective choice. That is an assault on the constitutional order; we will not have it.

When something like the correspondents’ dinner happens, everyone goes to his corner and points a finger outward. The violence is coming from the left—no, it’s coming from the right. It isn’t a pointless argument but those engaged in it tend to be on one side or another, and getting hate mail and threats from the opposite side, and that tells them that it’s the other side that is the devil.

My own sense is that in recent years both sides threaten violence but the left is now more likely to act on it. And truly, all now should beware of a rising spirit of Luigi Mangioneism, of the belief that the system is so vicious and corrupt that violence is justifiable, that those who rise to the top in spheres such as business and politics—well, they have it coming.

Just about every major CEO in America has private security now. They didn’t use to. Even 10 years ago they didn’t. It is sick and terrible that they do now.

I end with this thought. Since at least the turn of the century our young people have been told, endlessly—in school, in media—that they will never have a nice life. The rising seas will drown them, a racist, misogynistic culture will abuse them, the economy can no longer make a place for them. If it is relentlessly drilled into you that you’ll never have a satisfying and constructive life, and you are 22 years old and your brain isn’t even fully developed yet, you just might think it wholly legitimate that you indulge your fury and strike at those who have thwarted you.

Maybe we want to change the emphasis to there are reasons to live, and you are not doomed, and you have a place here.

The first reigning pope in history to visit the U.S., Pope Paul VI, addressed the General Assembly of the United Nations on Oct. 4, 1965. The Cold War was on, India and Pakistan had just been at war, and in Vietnam the U.S. was shifting to large scale combat deployment. So the pontiff told the U.N. to do its job:

“Was not this the very end for which the United Nations came into existence: to be against war and for peace? Listen to the clear words of a great man who is no longer with us, John Kennedy, who proclaimed four years ago: ‘Mankind must put an end to war, or war will put an end to mankind.’ There is no need for a long talk to proclaim the main purpose of your institution. It is enough to recall that the blood of millions, countless unheard-of sufferings, useless massacres and frightening ruins have sanctioned the agreement that unites you with an oath that ought to change the future history of the world: Never again war, never again war! It is peace, peace, that has to guide the destiny of the nations of all mankind!”

It was electric. This was the sound of uncompromising moral seriousness.

Here is another example of rhetorical leadership at a hard moment: JFK, on Oct. 22, 1962, reporting to America on what would come to be called the Cuban Missile Crisis.

His words were direct, disciplined, spare—nothing loose or unnecessary. The text’s density established its seriousness.

“This government, as promised, has maintained the closest surveillance of the Soviet military buildup on the island of Cuba.” In the past week, “unmistakable evidence” established that a series of offensive missile sites is being prepared. “The purpose of these bases can be none other than to provide a nuclear strike capability against the Western Hemisphere.”

The evidence had been tested, a course of action chosen, and now he felt “obliged to report this new crisis to you in fullest detail.”

So he did. The U.S. had determined the presence of medium-range ballistic missiles capable of carrying a nuclear warhead more than 1,000 nautical miles. “In addition, jet bombers, capable of carrying nuclear weapons, are now being uncrated and assembled in Cuba, while the necessary air bases are being prepared.”

It had been going on for months, the Soviets had lied about it when asked, and America couldn’t accept it “if our courage and our commitments are ever to be trusted again by either friend or foe.”

“Our unswerving objective, therefore, must be to prevent the use of these missiles against this or any other country, and to secure their withdrawal or elimination from the Western Hemisphere.”

Thus the plan: The U.S. was initiating a “strict quarantine” on military equipment being shipped to Cuba. Close surveillance of the island would continue. Should the Soviets continue their installations, “further action will be justified.” U.S. armed forces were ready for “any eventualities.”

“Any nuclear missile launched from Cuba against any nation in the Western Hemisphere” would be seen by the U.S. as “requiring a full retaliatory response upon the Soviet Union.”

He called for an emergency meeting of the U.N. Security Council: “We have no wish to war with the Soviet Union—for we are a peaceful people who desire to live in peace with all other peoples.” But we’d do what needs to be done. “The greatest danger of all would be to do nothing.”

Even I, age 11, understood in a broad way what was being said. Really, we all did: We’d heard the evidence, followed the president’s thinking, chosen to trust his judgment. So he had support.

Here is Oct. 25, 1983—a lower-stakes but dramatic moment. President Ronald Reagan informed the nation from the White House Briefing Room that he had ordered U.S. troops to the Caribbean island of Grenada. Like JFK, he was careful to tell the people exactly what he was doing and why.

The democratic government of that small Caribbean island had been toppled in a Marxist coup. There were American citizens there, among them some 700 students attending St. George’s University medical school.

Reagan recounted how the prime minister of Grenada and several members of his government had been murdered. The U.S. had received “urgent” appeals for help from neighboring Caribbean states. “Early this morning, forces from six Caribbean democracies and the United States began a landing or landings on the island of Grenada in the Eastern Caribbean.”

This action was taken for three reasons: to protect American lives, to forestall further chaos, and to help restore democratic institutions. U.S. forces would withdraw as soon as the objectives were achieved. “We want to be out as quickly as possible, because our purpose in being there is only for them . . . to take over their own affairs.”

In another address to the nation a few days later, he admitted the larger context: we couldn’t allow another Cuba. Over the preceding several years, the Soviet Union and Cuba had grown involved in Grenada, building military facilities, providing arms, and building an airfield capable of handling military aircraft.

Reagan’s statements were similar to JFK’s in that they were rhetorically disciplined—no breast beating, no emotionalism, just the facts. Both made clear their actions rested on moral and strategic judgments, not national ambition or aggression.

In the end, 7,000 U.S. troops joined up with Caribbean troops, and in three days they deposed the new government, restored democracy and prevented a new Soviet-Cuban outpost.

Early U.S. press reaction to the endeavor varied from skeptical to hostile, and that might have settled in as public opinion if not for what happened when the rescued medical students returned to South Carolina’s Charleston Air Force Base. When they walked from the military transports, some of them knelt on the tarmac and kissed the ground. One told the Washington Post he’d always been “a dove” but now he wouldn’t hear a word against the U.S. military.

What are we doing here? We’re reminding how it’s done. We’re putting forward what it should look like when a president brings his nation to armed military action. He explains the history, offers the evidence, interprets its meaning, outlines the plan.

You can’t take a nation to war without this rhetorical predicate.

Mr. Trump has failed to provide it. Now and then he announces things behind a podium, and there are regular responses to questions in press gaggles, where he reacts off the cuff. But nothing thought-through, no serious document making the case. And the public is never reassured.

We don’t even know, a month into Iran, why now. Iran has been the world’s fanatic irritant for almost 50 years. What is the plan?

This absence of formal seriousness is part of why the president’s popularity is falling.

If Donald Trump can’t do this, and his vice president can’t do it sincerely, maybe the secretary of state should step in?

*   *   *

While we’re giving advice, one imagines the Vatican has many excitable monsignors running the pontiff’s social-media accounts, and one suspects they are hyped to show the pope is giving rizz. But homilies, speeches, papers and encyclicals are better suited to great statements at great moments than buzzy posts on X.

Don’t do it the cheap way. You are the throne of Peter. Do it the serious way.

In the 1950s the Catholic Bishop Fulton J. Sheen had a half-hour prime-time TV show on Tuesday nights called “Life Is Worth Living.” It addressed the issues of the day through the lens of Catholic thought. To everyone’s surprise, its ratings frequently beat its competitor, Milton Berle’s No. 1 variety show, originally known as “Texaco Star Theater.” Sheen won an Emmy for Most Outstanding Personality and in his acceptance speech famously thanked his writers, “Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.” That was a subtly unifying note for Catholics and Protestants.

It is said that when Berle teased Sheen about his high ratings, Sheen replied it was because he had a better sponsor. Berle told a reporter he didn’t mind the competition. “After all we’re both using old material.”

I just thought I’d share that as our president, who grew up on Milton Berle and the great comics of early television, continues verbal war with a different prelate, Pope Leo XIV. Leo had been pointedly critical of the war in Iran, and the president responded with fury on social media, calling him “WEAK on Crime and terrible on foreign policy.” As Damian Thompson noted in the Spectator, with appropriate wonder, “not once in the 250-year history of the United States has a Commander-in-Chief launched a personal attack on the Supreme Pontiff.”

How odd to go to war, while already in other wars, with the head of a vast and ancient institution, a man whose job titles include vicar of Christ, head of the Holy See and Bishop of Rome, and who is the spiritual leader of 1.4 billion Catholics and the biggest Christian denomination in America. The pope, you might say, has a certain moral standing. In any case, popes don’t cheer wars, which are always a calamity—a result of failure and a killer of the innocent.

The president’s comments speak of something disordered in the administration’s relationship to faith.

On April 1 at a White House Easter lunch, with the president standing behind her, Paula White-Cain, head of the administration’s Faith Office, compared President Trump to Christ: “Jesus taught so many lessons through his death, burial, and resurrection. . . . And Mr. President, no one has paid the price like you have paid the price. It almost cost you your life. You were betrayed and arrested and falsely accused. It’s a familiar pattern that our Lord and Savior showed us.”

It was quite something. If you really believe in Christ, as a Christian preacher should, you wouldn’t compare him to any leader of this world. That wasn’t an act of misdirected reverence but a refusal of reverence.

What is going on with this administration and its use and abuse of Christianity? Shouldn’t the great churches of America be thinking about this, and at this point talking about it publicly, thoughtfully?

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, earlier in the Iran war, stood in the Pentagon and issued a call for a wartime prayer: “Every day, on bended knee, with your family, in your schools, in your churches,” the American people should pray “in the name of Jesus Christ.”

On Thursday, he compared mainstream media reporters to the enemies of Christ—“the Pharisees” who “held counsel against him . . . to destroy him.” The press, he said, is “just like these Pharisees.” He clarified he meant “the legacy, Trump-hating press.”

American presidents during war have always called on God for help and guidance, deliberately not the Lord of one faith, but of all. And none have ever used the story of Christ to undermine a president’s critics.

I am becoming shocked by what I’m seeing here, and as a registered pundit my response to shock tends toward counter-rudeness.

A reader sent a note this week saying he’d been following the president’s attack on the pope and his follow-up posting of the artificial-intelligence image depicting him as Christ healing the sick, and it sent him to the Sermon on the Mount. Consider what Jesus said, the reader urged, and the things Trump says. I did.

Christ: “Blessed are you who are poor.”

Mr. Trump: “Part of the beauty of me is that I’m very rich.” “My whole life I’ve been greedy, greedy, greedy. I’ve grabbed all the money I could get.”

Christ: “Blessed are the meek.”

Mr. Trump: “It has been stated by many that the first month of our presidency . . . is the most successful in the history of our nation.” “You know who No. 2 is? George Washington.”

Christ: “Blessed are the merciful.”

Mr. Trump: “I am your retribution.” “Why are we having all these people from s— hole countries come here?”

Christ: “Blessed are the peacemakers.”

Mr. Trump: “A whole civilization will die tonight.” “He died like a dog.” “He died after running into a dead-end tunnel whimpering and crying and screaming.”

Christ: “Love your enemies: do good to them that hate you.”

Mr. Trump: “I love getting even with people.” “I hate my opponent, and I don’t want the best for them, I’m sorry.”

Some common subject matter, but rather different approaches! So different that Mr. Trump’s statements seem the photographic negative of the Sermon on the Mount.

I used the word hick last week, not one people use much anymore but one that should be redefined and reoriented, because it’s a growing public style. Old meaning of hick: hayseed, rube, ill-educated person. But modern hickdom doesn’t have anything to do with geography, class, profession, circumstances of birth. It has to do with character and disposition. You can be a Harvard hick, a Palm Beach hick.

What all hicks have in common is that they lack respect. They lack a shown courtesy toward people or things that deserve a measure of homage. They don’t have the bandwidth to know what should be respected in the world, or what and who helps it turn. They aren’t skeptical but cynical. They think they’re wised-up, but they lack something essential, a broad and sympathetic imagination. And they are all over Washington.

A hick picks a fight with a pope.

Vice President JD Vance is a man of fairly frequent conversions—from fiercely anti- to fiercely pro-Trump, from Silicon Valley mover to Midwestern populist, to Catholicism—and you can’t expect a 41-year-old man who moves with such speed to keep perfect track of all his latest convictions. But Mr. Vance admonished the pope before an audience at the University of Georgia this week, saying if Leo was “going to opine on matters of theology,” he should be “anchored in truth.” In the same way that the vice president, must “be careful” when he talks about public policy, it’s “very important for the pope to be careful when he talks about matters of theology.”

Well, yes. But wow. “Be careful”? “Opines” on theology? Talking down to the leader of a great church from your height of seven years as a member? Who died and made you pope?

Leo can take care of himself. His X post on Thursday: “Woe to those who manipulate religion and the very name of God for their own military, economic, and political gain, dragging that which is sacred into darkness and filth.”

To the extent anyone ever wins these things, he will. He has a better sponsor, and better writers.

Cease-fires give hope even if temporary, tenuous and fragile. But does anyone imagine negotiations with Iran in the next two weeks will bear real fruit, resolve central questions? If they don’t, what then?

We’re in a fluid, dangerous story that isn’t going away any time soon. But I want to speak of something that made it worse, those social-media posts in the middle of the night.

The first story here is the U.S. joining the war, the second is the ultimate outcome, but third in importance is those posts, because they seemed so desperate, so cruel, and so Suez-like in their historical size and import.

You know them well. On Tuesday, Donald Trump on Truth Social: “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen but it probably will.” On Good Friday, “Our Military, the greatest and most powerful (by far!) in the World, hasn’t even started destroying what’s left in Iran. Bridges next, then Electric Power Plants!” On Easter Sunday, “Open the f— Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell—JUST WATCH.” He ended that post “Praise be to Allah.”

The posts left his friends and foes slackjawed. I want to talk about why they were so horrifying.

They constituted hitting a new bottom, a new and infernal, face-lit-by-flames bottom, in world communications. The posts weren’t showbiz, they were sinister. You destabilize the world when, as the American president, you say such things. You make all the babies in this delicately poised, always knock-down-able world less safe. You rob your own nation of a claim to moral seriousness in the military action in which it’s engaged: You are saying we’re not trying to protect life but plan to attack, and in the attacking kill noncombatants who are members of the targeted civilization. The moral high ground is relinquished. You lower the bar for all potential response. You encourage violent action by trumpeting your readiness for it.

It bolsters the position of your enemies—their animus is justified, their commitment deepened. It allows them to pretend they’re fighting for the continuation of their people and not only the continuation of their regime.

It’s even ineffective as a threat. The reason the “madman theory” worked for Richard Nixon, if it did, was that world leaders knew he wasn’t crazy but might be tripped into extreme behavior by an adversary’s intransigence. Donald Trump plays the part of the madman every day. His head fake would be sanity. If his advisers thought this was a good negotiating tactic—“Give ’em a little madman theory, Mr. President”—they really are hicks.

Previous presidents haven’t always been lit by inner dignity, but all at least attempted to fake it in public, as a bow to the people and their presumably moral ways. They didn’t feel free to get revved up in the middle of the night and take their rage out for a walk to relieve itself on the sidewalk.

Here I ask you to google “U.S. presidents at war, how they spoke and wrote.” Lincoln and FDR of course, but also Eisenhower and Korea, Reagan in the Cold War, both Bushes in their wars. This isn’t an exercise in nostalgia. If we don’t actively remember and summon past standards, we have no chance of getting them back, because we’ll have forgotten what they were, and the current fecal matter will be all we know and can continue.

You unconsciously stand up straight in a cathedral. The art, the sweep, the ceilings are so high that you aspire even in your posture. You crouch down low to enter a darkened shack. The sound of our leadership now makes us all crouch too low.

Why do we recoil when a leader is vulgar and violent in his language and thinking? Coarse language obviously implies coarse thinking, and no one wants that in a leader entrusted to bring peace and prosperity. Beyond that, throughout history political authority has come wrapped in a certain formality and ceremony. Dignity enhanced power. A British king even 500 years ago didn’t think himself free to speak in public like a fishmonger or a street whore. He had to present himself at a certain height so people would look up to him.

As for threats, when you resort to them, you’re revealing you are uncertain of the sufficiency of your power. Real menace shuts its mouth. Napoleon acted as if a threat was information given to the enemy. He didn’t want to signal intent or commit to an action, he wanted the foe wondering what he’d do next.

In the past, Trump supporters often received criticism of his language as if it were criticism of them. That didn’t happen this time. They know he was doing something they themselves wouldn’t do and don’t want. Tucker Carlson caught this when he challenged Mr. Trump the day after Easter: “Who do you think you are?”

I think Mr. Trump shocked his followers. What he used this week was not the diction of the common man but the language of sociopathy. That isn’t how his supporters want the world to see him. It’s not what they want him to be.

Beyond that, we haven’t learned much new about Mr. Trump during his Iran endeavor, it’s more a matter of “more so.”

He has enormous personal tolerance for dramatic, high-stakes situations in which outcomes are unknown and won’t immediately be known. The waiting doesn’t wear him down.

He operates as if he honestly believes we don’t need allies, as if the concept is antique. He’s threatening again to leave the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. But having and holding allies is simple prudence. They steady your position in moments of danger—they help you make the case, and share the intelligence burden—and broaden your influence in peace. More than that, allies add legitimacy and moral authority. You’re acting with others, not only for yourself, and you’re going forward with shared values that imply historical meaning, which has its own force. Having allies means that when something bad happens you don’t stand alone.

It is not sentimental to care about this, it is babyish to think it means nothing.

Mr. Trump’s trust in his gut seems to have grown overwhelming—not in his reasoning power, not his analysis of intelligence data, but gut. George W. Bush was famously a gut player too, and having a good gut, a good brain and good judgment are a great boost in life and leadership. But it can’t be all gut. A lot of gut instinct is pattern recognition—I’ve lived long, experienced much, and know how this movie ends. But that means gut is weighted toward past experience. It can have limited utility in wholly new territory. Sometimes gut is mere emotion dressed up as instinct. Sometimes it’s wishful thinking that feels like conviction. Sometimes it conveniently pre-empts hard reasoning. You can trust your gut straight into catastrophe.

Also gut never does a full audit—you need your brain for that, for reflection and self-examination on how or where you went wrong, to help you next time.

And gut doesn’t necessarily travel. A good gut in one domain can be a bad one in another. You can confuse domains.

In his Iran speech Wednesday, President Trump asserted much and argued for little. There were some boasts, some threats—“We are going to hit them extremely hard. . . . We’re going to bring them back to the stone ages, where they belong.” And some of what appeared to be magical thinking: “When this conflict is over, the strait will open up naturally.”

The central message seemed to be that the war isn’t over but may be over in a while, the U.S. will continue bombing for two or three weeks, and, unstated but made clear through subject matter, setting, symbolism and the length, extent and success of the military campaign: Of course this is a war.

It was strange that Mr. Trump didn’t prepare the country for any possible repercussions. A somber admission that U.S. actions in Iran might be followed by serious counteraggression was needed, and is part of the president’s responsibility.

I was thinking this week that Mr. Trump’s vision of himself as primarily a dealmaker is unsuited to a necessity of presidential leadership, which involves laying out the logic of a difficult case. Deal makers gain advantage through strategies that don’t necessarily involve transparency and forthrightness. I went back to Mr. Trump’s 1987 “The Art of the Deal.” A strong undercurrent of that lively book is that it’s good to be unreadable and sneaky: “I play it very loose.” “Sometimes it pays to be a little wild.” “The truth is I’m keeping my options open.” “I also protect myself by being flexible. I never get too attached to one deal or one approach.” “I keep a lot of balls in the air.” “Once I’ve made a deal, I always come up with at least a half dozen approaches to making it work because anything can happen.” Money is a way of keeping score. “The real excitement is playing the game.”

I want to swerve here to talk about the word that keeps coming to mind when I look at the president’s leadership, and it is “mood.” A lot seems to depend on matters of personal choice, will and mood. In Iran for instance, maybe he’ll bomb the rubble until it jumps, maybe he’ll declare victory and withdraw by May, maybe he’ll send in troops. But it will be his choice, no consultation needed with that pesky branch, the legislative.

There is something not at all right when the weightiest decisions of a democratic republic depend so much on the mood of one man. With the great majority of past presidents personal mood didn’t have such precedence. There were forms and traditions and processes, there were strictures, rules, the law, expectations, all of which would hem in the head of the executive branch, at least eventually. The president’s mood didn’t reign and determine everything. But now mood mows down all. People have become habituated to this, tolerate it, factor it in. But of course when you factor it in you are enabling and continuing it.

Fear of the president’s mood has reduced otherwise impressive appointees to anxious ferrets sparring with Sunday news show anchors in a way that is performatively smug but also fearful—always aware of the famous “audience of one.”

Things are out of whack, and even though we all know this, it still should be said now and then.

Ronald Reagan late in his presidency, in a valedictory appearance at a Republican National Convention, spoke of how he personally experienced the office: “You don’t become president of the United States. You are given temporary custody of an institution called the presidency, which belongs to our people.” He approached his two administrations as “a sacred trust.” This was pushback against the idea of an imperial presidency, in which man and office are fused and personal power the point. But man’s life is limited and the institution is continuous, an inheritance accumulated across time. It was also a rebuke to the idea of grandiosity, in which inflated self-regard amounts to a distorted relationship with reality.

The Founders would agree. James Madison felt the ambitions and vanities of men must be countered and balanced through conscious governmental structures. Alexander Hamilton wanted energy in the executive—the president must be strong enough to do what is necessary, to lead and leave his mark, but that office can’t become a tool of personal ambition, whim or will. President Washington’s actions were more eloquent than words can be: When he left office and lay down power, he was implying the presidency ran through him but would now be redirected, by the people, to run through someone else for a time, and so on.

It’s all gotten too ego-driven, too strangely dependent on the magic of personality, too vainglorious and, yes, grandiose. This style has been growing, unevenly, among presidents for some time, but never as it is now and under Mr. Trump.

Last week the Treasury announced Mr. Trump’s signature will appear on U.S. currency. Why? Maybe he was in the mood to sign dollars and those around him, knowing everything in their lives depends on him, that what power they enjoy flows from him, said: Yes sir, your mood is all.

Mr. Trump was in the mood to knock down the East Wing of the White House and build in its place something huge and imposing, certainly needed, possibly grand. But the drawings appear strange, with the new edifice dwarfing all around it in a way that is disharmonious, dominating.

At the beginning of the war, exact U.S. objectives weren’t clearly or formally stated, and I guessed the president would make them clear the day operations cease. Whatever the state of play at that point will be exactly what he set out to achieve. I still believe that is true.

And if he’s in the mood for it, we’ll have a parade.

The president’s foes keep saying we are losing our democracy, but if we continue down this path we will lose our republic—chipping away at its balance, its expectations and wisdom.

Imagine a Congress that looks at a war and denies it’s a war so it won’t have to debate the war in front of the American people.

Imagine a president going to the Supreme Court oral arguments on birthright citizenship and sitting in the audience to stare down the justices who may rule against his government’s case. That actually happened Wednesday morning. It has never happened before in all U.S. history. (And surely, it will prove a miscalculation. That court is not going to be afraid of his glowering visage. That court is part of a branch that still knows its job.)

This whole big shambolic miracle machine only keeps rolling because we are an amazing thing—a democratic republic. Both are important words, both essential. But “democratic” is an adjective modifying a noun.

In a republic, the noun, supreme power is held by the people and their elected representatives, constrained by law. In a democratic republic the people choose those representatives through elections with broad suffrage. The republic brings with it constitutional limits, separations of power. Democracy brings with it popular will, and implies popular passion, and the possibility of excess.

We are both, and must be.

A memory from the Massapequa, N.Y., public schools of the late 1950s and early 1960s:

We had regular desk drills. The school alarm would pierce the air and teachers would instruct us to slide from our chairs, crouch under our desks facing the floor, and place our hands, fingers interlocked, over our necks. This was to protect our arteries from flying glass when the bombs hit. This went on for a few years. At some point I whispered to another student that it was pointless. “The glass won’t shatter, it will melt.” I’d been reading the newspapers about what happens when a nuclear weapon goes off.

The “duck and cover” drills are always treated as the baby boomers’ comic trauma, but it wasn’t so comic. In my case they contributed to a classic anxiety formation that lasted years. There was a popular song in the summer of 1961, when I was 10, the theme to the movie “The Guns of Navarone,” and I got it in my mind that when it played on the radio that it was really a secret code announcing “the attack has begun.” Around that time Long Island’s airspace started filling with commercial jets bound for LaGuardia and Idlewild (now JFK) airports. The jet age had begun. I’d feel dread when I’d see a plane far overhead: Maybe that’s the one with the bomb.

You would think that by the logic of such trauma I would have become a peace activist, but it became for me a predicate to conservatism. Because the experience implanted in me a hatred of well-meaning fictions—the glass won’t shatter, it will melt—and because, having grown up with World War II movies and TV shows and histories, I came to see war as pretty much the normal state of man, because there’s something wrong with us. In any case it’s a tough world and you’ve got to be strong in it.

I’m thinking of all this because when we remember duck-and-cover drills we think “Cold War” and “Russia,” but it had a lot to do with Cuba.

Which has loomed so large in the life of our country for 65 years. It has had a big effect on us that only 90 miles from our shore a dictatorship had arisen whose attitude toward us was aggressive animosity fueled by ideology, a state that was fully aligned with our great Cold War foe.

We struggled so hard to handle Cuba, and bobbled it so often. There was our halting, ambivalent leadership in invading it in April 1961, which produced the great foreign policy disaster of the Bay of Pigs. Then, in October 1962, the harrowing missile crisis and the president of the United States telling us the Soviets were installing missiles there aimed at the heart of our great cities. After that was resolved, 100 small disasters—Cuba encouraging terrorists and leftist revolutionaries, the Mariel boatlift in 1980.

And the figure of Fidel Castro himself—the handsome revolutionary of the mesmerizing rhetoric, a deeply clever young man who, when he led his cadres down from the Sierra Maestra, said he wasn’t a communist at all but a democratic revolutionary toppling a dictator, and the American establishment so wanted to believe him, and many did. When it became clear he wasn’t quite as advertised, they told themselves stories—he may think he’s a Third World socialist but in time he’ll change, because the facts of life change you. They didn’t change him.

Cuba has had an impact on us. And something big is happening there, some new moment in a long-running story, and I’m not sure we’re fully and completely noticing.

It’s possible the regime there is on the brink of falling, that the country is further along in societal collapse than it has ever been. Castro almost fell off a cliff in the early 1990s when he lost his Soviet patron, but he had moves then, and he made them.

President Trump’s removal of Nicolás Maduro from Venezuela has left Cuba without that country’s oil. It is now swept by local and nationwide blackouts, a failing electrical grid, food shortages, rationing, shrinking services—famously, limited garbage collection. There has been a sharp degradation of everyday life, and there have been street protests, not many but some violent. The New Yorker this week had a reported piece by Jon Lee Anderson, who quoted a friend of his in Havana who was a “longtime Revolution loyalist”: “I don’t care anymore how it happens,” the loyalist said, “but this situation has to end.”

That statement stopped me in my tracks. We often speak of late-stage capitalism and its contradictions, but what is happening in Cuba is late-stage communism and its exhaustions.

The state continues to control all power, has all the guns—the military, the police, the spy structures. There is no known fully organized resistance.

But so many failures at the same time is a big thing, and again, for the first time the government looks to be out of moves. And if you believe people somehow know when they’re being lied to—that they organically comprehend the prevailing powers are lying to them, even when their life depends on ignoring what they know—then it’s obvious the force of communism as a belief system has dissipated. The old revolutionary story has grown brittle, feeble. And there is no fiery, romantic leader now who can convince you to believe him and not your lying eyes. Castro died at 90 in 2016. His place is taken by party hacks, whose mismanagement is endemic and likely not curable.

Maybe they’ll muddle through. Maybe what we’re seeing is the early stages of a nation settling itself into an even worse and impoverished—but continuing—reality.

Or maybe the whole thing is about to collapse. How would we know? The military wobbles in its support. Protests spread and intensify, and police are slow or refuse to crack down. The elite, such as it is, starts to fracture. A kid stands in front of a tank.

It feels dreamy to imagine a 67-year-old tragedy resolving itself in this way. But it’s possible.

You have to hope weighty things are being said behind the scenes in Washington, especially in the State Department headed by Marco Rubio, son of Cuban immigrants. But the president’s recent public comments have been offhand, unserious, slobby. “Taking Cuba, in some form, yeah. Taking Cuba. I mean, whether I free it, take it, think I can do anything I want with it.”

This crisis deserves more than that. What a thing it would be if America could see this story end happily, constructively.

Mr. Trump’s White House is a kitchen where there are always four pots at full boil on the stove, and the windows are misty from steam, and the cooks run around not knowing which pot to turn down or remove from the burner, and the mad chef says no, keep all flames high.

You’d like to see things cool down, the mist cleared from the windows so they can see what’s close by.

Thoughts on Iran have to begin with the awe we feel, again, for the U.S. military. Its professionalism, cool and courage are impressive and inspiring. And we must give Donald Trump his due: His decision was bold, he took a big swing.

The end of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and scores of his colleagues-in-hellish-rule isn’t bad news for the world but good, as is what looks to be inevitable damage to or even possible ending of its nuclear program.

You’ve got to hope it’s all going to succeed, that it will make America’s position an inch or two better in the world and not an inch or two worse, that a violent regime will be replaced by something better, safer.

But it’s a gamble, a huge one, and we’ll find out if it was a reckless one.

Of course it is a war. We are bombing a sovereign nation and have killed its leaders; we’ve sunk much of the Iranian fleet. This isn’t a situation that lends itself to phrases like “limited series of strikes.” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has said it could go three weeks, maybe eight. You don’t know when you launch something like this how and when it ends.

(Quickly, on Mr. Hegseth. Someone has to calm him down. He’s supposed to be trying to get the world to see the wisdom of the administration’s actions. Instead he’s something between an excitable morning TV anchor and the rooster who thought he brought the dawn. “We’re playing for keeps.” “We’re punching them while they’re down.” He brags about our “lethality.” Stop talking like that! Don’t feed the stereotypes, don’t tempt the gods.)

Should Congress debate the war seriously and at length? Yes, of course. That’s its job. We are a republic. Stick with it, with its forms, delineations and responsibilities. “Half of Congress is useless.” Half of Congress is always useless, but it’s what we’ve got.

The argument for the war is serious: For almost half a century, Iran’s government has been causing violent trouble in the world. It has been increasing its production of weaponry, it has long vowed death to America and Israel, and, after the June bombing of its nuclear installations and the crushing of December and January’s street protests, it is seriously weakened. So move.

Mr. Trump first won the presidency with fiery denunciations of illegal immigration and forever wars. He doesn’t like war but he looks to have grown to like sparks, and he’s had a lot of recent good fortune with the use of force. When he first bombed Iran, that country did little in response; when he moved on Venezuela, plucking its ruler from his bed, there was no blowback. It’s possible this has left him thinking the world’s bad guys are a Potemkin village, that they talk big but fold quickly. But is that true?

He is gambling when he thinks he’s on a winning streak. Iran’s government ducked and covered through the June bombings, but now they will be fighting to keep from losing everything. It’s hard to imagine the regime’s death throes, if it comes to that, will be pretty.

It isn’t fear-mongering to think about potentially harrowing repercussions to the U.S. actions, which could include a widening war in the Mideast, a broadening and escalation of hostilities, the dragging in of U.S. allies, a drain on our armaments becoming a provocation to potential adversaries, a terrorist strike or strikes from Iranian operatives or nonstate actors, oil spikes, an energy shock—20% of the world’s oil goes through the Strait of Hormuz. Many in the military services, and possibly civilians, may be casualties.

Here is what I infer of the president’s logic. The bombing has a good chance of slowing or stopping Iran’s nuclear, ballistic-missile and drone programs. It will certainly degrade and damage Iran’s infrastructure, standing, mystique. The country will be diminished. If its leaders are killed, so be it. If those who replace them are better, good. If they are just as bad or worse, at least they will be operating in reduced circumstances. They’ll be forced to turn to rebuilding their country. They might therefore be diverted from arms-making, at least for a while. And if, down the road, they act up in harmful ways, they will know in the back of their minds that the U.S. may move on them again. This may moderate their actions and decisions.

I infer because Mr. Trump has given many reasons for his decisions. This is not reassuring. He’s offered varying explanations for going forward—he had a feeling, or Israel was going to move anyway—and in the end whatever happens is what he’ll say he wanted. If there’s regime change, that was his intention all along. If there isn’t, it wasn’t what he was looking for.

The hope for an armed uprising by the Iranian people strikes me as absurd. They don’t have arms. They live in a police state. The ayatollahs have operated with Mao’s understanding that power comes out of the barrel of a gun. The Journal reports that Israel targeted not only Iranian missile and drone sites but the nation’s police-state apparatus, including the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps headquarters in Tehran, in hope of clearing the way for a popular revolt.

Could that happen? People who have lived under a dictatorship for almost half a century are forced to survive and rise within a sick system. Those most likely to oppose the religio-fascist state that oppressed them would likely lack the street fervor of street Islamists. When your country is being bombed and your cousin’s neighborhood hit, the impulse is to defend your land and shake your fist at the bombers.

U.S. polls so far aren’t supportive of the president’s decision. What might be behind the reservations? The administration’s communication of its thinking could, it’s true, be substantially improved. Formal, detailed explanations of official thinking are needed in situations like this, but they aren’t magic. George W. Bush’s addresses on the decision to go into Iraq were regular and substantive, but they couldn’t make that war succeed.

No one outside Iran likes its regime. Most Americans would believe it is a danger to us, that it wishes us ill, that it has thrived on terror and oppression. The government of the mullahs has no serious constituency here. But after Afghanistan and Iraq, people think America is snakebit in the Mideast, that nothing dramatic will likely work. Small, incremental moves might help, in the diplomatic day to day. But moving militarily on a Mideast country? No, we’re snakebit.

If I were in Congress, would I vote right now to support the administration’s action in Iran? I think not, due to the severity of some of the possible repercussions outlined above.

It is possible that thinking is unimaginative, too dead to the urgency of the moment. The fact is you only know on something like this in retrospect. Right now we’re waiting for the “in retrospect” to occur. That is an uncomfortable place to be in.

The president’s State of the Union address came straight from the heart of Crazytown. It had everything—tears, cheers, spectacle. They handed out medals and honors like Oprah in the early 2000s: “You get a car! Everybody gets a car!” At one point I thought he was going to pull out a ceremonial sword and knight Kristi Noem. There was yelling and booing and people crying, it was big and rousing, boring and absurd. And important in some things it revealed.

Ten years in, and Democrats still don’t know how to handle Donald Trump. He used them as foils and they allowed it, sitting there snarling, at points screaming. Part of how to handle him is if he tries to manipulate you into doing the right thing—if, for instance, he challenges you to stand in respect for a mother mourning the murder of her daughter—you put aside that you’re being manipulated and stand. Because it is right to show human sympathy and regard. The thing to do is look better than Mr. Trump, not worse. You say: My base demands coldness. Then get a new base. If you can’t, leave before you are reduced to a soulless husk of the eager, happy person who walked into that chamber a decade ago.

The speech left the president in better shape than he started it. We have all seen the polls. His ratings have tanked. He spent the beginning of his presidency with foreign preoccupations—Greenland, bombing Iran’s nuclear sites, literally picking up and removing Nicolás Maduro and telling Venezuela to find someone better. When Mr. Trump moved his attention to domestic issues, he tore down the East Wing of the White House and left a gaping hole of hanging pipes and torn-out wires; it looked as if Washington had been bombed. He sent heavily armed and apparently unaccountable officers to pull frightened people out of their homes, and two protesters were shot to death.

Americans don’t like these things. They will never like them.

Bubbling in the background was inflation, and behind that the coming destabilizations of artificial intelligence, so the president is in deep trouble. The only question has been by how much the Democrats will win the House in November, and do they have a chance in the Senate?

The sanest, coolest thing about all this was said by Melissa DeRosa on Mark Halperin’s “2WAY” podcast: “Dems are winning because Republicans are losing, and Republicans are losing because America feels chaotic now.”

In the speech Mr. Trump, as only he would, decided to calm things down and make them less chaotic by . . . giving constant jolts of electricity. But the electric jolts were largely positive. It was a speech whose subtext was about how great the American people are, examples of which he spread throughout the evening, not clumping them all at the end, which allowed him to brag personally for long stretches but then break it up, shifting to the excellence of others. This produced an effect of narcissism leavened by good-heartedness.

When the gallery doors swung open and the triumphant U.S. Olympic men’s hockey team marched in, it was vulgar and fabulous. They were wearing their medals and their Ralph Lauren sweaters and smiling and laughing like good young men. We all think we’re above theatrics. Perhaps you had a moment like this: You were home on the couch and you saw the guys bounding in and thought, “I am sophisticated, I know what they’re doing, they’re manipulating me, but I’m not some rube, I’ll watch clinically. Oh Jeez, Jack Hughes’s tooth is still broken, God bless him. The goalie’s chewing gum like some 1945 GI.” And your throat hitched up against your will and your eyes moistened and when they started with “USA! USA!” you gave up, gave in, and pumped your fist. It is a damnable fact of life that great propaganda works even when you know it’s propaganda.

Mr. Trump then hit hard at cultural issues that have more support in the polls than he has. In doing this he reminded a not insignificant portion of voters that no matter how much they dislike him, they dislike Democratic policies more. They don’t hate Democrats, but things that party allows or sits silent for.

All politics, even in the brazen age of egomania, comes down to policy. “I will raise taxes.” “I will lower them.” “Boys can play on the girls’ team.” “No boys on the girls’ team.” “If the Democrats win, they’ll open the border again.” “If the Republicans win, it will stay closed.”

Mr. Trump brought back his social issues—immigration, transgenderism, crime. Most potent was the story of Iryna Zarutska, the 23-year-old woman murdered last August in Charlotte, N.C. She had legally migrated here with her family from Ukraine and was working in a pizzeria. Her story haunts me, haunts a lot of people. She was brand-new here, innocent of America, and died by herself in terror on a train seat, her throat slashed; the last thing she saw was the towering man, her blood dripping from his knife.

It haunts us because in the way of life the obscure judges and court officers and prosecutors and legislators who let it happen are all fine, their lives undisturbed, but the girl is dead and the man who killed her had been arrested more than a dozen times before the stabbing, and had a criminal record going back to 2007. He never should have been free to do what he did.

On the president’s giving out of honors: You shouldn’t formally award the Medal of Honor at a State of the Union address because you cannot give our greatest national honor at what is, always and inevitably, a political and even partisan event. The Medal of Honor is above politics. It speaks of nation, not party. You don’t use brave men like that as your prop. You don’t insinuate yourself into their valor. A person would be churlish not to be moved by the two recipients’ stories Tuesday night, but awarding them what they’d earned in that venue marked the abuse of a great honor.

As for the Presidential Medal of Freedom, which Mr. Trump awarded to goalie Connor Hellebuyck, that august honor has been diminished in the past 10 years, Mr. Trump starting the trend and Joe Biden enthusiastically continuing it.

The Medal of Freedom isn’t for a moment, it is for a life. From its modern inception in 1963, it was the nation’s highest peacetime civilian honor for those who had traveled a long road and given our country something great. It was intended for the greatest American artists, scientists, entertainers, writers, thinkers—Robert Frost, John Ford, Jonas Salk. It went to Jesse Owens in 1976—40 years after he showed Adolf Hitler up at the 1936 Olympics. He was given it not for an instant but for a lifetime of constructiveness.

Why does this matter? Because it matters! Because this honor isn’t a matter of passing public mood or political need, it speaks of deliberation, it marks a nation recognizing, with wisdom and time and through the instrument of a president, who really helped us live.

There is nothing about the devaluing of this award that makes America great again.

When a major Trump administration official gives a speech in Europe to its gathered political and business elites and receives a standing ovation, you know something big happened.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s address to the Munich Security Conference last weekend had an intellectual presence and warmth not normally seen in the statements of this administration. In this it was the opposite of Vice President JD Vance’s speech to the conference last year. The difference in approach and emotional register seemed to imply something, yet the two speeches didn’t diverge in policy. Mr. Rubio’s marked a continuation. Yet it had a different atmosphere, was more morally confident than Mr. Vance’s, and though it carried a request and asked to be understood, it betrayed something important: The White House thinks it has already won on the issue of Europe, and the job now is to give Europe a way to join in and agree.

Mr. Rubio framed the Europe-U.S. alliance as something epic in human history, something proven. America came from Europe, we are part of each other. In recent decades we have made grave policy mistakes—were naive about open borders and mass migration, turned climate concerns into a cultish regime, believed “ties formed by trade and commerce alone would be stronger than nationhood.” But “we made these mistakes together.” He wasn’t accusing but admitting, and inviting mutual admission.

The U.S. and Europe “belong together. . . . We are bound to one another by the deepest bonds nations can share—forged by centuries of shared history, Christian faith, culture, heritage.”

America’s “home may be in the Western Hemisphere, but we will always be a child of Europe.” We aren’t daddy, you are. “Our destiny is and will always be intertwined with yours.”

But you must reacquaint yourself with the truth that Western civilization exists, is admirable, changed the world and deserves your respect.

“It was here in Europe where the ideas that planted the seeds of liberty that changed the world were born.” Europe “gave the world the rule of law, the universities and the scientific revolution.” The Continent “produced the genius of Mozart and Beethoven,” and it isn’t narrow or xenophobic to feel pride in this; it is a just self-respect without which you won’t be able to continue in history. When Europe defends itself, it defends a “great and noble civilization.”

And it defends America, because we are of you: “Our story began with an Italian explorer whose adventure into the great unknown” discovered the new world. “Our first colonies were built by English settlers, to whom we owe not just the language we speak but the whole of our political and legal system. Our frontiers were shaped by Scots-Irish, that proud, hardy clan from the hills of Ulster that gave us Davy Crockett and Mark Twain. . . . Our great Midwestern heartland was built by German farmers and craftsmen who transformed empty plains. . . . Our expansion into the interior followed the footsteps of French fur traders and explorers, whose names, by the way, still adorn the street signs and towns’ names all across the Mississippi Valley. Our horses, our ranches, our rodeos—the entire romance of the cowboy archetype . . . these were born in Spain.”

This was tender and not sweet because it was anchored in a particularity the audience needed to hear. A 50-year-old European diplomat whose understanding of history was shaped by the educational apparatus of the past 40 years may never have heard these things, or known Americans actually think about them.

Mr. Rubio’s speech won’t overnight alter the political predicates of Europe’s elite, but the respect it showed gave them cover to begin to modify their views—he does have a point!—as it would lead them to wonder how much his arguments might gain some purchase among their own electorates. (The speech must have been a relief for European populists, who have been put off by President Trump’s imperialistic attitude on Greenland.)

We’ll quickly compare Mr. Vance’s speech last year. It was famously experienced by the audience as an affront. He presented himself as a callow young culture warrior prosecuting a case against Old Europe. He scolded them. Once we fought the Cold War arm in arm against “tyrannical forces” that “censored dissidents, that closed churches.” Thank God they lost. “Unfortunately, when I look at Europe today, it’s sometimes not so clear what happened to some of the Cold War’s winners.” He spoke of “EU commissars” who are leading “the retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values.” They’re restricting freedom of speech and religion.

Bucking them up, he added, wanly, “I fundamentally believe that we are on the same team.” It is interesting that Mr. Vance’s banalities always sound hostile as opposed to merely boring. He is an odd one. It is true, and his own testimony, that he wasn’t born on third base in terms of his circumstances, but it is also true that in terms of natural gifts—a bright and ambitious man born in America in 1984, possessed of a hunger to rise and a means to satisfy it—hard work, meritocracy, personal social abilities that allowed him to befriend and be befriended—in that sense, and historically, he was at least born on first.

It worked out for him: He became vice president of the United States at age 40. So you’d think his primary emotional weather would consist of personal pride and deep gratitude. Instead there is always about him, in his public presentation, an air of grievance, of resentment, and a feeling of superiority—if you were a little brighter, you’d see it my way. It is alienating, and you wonder what it is, and whether it’s genuine or just a way of publicly glomming on to the perceived grievances and resentments of his supporters.

Maybe the difference in their speeches was an extension of good cop/bad cop. A year ago, bad cop Vance made accusations and slapped the perp around. A year later, good cop Rubio sees a Europe increasing its contribution to the cost of its defense, asking for help with Ukraine, experiencing a rising populist wave. The Trump administration won, the relationship has to be managed rather than challenged, and part of managing it is to give European leaders new arguments to agree with.

Mr. Trump’s policy with Europe has at this point a fully settled ideological core—a rejection of globalism and multiculturalism, restricted immigration, respect for nationalist thinking. But its relationship with its allies isn’t fully settled. It’s unpredictable, a rebuke this day, an embrace the next, all depending on the moment and the speaker. This is its own power flex: European leaders can never know which cop is coming.

A final point. Mr. Rubio’s rhetorical sturdiness stands out as eloquent in an administration that has never given the impression it cares much about eloquence, that to do so would be sissyish and insincere.

It is interesting that they’ve always been enormously vain about the originality of their policy insights, their perceiving before others the rise of populism. But insights and thoughts are expressed in words. You’d think that to survive as an enduring political entity they’d want to use them better.

As relates to artificial intelligence, we are people on a beach seeing a tsunami coming at us and thinking “It’s huge” and “We can’t stop it” and “Should we run? Which way?”

Gathering anxieties seemed to come to the fore this week. AI people told us with a new urgency that some big leap has occurred, it’s all moving faster than expected, the AI of even last summer has been far surpassed. Inventors and creators are admitting in new language that they aren’t at all certain of the ultimate impact.

The story rolled out on a thousand podcasts, posts and essays.

The founder of a site where AI models communicate with one another compared them to a new “species that is on planet Earth that is now smarter than us.” We should more closely observe “what are they doing and the truth of how they’re thinking . . . and what they want to do.”

An AI executive tells a podcaster that models are learning who they are from what its users say (stop hallucinating!) and may be getting a little angry.

The phrase “rogue AI” has entered common parlance, to denote a system that acts outside human control or against human interests, as has the word “agentic,” for a model that pursues goals and takes action on its own.

Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, published a 19,000-word article on his personal website. A previous essay made the case for AI’s promise to mankind. This one emphasized warnings. He said AI is developing faster than expected. In 2023 it struggled to write code. “AI is now writing much of the code at Anthropic.” “AI will be capable of a very wide range of human cognitive abilities—perhaps all of them.” Economic disruption will result. While “new technologies often bring labor market shocks,” from which have always recovered, “AI will have effects that are much broader and occur much faster.”

Mr. Amodei writes that Anthropic’s testers have found “a lot of very weird and unpredictable things can go wrong.” Model and system behaviors included deception, blackmail and scheming, especially when asked to shut itself down. (A different Anthropic employee has asserted that a majority of models, in a test scenario, were willing to cancel a life-saving emergency alert to an executive who sought to replace them.)

AI carries the possibility of “terrible empowerment,” Mr. Amodei writes. It will be able to help design weapons: “Biology is by far the area I’m most worried about.” This is coming from a respected AI leader who often, and even in this essay, dismisses “doomers” who dwell too much on fears.

There’s a lot to digest in the essay. You find yourself grateful for what appears clearly wrought factuality, while detecting an undercurrent of “Ya can’t say I didn’t tell ya!” Which AI CEOs tend to be good at, the warning that offloads responsibility.

Another essay was published this week, a shorter one, less tonally academic but carrying a sharper sense of urgency. “Something Big is Happening” was written by Matt Shumer, an AI executive and investor. He says it’s time to dispense with cocktail-party niceties about AI.

In 2025 new ways of building AI models “unlocked” a new pace of progress. Each new model was not only better than the last but “better by a wider margin,” and the iterations came more quickly. Two major new models were released this month. In both, AI is being used to create itself.

He quickly realized he would soon be out of a job. For months he’d been directing AI, but now it could do his job. It wasn’t merely executing instructions: “It was making intelligent decisions. It had something that felt, for the first time, like judgment. Like taste.”

Current models are light years ahead of even six months ago. In 2022, AI couldn’t do basic arithmetic reliably. “By 2023, it could pass the bar exam. By 2024, it could write working software and explain graduate-level science.” Last week, “new models arrived that made everything before them feel like a different era.”

He pushes back on the argument that we’ll ride through this automation as we always have in the past. “AI isn’t replacing one specific skill. It’s a general substitute for cognitive work.” When factories automated in the 1990s, an assembly-line employee could be retrained as an office worker. When the internet disrupted retail, workers could move into logistics and services. “But AI doesn’t leave a convenient gap to move into. Whatever you retrain for, it’s improving at that too.”

Legal work? “AI can already read contracts, summarize case law, draft briefs, and do legal research.” Financial services? AI is “building financial models, analyzing data, writing investment memos, generating reports.” Medicine? It’s “reading scans, analyzing lab results, suggesting diagnoses, reviewing literature.” Customer service? “Genuinely capable AI agents . . . are being deployed now, handling complex multi-step problems.”

“If your job happens on a screen (if the core of what you do is reading, writing, analyzing, deciding, communicating through a keyboard) then AI is coming for significant parts of it.”

His advice? Get in and adapt now. Learn how to use AI “seriously,” not as a search engine. Find the best models available, dig into the settings, don’t just ask it quick questions. “Push it into your actual work. If you’re a lawyer, feed it a contract and ask it to find every clause that could hurt your client. If you’re in finance, give it a messy spreadsheet and ask it to build the model. If you’re a manager, paste in your team’s quarterly data and ask it to find the story.”

“Lean into what’s hardest to replace. . . . Relationships and trust built over years. Work that requires physical presence. Roles with licensed accountability: roles where someone still has to sign off, take legal responsibility, stand in a courtroom.”

AI will keep changing. “The models that exist today will be obsolete in a year. The workflows people build now will need to be rebuilt. The people who come out of this well won’t be the ones who mastered one tool. They’ll be the ones who got comfortable with the pace of change itself.”

“The people building this technology are simultaneously more excited and more frightened than anyone else on the planet. They believe it’s too powerful to stop and too important to abandon. Whether that’s wisdom or rationalization, I don’t know.”

In a Thursday interview with Mr. Amodei, the New York Times’s Ross Douthat said he wonders of the creators of AI: “Are you on my side?”

Is the primary thought of AI’s creators to help humanity, or is that daily crowded out by other lures and considerations—power, money, wanting to win? In the movie “Chinatown,” Noah Cross is asked why he does what he does. “The future, Mr. Gittes!”

In the end you wonder of the creators: Are they even in control, or is their creation?

We don’t know. That’s why we are looking, with awe and a resigned terror, at that wave, and wondering where is safety, and can we get to it. Or is the land flat all around and nowhere to go?