Peggy Noonan

Our long cold civil war heated up somewhat in Minneapolis this week, and you’d be dreaming if you think we won’t have more such moments and tensions, and not only on immigration. We aren’t at peace with ourselves.

Here we take a look at some large things that went wrong and can be made better.

The federal government has not only the right but the duty to enforce U.S. immigration law. An urgent aspect of that action is to find and detain those who, since arriving here, have violently broken the law.

But if you do this, you must do it right—professionally, with restraint, by the book, in the full spirit of the law.

Americans don’t want and won’t accept masked men in camouflage jumping out of unmarked vans and demanding their papers. It’s not us. The government has to know that. Americans don’t want and will reject the street killing of protesters followed by an official response of lies and accusations.

All big actions have a spirit to them. Immigration enforcement must be serious and sober. Often, federal officers and agents have taken on a tough-guy way, pushing people around, being rough, profane and trigger-happy. They have operated within a context of fairly constant challenge—surrounded, pushed, jeered and taunted. But they can’t be a law unto themselves. They’ve looked like a mook army jacked up on videogames—not tough, just macho. The tough have self-discipline. These guys are operating with an eye to escalation, not de-escalation, which is among the first things cops are taught: Cool things down.

We debate whether they’ve been sufficiently trained. You’ve seen the videos, they aren’t sufficiently trained.

The federal government should pause enforcement and take time to regroup, retrain, reorient.

Which brings us to the spirit of the anti-ICE protests. Those who’ve taken to the streets are indignant, emotionally engaged, opposed and driven to show opposition. But watching them I thought: We don’t know how to protest anymore, we’re losing this knowledge.

Within human memory America was the stage of one of the greatest protest movements in all history, the civil-rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s. Its power came from a dignity that was majestic and couldn’t be denied. Go back to the photos of the marches in Selma, Montgomery and Birmingham. The protesters’ mien was sober, they presented themselves as adults who were morally serious, they were morally responsible and meant moral business. Look at their faces. They were sacrificial. They were risking their physical safety by putting themselves on the line for a great purpose.

They knew civil disobedience must be civil, peaceful resistance peaceful. They deliberately appealed to the conscience of a nation and were certain that nation, America, had a conscience to which an appeal could be made. Which was a compliment.

We’ve just marked Martin Luther King Day. He strategized that movement. He believed peacefulness and nonviolence were morally grounded (in Christianity) and historically tested (by Gandhi). He knew it was the way of the strong, not the weak.

In Birmingham there were marches, sit-ins, boycotts. The police chief, “Bull” Connor, turned fire hoses on the demonstrators, who didn’t physically retaliate. King knew the divide between those demonstrators and the violent response would play out on TV screens across the country. And he knew which side America would take.

Current protesters should emulate that dignity and power, not fall into formless jeering and harassment. Instead, they seem to have a spirit of “I’m so upset, I have a right to act out due to my sharper sense of injustice.” No. Be slow to interfere with law enforcement, and summon support by your bearing.

A final thought on an urgent need. As soon as something terrible happens, we fight about the facts. We’re at each other’s throats over what really happened, what’s true, who did what. It’s always a second front in the battle and always makes things worse.

We need the facts more quickly, more soberly, in greater depth. At this point in our country great reporting isn’t a craft or a talent, it is a patriotic act. It presents the facts on which we can build a serviceable picture of what happened, of right and wrong. This steadies the civic mind.

What reporters do is hard—find human beings in the thicket, in the wild, earn their trust, convince them to speak, read opaque documents, decipher things, restrain their own views, get the facts accurately and then let those facts speak for themselves.

News organizations want more voices and views—fine, good for them, more spirited opinion, good. But what you most need when your country is breaking up, and it seems possible every day that we’re breaking up, is the facts. In the troubled, challenged world of current journalism, he who has the facts will win the future.

A little side trip here to Walter Cronkite, whose name is being mentioned a lot. “Everyone trusted Cronkite.” True. I knew him, he was human, and he wasn’t trusted because he had nice eyes or a nice way or a well-lit set or smoked a pipe.

People trusted him because for much of his career he’d been a workaday reporter at United Press International. And it formed him, shaped his journalism. UPI, the Associated Press and other wire services told America what was happening each day in the country and the world.

Here is what the wires taught you. Their product was purchased and had to be acceptable to every newspaper in the country—liberal and conservative, big city and small. So wire service reporters had to play it straight—get it first but get it right, facts are gettable, verification necessary. You disciplined yourself out of the story. Accuracy was all.

Because of that training, viewers could tell Cronkite was a professional operating under clear and continuing standards.

The wire services, plus independent big-city papers, gave the nation a shared factual floor. We need to get it back. We won’t get through the future without it. So we need journalism (freelance, independent, institutional) more than ever.

Reporting is expensive—you have to get a lot of reporters on the ground, running around, getting the data. But it’s where the investment needs to be made.

People think journalism is hopelessly tainted, just another partisan player, can never get its reputation back. Wrong. You can build it each day. You can open up a new account in the credibility bank, see it grow. When Cronkite said Vietnam was a failure he was believed, because he had a big personal account to draw on.

The collapse of local newspapers means old-hand reporters and editors who knew the neighborhood are largely gone. The big national newspapers had bureaus in state capitals but shut them down as the internet rose—so that reporting is gone.

We’re kind of a ridiculous country in that we’re obsessed with what other Americans believe but aren’t covering the other Americans or bothering to know them. We have to turn this around.

I realize this sounds like “let’s return to the old ways.” But yes, let’s. They worked, the country didn’t rupture, we endured. Which is what we want.

Well, that was an epic climbdown. President Trump told Davos this week that he won’t move militarily to take over Greenland. “People thought I would use force. . . . I won’t use force.”

It was insane that he might, a relief that he won’t, and people thought he would only because he’d implied as much, repeatedly.

His speech to the World Economic Forum marked yet another tear in our old, ancestral, foundational closeness with Europe. It is captured in this exchange, on separate days, to the same audience:

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney said on Tuesday that traditional U.S. leadership of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization was over. “We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition.” The “middle powers must act together—because if we’re not at the table, we’re on the menu.” He got a standing ovation.

The next day, Mr. Trump ad-libbed: “Canada lives because of the United States. Remember that, Mark, the next time you make your statements.”

That, obviously, isn’t how friends speak to each other.

I continue on last week’s thoughts on aspects of Mr. Trump’s personal nature that have contributed to the current state of affairs. This week he put me in mind of a woman I once knew who was always roiled, always creating commotion and drama—quarrels, sudden attachments, fiery endings. I came to think she had a constant storm inside of her, and because of that she created storms outside, as if to maintain equal barometric pressure. To function, she needed a balance between the forces within and the forces without.

She had to create trouble to live. Does that remind you of anyone?

Mr. Trump has a real fear of boredom. When there’s peace and quiet, he becomes restless, anxious. He seems unable to tolerate normality and shows little faith in quiet progress—set a good policy in place, tend to it as it settles. So he creates drama, he attacks, arouses counter-forces, feels fear—will my luck hold?—defeats the enemy, claims triumph and relaxes. And becomes restless and creates new drama. Lather, rinse, repeat. Life is drama, always has been. It used to be gambling casinos and bankruptcy, now it’s Venezuela and Greenland. But it’s the same prowling anxiety.

It’s part of why this era feels so exhausting. In the peaceful weeks you start to get nervous, because you sense trouble is coming.

You see some of this in how he reads a teleprompter. When he is reading a prepared text he seems disengaged, as if he fears nothing exciting will happen. If he is improvising, excitement is possible. When he speaks off the cuff it’s a gamble—he doesn’t know what he’s going to say either!—and gambles are exciting and diverting.

Still, when he departs from a text he shares part of his inner world, and seems sometimes almost innocently interested in what he’s saying.

“What I’m asking for is a piece of ice. . . . It’s a very small ask.” No doubt this is at least part of how he thinks about Greenland. We aren’t talking about one nation seizing the land of another sovereign nation, he’s just a guy who needs some ice in his drink. It’s not too much to ask!

There’s his thinking on Europe. Mr. Trump often refers, justly, to his success in making NATO members increase their contribution to defense. What was revealing in the Davos speech was how he honestly seems to feel about our allies. America is always there for NATO, he said, “But I’m not sure that they’d be there for us.” If the U.S. were under attack, “I’m not sure that they’d be there.”

I wondered if Vladimir Putin whispers that kind of thing to him in their phone calls—Donald, you can’t trust your so-called friends. My second thought was what an insult it was. It’s hard to walk back “I don’t trust you” to a friend. Third, how bleak. Old allegiance, old history, shared blood, old tribes, old paper—Magna Carta, Émile Zola. You make yourself weaker in the world when you lose foundational friendships. It’s horrifying to witness their collapse. If you have two friends who’ve been friends 20 or 40 years, and they break, and the rupture isn’t healed, you feel toward them embarrassment and a kind of shame.

As is well known and has often been pointed out, everything is personal to Mr. Trump. The news is it isn’t getting less so.

“Until the last few days when I told them about Iceland, they loved me,” he said, referring to European leaders. “They called me daddy.” On Europe’s major business leaders: “I know every one of them. They’re sort of—they’re looking down. They don’t want to see me and they don’t want to stare me in the eyes.”

(Several times Mr. Trump confused Greenland with Iceland, which is understandable as Greenland is white and covered with ice and Iceland is green and covered with tourists.)

In an extended riff, he spoke of how he treated Switzerland. “They come in, they sell their watches, no tariff.” So he slaps on a tariff. The Swiss president, “a woman,” called and was “repetitive”—her country is small, you can’t do this. “She just rubbed me the wrong way.” So he increased the tariff. But then he lowered it, “because I don’t want to hurt people.”

On French President Emmanuel Macron: “I like him. I actually like him. Hard to believe, isn’t it?”

This was followed by something interesting. Mr. Trump talks about how he bullied Macron on pharmaceutical pricing. “I said, here’s the story, Emmanuel. The answer is you’re going to do it. You’re going to do it, fast.”

This startled me as I knew what sound I was hearing. It was the sound of Edward G. Robinson in a 1930s film on “Million Dollar Movie” in 1958. Which, like me, young Mr. Trump grew up watching on New York television. You can’t exaggerate how important television was in the making of this man, and I don’t mean “The Apprentice,” I mean those old movies.

Referring to Venezuela, Mr. Trump didn’t explicitly mention the U.S. removal of its president, Nicolás Maduro. Instead he said, in the rhythm of Robinson as Little Caesar, “We’ve been given great cooperation once the attack ended—the attack ended, they said, ‘Let’s make a deal.’ More people should do that.” Again, that’s movie mob talk.

In a section on rebuilding the U.S. military, Mr. Trump said, “We’re bringing back battleships.” The new ones are “100 times more powerful” than the legendary battleships of World War II, which he went on to name—the Missouri, the Iowa, the Alabama. “I thought maybe we could take them out of mothballs.” But he learned modern ones were much more powerful. “So that was the end of the mothballs.”

It’s unusual for a man to be surprised that modern battleships are more advanced than ones decommissioned decades ago, but more interesting was his engagement in what he was saying. Suddenly I was certain he grew up watching “Victory at Sea,” the great 1950s documentary series about the battleships of World War II. I researched it, and yes, the ships he mentioned were in the series, which indeed he watched as a child, experiencing history at a remove, on a screen.

Next week marks the first anniversary of Donald Trump’s second inauguration, so it’s a good time to revisit his essential nature, which appears to drive everything.

I queried acquaintances of mixed political disposition: What have you seen of Donald Trump the past year that is different from his first administration?

A Trump foe said, “He is more confident, alas.” Another bowed to “his capacity to stick to the script and at the same time drive a wider range of concerns.”

A Trump supporter quoted the satirical history of the English Civil War, “1066 and All That”: Mr. Trump and his aides are the Roundheads, “right but repulsive,” his Republican and Democratic opponents the Cavaliers, “wrong but romantic.”

A middle-of-the-roader (there still are such) quoted the Scottish poet Robert Burns: “And forward though I cannot see, I guess and fear.” He is supportive but “deeply afraid on a number of things (Greenland, Iran, where ICE enforcement goes).”

A Trump critic said, “Years ago he talked about taking oil and acquiring Greenland. In the second term, he is taking himself both seriously and literally.” He continued, “In his first term he saw Versailles and longed to be the Sun King. In his second he crowned himself and is building his own Versailles.”

I would add: In terms of policy judgments and predicates, Mr. Trump is unchanged. He’s for what he was always for, against what he was against. But he’s operating in a different internal and external context. Internally he is more confident than last time and less restrained. He’s less needy of approval: He’s written off the mainstream press. He works hard, has high energy, can’t repress his essential nature.

“I hate my opponents and I don’t want the best for them,” he said at Charlie Kirk’s memorial service in September. It was classic Trump in that it was boastful—I’m tough, don’t cross me—and in a way modest—I am less than you nice Christians—and in another way it was just a line, meant to entertain, a way to vamp until he thought of something better.

Something that is clear that wasn’t in 2017: Mr. Trump is world historic. He’ll be a trope, an instantly recognizable figure, to America and the world for the rest of this century and beyond.

The iconic image: Big man, dark suit, red tie, orange face, slight stoop, tough-guy expression. That image will prove as iconic as the bearded man in the stovepipe hat. It is as iconic as portraits of Napoleon when I was a kid: He’d been dead more than 100 years and wasn’t even an American, and we all knew who he was.

Anyone can imitate Mr. Trump because the sound is cuttingly clear and unchanging: It’s the rhythm and cadence of the Borscht Belt comics of “The Ed Sullivan Show.” You can say his act is getting stale, the whole shtick thinning out, but only when an act is truly vivid and has truly pierced can you trace the ups and downs of its lifespan.

I see two big differences between Trump 1 and Trump 2. Mr. Trump has hardened. Many of those around him have hardened too. Their job isn’t to win you over but to win—that’s what will settle what history says, winning. Scholars and intellectuals dilating in their little books: None of that matters anymore. Because they don’t matter anymore.

Mr. Trump seeks not to persuade but overpower. There is a daily mood in his administration of finally settling all family business. That of course is a famous line from “The Godfather” and is uttered by Michael Corleone, the smart son, the day he kills the heads of the other mafia families. “Today I settle all family business.”

Mario Puzo, on whose novel the movie was based, created the iconic three brothers of the film—fiery Sonny, cool and methodical Michael, incapable Fredo. It is a mainstay of political journalism that a political figure, especially one from a large family, is one of the brothers.

Mr. Trump in this term is the first president to be all three. He has a Michael side, but it’s overwhelmed by the Sonny side, and his Fredo side is more than a third of the whole.

That is what is so exhausting about him (and yes, Trump intellectuals, so capacious, so Shakespearean—in a sense!) and for some horrifying, that he’s all three, and you never know which one is coming to work today.

Second difference: In his first term Mr. Trump tested boundaries, probing like the proverbial Russian soldier who keeps sticking the bayonet in until he strikes bone. Now he operates as if he sees no boundaries. In the first term there was a sense he didn’t quite know what was constitutional and needed to be told. Now there is the sense he doesn’t really care, that the old parchment may not be equal to the demands of the moment. (He shares this with populists of the left.) The thinking: You can’t wait forever for the courts to resolve an issue, for Congress to do the right thing.

He has been charged with being preoccupied with the world and less so with domestic realities and legislation, things he has to see to and fake enthusiasm for. There’s truth in it. The world, he thinks, is where a political figure makes his mark. He desires a big legacy, still wants to show Manhattan (not to be too reductive, but there’s still something in it) that the outer-borough kid you patronized became a world-historic figure you ignored because you couldn’t recognize innate genius, and because you looked down on your country’s own popular culture, not noticing he was rising like a rocket within it. He’s wowed them now. I wonder if his victory is fully satisfying. The people he was once trying to impress aren’t there anymore, it was all half a century ago, they’re gone. Do you feel the full joy of revenge when you’re triumphing over ghosts?

A thing that many Trump opponents don’t say but feel: The idea of Trump as president is still so shocking that they can’t believe the American people did it. They don’t really care about “the reasons” or how others were experiencing America, whose ox the past few decades was being gored. They’re mad, and they think less of their countrymen now. They don’t really like them anymore and don’t feel they have to.

A thing many Trump supporters don’t say but feel: They enjoy the suffering they’ve caused, and not only because they’re in charge of the ship now. Also because many of those who have been dealt the mortification were comparatively affluent and accomplished. What Trump supporters felt toward them was social and professional envy. Trumpism gave this flaw a new carapace of meaning, a political rationale that lifted it out of pure and eternal human spite.

The most American thing in the world is to be born and immediately seek to rise. The second most American thing is to find reasons to resent those who rose.

They don’t resent Mr. Trump because he was born into wealth. They’d like to be wealthy too. And he never allowed it to make him classy. He stayed regular.

We are a complicated country.

Nicolás Maduro wasn’t the president of Venezuela but an illegitimate head of state, brutal and criminal, whose presence was ruinous for his country and its people. No good person mourns his fall.

Beyond that, some points:

The U.S. military reversed the script. After news broke Saturday of Mr. Maduro’s removal, gone was the picture you keep in your head of the slovenly withdrawal from Afghanistan. It was replaced by a predawn raid that was brilliantly executed and valiant. High stakes, high pressure, every piece of the machine had to work for the whole thing to work, and it did. One hundred fifty warplanes from 20 locations, a successful cyberattack that turned off Caracas’s lights, Russian-built air defenses taken out. The New York Times reported on the pilot of the first helicopter in the assault, who was hit in the leg three times when the MH-47 Chinook came under fire, kept flying, and struggled to stay aloft. He and the co-pilot stuck the landing, army commandos poured out, there was an intense firefight with Mr. Maduro’s security. Many U.S. troops were brave, all were professional, none were lost.

Can competence be moving? Yes.

The decision to go in was Trumpian in its boldness, Trumpian in its blur—he has ad-libbed and free associated about his strategic reasoning a lot but never issued a truly formal and persuasive statement, as if he didn’t trust his own reasons or didn’t trust others’ ability to understand them. It was Trumpian too in the sense that after the military success it all looks ad hoc and thrown-together, and maybe ill thought through in the long term.

No one knows what’s next. How does this work? A quagmire—a thugocracy left able and intact, with the likelihood of U.S. boots on the ground? An against-the-odds triumph—it’s only when you push over the tree that you find out how hollow it was inside? Something in between? What does that look like?

Everyone knows “You break it, you own it” is true. The administration is saying we didn’t break it, we just removed a bad guy and left his government standing, but under pressure and on notice.

The dog that didn’t bark was conservative influencers and media figures passionately inclined toward nonintervention in the world. Part of their silence would be personal loyalty to a president who had just launched a military operation, part would be professional prudence: If this foray works, they won’t have been tarnished by opposing a success; if it turns south, they’ll announce they were loyal but have eyes and now must speak up. But part of the reason they said little is that they weren’t sure how their own base felt. The base itself wasn’t sure.

Trumpian Republicans came to hate what they called “forever wars.” What they really hated is what we have called them in this space, “long, unwon wars” that bled blood and treasure for years and yielded nothing. That was what they hated: all that loss and nothing good. Capped off by Afghanistan—our aircraft and vehicles abandoned to the people we went there to fight, the Taliban, as they took charge. That is what Donald Trump’s supporters hate.

If this “war,” if that’s what it is, “works,” however that looks, they will be happy with it.

I don’t buy a major reason not to have removed Mr. Maduro, which is to avoid giving Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping a rationale for their own past and future aggressions: We can take Taiwan, he took Venezuela. Messrs. Putin and Xi do what they want within systems that allow it. “Trump did it” isn’t an excuse they need or require.

It is more likely they’ve been impressed by what Mr. Trump did—he was bold, made a big gamble, and U.S. military and intelligence were first-rate. If you think Mr. Putin with his shambolic military and envious nature didn’t notice, you’re wrong.

This is Mr. Trump’s second big win in this administration from the military and intelligence agencies, the first being the complex and successful bombing of Iran’s nuclear sites last June. Venezuela will sharpen his taste for such endeavors.

Is it possible to be happy Mr. Maduro is gone and still feel disquiet and unease? It is. Which gets us to the larger point, that we’re in a new time. What I felt Saturday morning was that something good had happened, and yet something had been unleashed.

In 2014, when Mr. Putin took Crimea, many in the U.S. foreign-policy establishment were rocked and shocked. I attended a gathering of diplomats, journalists and scholars, and they had blanched faces as they discussed what it means. But they dwelled on secondary and tertiary issues and had fantastical notions—was Mr. Putin just making a point, and having made it, will he retreat?

I thought no, you are missing the heart of it. What just happened is an endpoint. The old post-1989 way is over for Mr. Putin, we’re in new territory. I thought of the name of Tom Wolfe’s then-recent final novel, “Back to Blood”: The world is going back to something basic, grimy and tribal.

Concerned, sophisticated liberals are warning the world is devolving into “spheres of influence,” going in the direction of Russia dominating Europe, China dominating Asia, America dominating the Americas. No higher belief is held high, not democracy or pluralism.

They are right to be concerned. Such a world replaces the old imperfect one—it de-emphasizes the long and never fully satisfying work of friendship and alliances, of stabilizing international institutions and arrangements, of active diplomacy that can make things better. It isn’t creedal or expansive, will likely be more brutish and narrow.

Venezuela is within our sphere. So is Greenland, which within days the administration was threatening.

Connected to this, at least in my mind, are the words of Stephen Miller, White House deputy chief of staff for policy, to CNN’s Jake Tapper on Tuesday. This is the mood music of the Trump White House right now:

The world must be governed by “force,” Mr. Miller said. “We live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else, but we live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.”

He didn’t say “You can’t handle the truth,” as Jack Nicholson did in “A Few Good Men,” but that was the flavor. He didn’t say, as Osama bin Laden did after 9/11, that the world respects only “the strong horse.” But it had that sound.

There’s truth in it: This brute world respects strength. But you wonder how you’d feel if those words came from a high aide to the leader of China or Russia. How does it make anything better that Americans talk like this now, suggesting they’re more willing to act just like the world, think like it, leaving it with no higher standard to meet or better behavior to be impressed by? I can’t figure how that makes things better.

I don’t want to sum up the year, outline hopes for 2026, predict or warn. I want to say we all have to become better people.

You won’t get through the future without faith, you won’t get through life without courage, and if you want courage to spread (and you do—you’re safer in a braver world) you have to encourage it, give it a lift, give it style. That’s what gallantry is, courage’s style. Its class, its shine and burnish. As a virtue it is close to my heart.

We live in a culture of winners who must win, and if the others don’t know you won then you must tell them, over and over, like Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez. We are the wealthiest and most glamorous, we are living the best lives, Amal Clooney’s on line one, the pope’s on hold. Are you not impressed?

Gallantry never says it won.

When someone’s smart we say he has brains and if he’s brave he has guts, but gallantry isn’t assigned a human part and so must be a thing of the soul.

Courage faces danger but gallantry is the way you face it. Often it has to do with treatment of a weaker party; often it’s directed toward an individual or cause that can’t repay you. It involves self-discipline but isn’t grim. It travels light. It is modest, has no bombast. “It was nothing.” “We were all doing our best.”

A cold snowy night in late November 2012 in New York’s Times Square. Police officer Larry DePrimo was walking the beat and saw a homeless man standing barefoot on the sidewalk. Mr. DePrimo went to Skechers, bought a pair of insulated boots and socks with his own money, and helped the homeless man get them on. There was no expectation of notice, but a passerby took a photo and posted it online.

Reporters tracked down DePrimo. He said he didn’t expect the publicity, that his act “was something I had to do.” He kept the receipt for the boots in his pocket to remind himself some people have it worse.

Gallantry goes beyond duty.

I should underscore here that it isn’t some old, dead virtue, a relic of the past. It has nothing to do with knights or nostalgia. It is alive, it exists, you know people who are gallant, have witnessed gallantry and understand at this point that it is deeply countercultural.

If you say it’s old-fashioned maybe that’s because it requires effort you don’t want to make. If it’s increasingly rare then it’s increasingly precious.

Gallantry for beginners: When I was a child reading movie-star magazines, I read a story that gave me a window into an idea about how to behave. It was about Tony Curtis, new to Hollywood and unknown, a Bronx boy hoping for the life of an actor. He retells the tale in his 1994 autobiography, “American Prince.”

He and his wife, Janet Leigh, were invited to dinner at Cole Porter’s apartment. Ethel Merman picked up a wine glass and gently squeezed the top. “The wineglass was so delicate, and her touch so assured, that she could change its shape from round to oval without breaking it.”

Merman encouraged him to try it himself. “I squeezed, and this beautiful, delicate wineglass shattered in my hand. Ethel, who was dear and kind, said, ‘Don’t worry, kid, it could happen to any of us,’ and then she took her own glass and shattered it just to make me feel better.”

Gallantry takes responsibility.

On the morning of Jan. 15, 2009, US Airways flight 1549, its engines hit by a flock of birds, hit the Hudson river. Pilot Chesley Sullenberger landed the plane safely, brilliantly, and with his crew got the 150 passengers calmly disembarked and standing on the wings. As the plane began sinking, Mr. Sullenberger walked the cabin twice to make sure no one was left behind. All were saved. In the days afterward what struck people was not only that you can land on a river, or that an Airbus can float for a while, it was: Didja hear about the pilot? When asked what happened he always replied with factual precision and modesty. He redirected praise to the excellence of the crew and the sturdiness of the plane. There was a kind of public relief: We’re still making Sullenbergers, they aren’t just people in World War II movies.

Gallantry is being the victor and refusing to humiliate. It’s Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox treating Robert E. Lee with perfectly calibrated respect, letting Lee’s officers keep their sidearms and his men their personal horses. It is George H.W. Bush refusing to rub the Soviet Union’s face in it when the West won the Cold War. He did this not only for practical reasons—a humiliated foe is a dangerous foe—but out of decency.

Gallantry is male-coded and shouldn’t be. A history of gallant women is the history of the world. Famous examples: Jackie Kennedy, her life blasted away on a Friday afternoon, held her poise and on Monday maintained public ritual in the funeral of her husband, because the country needed it and history demanded it. Queen Elizabeth II was gallant throughout life but especially at the end when, old and unwell, often in discomfort, she continued to meet with new prime ministers, some of whom she would have understood to be silly, and did it smiling in a friendly way, in her cardigan and skirt. And in the end, her Jubilee video with Paddington Bear, confiding she keeps marmalade sandwiches in her bag, and keeping time with her spoon as “We Will Rock You” announced itself from the royal military band outside Buckingham Palace. Margaret Chase Smith taking to her feet in the U.S. Senate and telling the truth, knowing the price she’d pay, while the he-men in the chamber ran in terror from Joe McCarthy.

Sir Thomas More on the scaffold of Tower Hill comforted his executioner and was reported by a witness to have repositioned his beard on the block, joking it had committed no treason. On being asked by a pious official if he really knew God’s judgment, he is said to have responded, “He will not refuse one who is so blithe to go to him.” He didn’t say, “My actions were right,” he said God has a heart.

Why are we banging away on all this as the clock ticks down to a new year? Because gallantry is necessary. Modern life strips away too much, old protections aren’t honored, someone has to make things better.

Because we live in a cold political world of cocoons, bubbles and silos, and few feel safe to occupy the land between. It is a world in which people are obsessed with claiming their rights and not accepting their duties. Public speech is mean, strength is vulgar.

Gallantry goes against all this. It says you can push without humiliating, be decisive without being brutal.

It shows we can be better. It proves we are better.

Onward gallant ladies, gallant gentlemen of America. Welcome 2026 warmly, and save it modestly.

I want to say a small thing about a big subject, music. I’m going to put together two anecdotes because they are important to me even if they don’t go, by which I mean they aren’t connected or an extension of each other.

The first has to do with a conversation with the great opera soprano Beverly Sills. This was in the early 2000s, in Manhattan, at a luncheon that I think was a fundraiser or friend-maker for the Metropolitan Opera, of which she was chairwoman.

I’d never met her but we were seated together and the program was long and we settled in and pretty soon we were going from the wonders of opera to the purpose of music, what it does and what it’s supposed to do. I think we were both surprised by this: Music doesn’t have to have a purpose. But I found myself saying that deep down I think music is a stairway God gives us to get to him. Science is a stairway too, as are all the arts, and at the top of the stairway is truth and the truth is God. She was startled by this. So was I! I don’t think I had fully understood I thought that.

But yes, I believe that when a moment of truly sublime artistic or scientific excellence occurs, the veil between this world and the other thins a little, and we almost see something. That’s why we take to our feet and stomp and cheer and shout when something beautiful happens in a theater or hall, it’s why we stop the show, because we sense there’s something beyond human perfection going on. I think it’s why we get choked up when we see a magnificent moment on the playing field, also. You sense when the Holy Ghost, the big speckled bird, is making an unaccustomed flight over Citi Field. (We use that term in honor of Johnny Cash, who once said, “When the Holy Ghost is in the music, people feel it. You don’t have to explain it.”)

I badly want to tell you Beverly Sills’s response to all this, but I don’t remember what she said, I kept no notes, I recall only her wonderful face, full and strong, merry, and her look of engagement. She was processing a surprising thought from a stranger. I suppose I was telling her that to me her life was even more constructive than she thought, and she must have thought it was pretty constructive.

Anyway, that was a great moment, getting to tell Beverly Sills what I think music is.

The second anecdote is also from a conversation, at a professional gathering in Arizona in the fall of 2023. One night at dinner I sat across from a brilliant and accomplished young man in his 40s who writes music, including movie scores. He was from Los Angeles, chic and hip and thoughtful. I shared a recent favorite score, the one written by John Adams for Luca Guadagnino’s “I Am Love.” Then our talk took a turn. For a while I’d puzzled over something and hadn’t had anyone with his background and expertise to ask about it.

I said I love music, have all my life, and I guess I know the entire American songbook circa 1880 to 2000-something—know my Cole Porter, my Gershwin, my Jimmy Webb and Burt Bacharach, my Broadway shows, my Sondheim. I love rock and pop, can recite the lyrics of Kesha and enjoy, when being asked how I am, responding that I wake up in the morning feeling like P Diddy. Yet sometime around 2005 or 2010 I stopped absorbing new music. My memory didn’t hold new songs anymore. I was guessing that the reason is that my brain’s music storage unit is filled. It has enough, a lifetime’s worth, and doesn’t need more. Or, and possibly there are studies on this, at a certain point the brain’s memory neurons start to crowd out the new-experience neurons, and . . .

“No. That’s not it,” he said as he shook his head. It was clear he’d been thinking about this. He said the reason I am not absorbing and holding music now is that at the time I stopped listening, popular musicians stopped doing melody. They stopped doing the tune. They did other things, they kept the rhythm, the beat, but they started shunting aside melody. That, he said, is why you stopped keeping it.

And I thought: Oh my, that’s true. And it seemed the reason he cared is that he missed the melody too.

Rhythm is felt, the beat is felt, but melody is both thought and felt, so it has two ways to enter you.

I thanked him for helping me, told him I thought he observed correctly, and have been pondering what he said ever since.

The past two years it became a thought of broader application—that maybe as a nation we’ve kept the beat, we’ve still got the rhythm, but the melody, the tune—this century hasn’t been about those gentle things. We haven’t been about them.

Maybe others, even the primary audience for popular music, are coming to miss it too. I keep hearing of the children and grandchildren of friends who seem to be listening a lot to the music of past decades.

There are Reddit threads on this. A typical post: “As my kids are getting older, I’m realizing more and more that they seem to prefer music from the 70s, 80s, and into the 90s than they do from current music. I know this isn’t a new phenomenon, as we listed to stuff from the 50s, 60s, and 70s, but I feel like when we did it, it was just supplementing our generation’s modern music. With kids, and their friends, so I know it’s not just mine, it’s like all they really want to listen to is older stuff. . . . I never hear them listening to any modern pop (Taylor Swift being the big exception).”

Another post, different thread: “Pop songs from the 50s have a certain lilt to them—a certain undertone of satisfaction with life.” Another: “Pop music from the 80s is charged with optimism as well as soundboard experimentation . . . an undertone of eagerness for what is to come.”

From another thread, a post on being dragged to a karaoke night. “The crowd was at least 60% under 25, and in 3 hours, only two contemporary pop songs were sang.”

Someone noted that all this isn’t necessarily a turning away from current pop songs, it’s technological: Everything from every era is available on streaming services, it’s easy now to discover other eras and fall in love with them.

But I suspect the young are hungry for melody. And perhaps this is a hunger too for God, for a connection with something beyond that only a well crafted, fully felt song can provide. Music isn’t only organized sound shaped in time to spur human feeling, it isn’t only a gift, it comes from a place. A nation’s music comes from that nation’s deepest self—its culture, its society, its understanding of itself and of life.

If our era’s artists have been moving away from melody and tune this century, then maybe that means something, implies something about the larger American picture, with all its broken-upness, political and otherwise. Maybe we ought to think about that.

President Trump’s address to the nation Wednesday evening was bracing and, as such things go, revealing. As is often the case with Mr. Trump there was text and subtext—the sparkling surface and, below, deeper currents that tugged this listener’s thoughts toward the more fundamental meaning of Mr. Trump’s efforts and a realization, once again, that with this president one is in the hands not of a mere magician, but a master.

Ha, just kidding. The ghost of Walter Lippmann leaning into the wireless to hear FDR . . . stole into me. Why should only AI get to hallucinate? Why can’t I have Franklin Roosevelt?

As a piece of work Mr. Trump’s speech was blunt and blubbery, didn’t persuade but only asserted, and not in a winning way. It was propaganda that didn’t bother to make believe it wasn’t propaganda, which always feels like an insult. His mouth moved oddly, as if he were mad at his words.

“One year ago our country was dead.” “Eleven months ago I inherited a mess and I’m fixing it.” “I was elected in a landslide.” He’s in good shape because he beats so many dead horses. It keeps the arms and shoulders up.

I liked, “Good evening, America,” because it was new, Trumpian—why talk to your fellow citizens when you can talk to a continent?—and sounded like the name of a bouncy new television show, which I’m sure it will soon be.

If you liked him you liked it, if not you didn’t, but he did nothing to draw you into his way of thinking, bring you along, increase your confidence, kindle a little faith.

So, a missed opportunity. Here I mention that it would be nice if presidents returned to making national addresses from the big desk in the Oval Office. A full generation of White House advisers decided that image was static and inert, that a president looks more dynamic if he’s standing, with long halls or mantles behind him. It doesn’t look dynamic; it looks tentative, as if he’s afraid to settle into a line of thought. He looks as if he just strolled by and bumped into a podium. Men at desks are committing to a conversation. A brave president, probably a woman, will some day go back to the Resolute, sit, and share her thinking.

Mr. Trump is charged with seeming detached from the citizenry’s experience of inflation. His recent and most persuasive critic, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, reminds us he is a billionaire. Nothing showed the distance between Mr. Trump and regular Americans like the Journal’s report this week on the degree to which the president and his family have prospered financially since he re-entered office. David Uberti, Juanje Gómez and Kara Dapena reported the Trump family has enjoyed a “major expansion” of its “vast” array of business interests—in crypto, communications and financial products, added to its older holdings in real estate and golf courses. The Trump organization has “launched a host of new ventures and products, from memecoins to data centers.”

Wealth insulates. The wealthy know this and try to compensate in everything from their philanthropy to visiting grocery stores now and then to learn the price of ground chuck. Voters, including Mr. Trump’s supporters, look at him, know it insulates him, and wonder exactly how such significant new wealth has attached itself to him and his family—how exactly that works, what exactly got traded, whether or not that’s all fully right.

Finally, the most vivid communications-burst from the Trump White House came this week from the long-form profile of the previously silent White House chief of staff, Susie Wiles, in Vanity Fair. It’s a lollapalooza. A scoop’s a scoop, a story’s a story, none can decry it. She had her reasons for sitting down with former “60 Minutes” and cable news producer Christopher Whipple, who has written a book on presidential chiefs of staff. But nobody knows what they were.

Her essential judgments on persons and events, as quoted, make her look wise and perceptive, which is her general reputation, but she was also indiscreet.

Other staffers and officials cooperated in the spread. The minute I saw it I thought: They think they’re going to get the positive treatment the George W. Bush White House got in a cover story in Vanity Fair in 2002—rich, handsome photos, no embarrassing quotes. But that was just after 9/11 and before Iraq. America needed a lift. Attractive young Mr. Bush, Condi Rice’s star power, Ol’ Reliables Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld—it was another world.

My guess is that Ms. Wiles took part because she wanted to be understood, which is almost always a mistake in public life—you’ve got to have a harder, meaner objective than that—and wanted the White House understood, a nobler objective but one that wasn’t going to happen. Vanity Fair does not exist to “understand” Donald Trump.

The accompanying photo portraits are mostly hideous, in Ms. Wiles’s case also ill-mannered and unkind. She is the first woman to be a White House chief of staff, a lady of a certain age and accomplishment who swims in the highest of high seas. She is presented as bug-eyed and insane, as Mrs. Lovett asking if you wouldn’t like another piece of pie. Nice people hate it when Mr. Trump shows no class; they ought to feel it when his foes show none.

Ms. Wiles seems, in the piece, to have been allowed, perhaps even encouraged, to view her interlocutor as her friend, her jolly confidante. She talks to him while doing the wash.

This reminded me of some stinging words, among the most famous ever written about journalism, by a journalist herself: “Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people’s vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse.”

That is Janet Malcolm, from her book “The Journalist and the Murderer.” She was one of the great, singular, unflinching writers of her generation, which included Joan Didion, in relation to whom she had an equal or superior level of talent without the promotional ability. Malcolm wasn’t damning her profession but admitting its members place themselves in moral peril, cultivating an atmosphere of intimacy with a subject, for instance, and then treating the material roughly. The subject is left, on publication, humiliated. Malcolm thought journalists must proceed with humility, and an awareness of the central fact of what they’re doing.

Mr. Whipple, in his media victory lap, told CNN’s Anderson Cooper that normally when he’s spoken to former chiefs of staff they’ve toggled between background, off the record and on. Ms. Wiles didn’t, he said. He seemed almost to giggle, but stopped himself.

Practical if cynical advice to future White House staffers: If you’re going to do a series of interviews in which you share plain-spoken thoughts and views, do it with a writer working the beat who will continue to need you as a source, someone whose flourishing depends to some degree on your goodwill.

You need them basting you like a turkey in the oven, not carving you up on the cutting board.

Donald Trump and his tumult nearly 11 months in: He’s a rocket going not up but sideways or down. All polls say down. On Thursday AP-NORC reported his approval on the economy and immigration has “fallen substantially” since the spring, with 31% of Americans approving his handling of economic matters, down from 40% in March, and his approval on immigration at 38%, down from 49%. Recent Democratic sweeps in New Jersey and Virginia, and this week’s Miami mayoral race, make 2026 look distinctly blue-tinged.

In fairness, 11 months as president is long enough to get on everyone’s nerves—to disappoint your fans and infuriate your foes. But he’s in a fix, surrounded by mood shifts, challenges and bad signs.

His Capitol Hill base for once and famously began to kick away this summer, with loyalists breaking with him on the Jeffrey Epstein files and Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene on other issues as well. She’s leaving Congress but not looking like someone who lost her battles with Mr. Trump. His problem: Once someone makes a successful jailbreak, all the other prisoners know a jailbreak is possible. This changes the conversation in the prison yard. Guards are eyed differently, the warden’s mystique is diminished.

Outside Washington Mr. Trump’s base is fighting with itself. America first is saying “I’m not MAGA.” Conspiracists all over: “Israel killed Charlie.” The assassination of Charlie Kirk looks increasingly like an epochal event. Did he understand how much he was holding together the Trumpian right? Without the force of his mediating presence they are cracking up.

Percolating below, unseen, is the price you pay in time for success. The president’s border triumph will likely weaken his and MAGA’s political position. He shut down illegal immigration on the southern border, which had been more or less open for decades. But it was anger at illegal immigration that kept his base cleaved to him and allied with each other. Remove the issue that made you, and you can no longer use it to gain votes or maintain unity.

This is the paradox of politics: Every time you solve a major problem, you’re removing a weapon from your political arsenal.

What happens when you lose your great issue? What happens when all that remains of that issue is its least popular aspect? Immigration remains in the news only because of brutal deportation practices. It isn’t “build the wall” anymore; it’s “Don’t arrest the poor guy working the line in a second job at the chicken-processing plant.” Americans don’t want that guy thrown out. The longer the deportations continue, the more unpopular and damaging to the administration they will become.

There is the matter of his mouth. The president’s supporters have for 10 years put up with his babyish obsession with insulting people. They think of it as the Trump Tax, the price you pay for getting someone bold and tough. But his hate-stoking now, in an era of political violence, is going to get someone hurt. In his Truth Social post Tuesday night he used criminal language about the press—news outlets and reporters are “seditious, perhaps even treasonous,” They “libel and demean THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES.” They are “true Enemies of the people, and we should do something about it.” Like what?

It isn’t 2015, we’re more on edge. In a darker time, he’s going to find in the polls fewer people willing to pay the Trump Tax.

Obviously inflation is the so-far-immovable thing, and he’s bungled his response—“affordability” is a Democratic “hoax”, a “scam,” a mere political talking point.

He sounded like Lyndon B. Johnson, who late in his second term was reported to have said, when the public started turning on the effects of his economic policies, “You’ve never had it so good!” That’s the sound of true presidential detachment: I work so hard, you’re a bunch of spoiled babies. House Minority Leader Gerald Ford beat Johnson around the head for that at a 1967 Lincoln Day dinner: “I cannot conceive of a Lincoln telling the people ‘You never had it so good,’ when consumer prices are soaring, the workingman’s real spendable earnings are slipping, and the farmer’s parity ratio is falling hard and fast.”

People on the ground feel tremors presidents can’t feel. They see Mr. Trump flying around the world on his missions and tearing up the White House East Wing to build a ballroom. All that feels like what presidents do when things are going well, in a boom everyone is experiencing. People don’t feel that way now.

It isn’t only inflation spreading unease. Artificial intelligence is coming. It’s going to change the entire employment picture in America over the next few years. It’s going to eat jobs, and people with imagination—and America is nothing if not imaginative—can see it coming. This is part of the background music in America: Americans who aren’t unemployed and do have a house are afraid that in the next few years they could lose their job, their security. And they’re worried about their kids.

A woman in a service industry, an immigrant to America from Eastern Europe who’s been here about 20 years, took me aside recently. Her eldest child, a senior in high school, is looking around at local colleges. She was worried about AI and asked for advice on what her son might study so that in four years he could get a job. We asked ChatGPT, which advised “embodied in-person work” such as heating and air conditioning technician, pool cleaner. She wasn’t happy with that. She’d worked herself to the bone to get her son higher in the world than she is. She wants him to own the pool.

That is how Americans think: rise. They want to know their government is thinking about AI. They want a sense that someone in charge sees the big picture. They want to hear there’s a plan. Mr. Trump sees the development of AI simply as a matter of competition with China and of economic growth, which is dependent right now on AI.

He shows no sign of seeing any dark side to it, has no apparent plans to regulate it, and is beating back state attempts to impose limits. He’s given his friends the AI “broligarchs,” in Ed Luce’s term in the Financial Times, “carte blanche.”

What happened the last time Mark Zuckerberg had carte blanche? Haven’t we read about all the billionaires powering AI who have safe houses and bunkers to which to flee if and when the world they’re inventing goes under?

Mr. Trump seems alive to none of this, but regular people are, and this has more to do with our economic unease than we credit.

Those around the president believe the next big moment for him comes in January, with the State of the Union address, when he can reset the table with a great speech.

Maybe. Those addresses don’t have the power they once had but still retain some. He might focus on things people are really thinking about—AI, inflation and how Americans in their 30s and 40s can get it together to buy a house and have a baby and keep this whole lumbering thing called America going.

Somebody is going to get hurt.

Somebody already has.

This is a partial list of those killed or wounded recently in politically driven violence:

Two members of the West Virginia National Guard ambushed while on patrol near the White House on Nov. 26. Spc. Sarah Beckstrom, 20, killed; Staff Sgt. Andrew Wolfe, 24, is in serious condition. Prosecutors say a nearby guard saw them fall to the ground as the accused shooter, an Afghan exile, screamed, “Allahu Akbar!”

Charlie Kirk was assassinated as he spoke at a peaceful outdoor rally at Utah Valley University on Sept. 10. On June 14, 2025, Minnesota state Rep. Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark, were shot and killed in their home in Brooklyn Park by a man impersonating a police officer. Earlier the same night state Sen. John Hoffman and his wife, Yvette, were shot and wounded in their home. The shooter is reported to have had a list of about 70 targets. In May, two Israeli Embassy staffers were shot to death outside the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington. In December 2024 Brian Thompson, CEO of UnitedHealthcare, was assassinated on the sidewalk outside a Manhattan hotel. The accused shooter was angry about protocols surrounding health-insurance coverage. On July 13, 2024, Donald Trump was wounded in an assassination attempt in Butler, Pa. In September 2024 another assassination attempt was thwarted at a golf club in West Palm Beach, Fla.

After the Kirk shooting, Reuters reported the first half of 2025 saw roughly 150 “politically motivated attacks,” nearly double the previous year’s number for that period.

This April the residence of the Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, was firebombed. The dining room, earlier that evening used for a Passover Seder, was destroyed. The accused arsonist said he was protesting what Mr. Shapiro “wants to do to the Palestinian people.”

In an important piece called “In the Line of Fire” in this week’s New Yorker, Mr. Shapiro told journalist Benjamin Wallace-Wells that he gets a lot of calls from people asking his advice on whether to run for office. But the calls have changed. “I’d say that 10% of their questions are political, and 90% are about what can I do to protect my family.”

The head of the U.S. Capitol Police told Mr. Wallace-Wells that a decade ago lawmakers typically reported fewer than 2,000 threats of violence per year. Around 2017 it began to escalate. “Last year it was almost 10,000.”

This week Sophia Cai of Politico reported on a meeting of Department of Government Efficiency alumni who had gathered near Elon Musk’s space facilities in Bastrop, Texas. Mr. Musk, who attended by video from an undisclosed location with a pitch-black screen around him, told attendees he couldn’t appear in person because he believes he is an assassination target. In June 2024 on a Tesla shareholder call, he reported that “two homicidal maniacs” had “come to aspirationally try to kill” him in the preceding seven months. “I mean, it’s getting a little crazy these days,” Mr. Musk said.

You cannot trace the incidents of political violence the past 18 months without feeling that we are entering or have fully entered a very bad time. I have been thinking of the dreaded era of assassinations that began with the murder of JFK in 1963, and went on to include Malcolm X in 1965, Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy in 1968, and the nonfatal shooting of George Wallace in 1972.

It’s hard to pinpoint when this latest era began because eras don’t declare themselves, and such shootings aren’t new. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords was shot in 2011, Rep. Steve Scalise and three others at a congressional baseball game in 2017. Nancy Pelosi’s husband, Paul, was attacked by an intruder in their San Francisco home in 2022.

But we’re seeing such cases more steadily now, the tempo is up.

In the past at this point in a column like this I’d speak of gun control, because surely controlling the number of guns out there would help. Tightening red-flag laws and applying other such limitations to gun purchases might still help, but “gun control” is pretty much gone as an issue—the guns won. We famously have more guns than people in America, and as long as people feel their institutions are failing, their culture going down, and 911 calls going to voicemail, that will continue.

In the past too I would have talked about what I saw as a coming mental-health crisis among the young in America. Dealing with that is a long-term project, as is the issue of young men and online culture—a whole generation raised by screens, which prompt them to think sick and destructive thoughts. There is a reaction going on in that area; parents are trying to become more careful, and schools are beginning to ban smartphones.

In the shorter term, at least we have what we say in public. Couldn’t we make some progress there? The parties, the podcasters and streamers—everyone’s trying to excite a country that’s too excited already. They never think they’re doing “incitement” with the supercharged and accusatory things they say; they just think they’re telling the truth and breaking through.

But I want to speak of Mr. Trump. He is less careful in what he says than any previous president in history, we know this, and it is unfortunate because presidents—more than we like, more than is right and is good for us—set a tone. His is often menacing and dehumanizing. What he is doing right now with the press is very dangerous.

In the past few months he has been isolating and going after women who are reporters. A New York Times reporter is “ugly both inside and out,” a Bloomberg reporter is told, “Quiet! Quiet, piggy.” An ABC news journalist is “a terrible person and a terrible reporter.” A CBS News reporter is “a stupid person” and an anchor “stupid” and “nasty.” The New York Times is “degenerate,” the Wall Street Journal “rotten.”

More seriously—more sinister—the White House has just put up a wall-of-shame webpage tracking media outfits and reporters who “misrepresent” or “lie” about the administration. Names are named, outfits identified and shamed. All this is meant to intimidate; it institutionalizes attacks on the media and, considering the broader context, potentially prompts and gives permission to unstable people who might want to act in the president’s supposed defense. The webpage, paid for by taxpayers as part of the White House website, looks not like an insult but part of a sustained campaign. It is a threat. It should be taken down.

We have to notice that the moment we’re in appears to be one of incipient political violence. It is a strange peculiarity of Mr. Trump that he constantly pumps the pedal of this already speeding car.

Everyone who speaks publicly in America needs to take it down a notch, be cooler, more deliberate, more aware of the context.

Because somebody’s going to get hurt. We know this because people already have.

Practical advice from one Charles Dickens in “Sketches by Boz”: “Reflect upon your present blessings—of which every man has many—not on your past misfortunes, of which all men have some.” G.K. Chesterton took a different tack—gratitude is “the highest form of thought.” Tolstoy took it a step further: You can infer from his work that he thought the moments in which we feel the greatest thankfulness are those in which we are most noble.

Don’t be embarrassed by talk of gratitude this weekend, or think it rote or corny. Feel thankful enough long enough and it amounts to a stance toward life, a good one. I did nothing to earn the snow-capped mountain on the horizon and yet there it is, filling my eyes and soul with wonder. Thank you, God. Or thank you, mystery. But thank you.

What are you thankful for this year? We’ll start big and go small, knowing small is big too.

Big is from Harvard University political scientist Graham Allison, who wrote to me this week to share three reasons to give thanks this Thanksgiving: “80, 80, and 9.”

Many readers will know what these numbers signify, remarkable achievements that most of us have enjoyed all our lives.

The first 80: “Since Japan surrendered in September, 1945, the world has lived in the longest peace—the longest period without Great Power war—since the Roman Empire.”

“The second 80 is the answer to the question: how many years has it been since nuclear weapons were used in war? Had anyone been asked to bet about this in 1950 or 1960, they could have gotten thousand-to-one odds against this outcome.”

The 9, he says, may be the most incredible of all. “How many states have nuclear arsenals?” We rightly fear nuclear proliferation, and yet “amazing grace and good fortune,” and admirable postwar statecraft, “actually bent the arc of history.”

More than a hundred nations have the resources to build nuclear weapons, Mr. Allison says. Instead they’ve chosen to rely on “the security guarantees of others.” This is wonderful and “historically unnatural.”

Much of what made this happen is being “eroded.”

But for now and just a moment . . . think of the genius that went into making 80, 80 and 9. And be grateful. (The thinking of Mr. Allison and his collaborator, James A. Winnefeld, Jr., on how to renew progress, is in the latest issue of “Foreign Affairs.”)

I asked some friends what they personally found themselves most thankful for this year. Two shot immediate replies.

One, a professor, aged 70, said his thoughts continually returned to a doctor’s genius. “In 2012 I suddenly lost vision in one eye because of a detached retina. After restoring my sight, a surgeon noticed a tiny retinal tear in my other eye and fixed it with a laser. If it were not for medical advances, I probably would be blind.” He can’t stop thinking how grateful he is “for all modern medicine—antibiotics, vaccines, surgical technology, all the rest.”

Another friend, a think tanker in the same age group, said, “Advances in cancer treatment and a wonderful doctor, which have kept my father-in-law alive in a situation which in generations past would have likely produced a quick and negative outcome.”

Here’s to the doctors and nurses and scientists. Thanks, too, to Tatiana Schlossberg for her cool, brave, brilliant reporting on her struggle with cancer, in the New Yorker. She especially toasts nurses: “Nurses should take over.” They should.

My friend Lloyd the lawyer, in his sixties, cited three special objects of gratitude this year: old college friends who show how they care through their candor, his Shabbat morning bible study group—“they are sharp, warm and skeptical”—and what happens when he walks the dogs each day just before dawn on the Westchester shore. He sees “the sun creep over the Long Island sound.” It feels like “the sweep and glory of Creation.”

I’m grateful I have work, that I get to be a writer in America, that I have been able to earn my living that way and know so many of my readers. I have met them traveling the country the past 35 years. We talk at speeches, conferences, book events, dinners, and I know who they are: They are the people who make America work. They’re the doctor on the local hospital board, the businesswoman helping local education, the volunteers in the group that helps new mothers, the store owners heading the downtown revitalization effort. Sometimes they disagree with me on politics but we’re kind of old friends, we came up together, and they forgive me.

They make America live each day. I am a writer in America and I get to be with them, hear from them. Isn’t it corny to say this moves me? But this moves me.

Quickly:

I am grateful for this moment: A small, thrown-together dinner of old friends (thank you, you are precious to me) and, near the end, my friend Richard and I creep into the TV room to catch the end of game three of the World Series. We watched silently and then he said, softly, “It’s a privilege to be here in the age of Ohtani.” I said, oh my gosh, that’s the word, privilege. And at that moment I remembered an older friend no longer with us whom I’d always envied because, as a boy, he’d go to Yankee Stadium and see Joe DiMaggio play. “The great DiMaggio . . . who does all things perfectly,” as Hemingway put it. My late friend always told me it wasn’t just DiMaggio’s hitting, it was his fielding, “fluid, like liquid.”

And there in the TV room, in game three, I realized: I have my Joltin’ Joe. Shohei Ohtani, I am grateful for you.

I am grateful for a little blond boy, just over a year old with a funny, grave face. There is a thing about him, a courtesy, or what I read as courtesy. When he meets adults he stares at them and takes them in, then kindly smiles and gurgles and lets them pat him, ruffle his hair, and take his face in their hands.

Then he returns to the thoughts that really occupy his mind: The ball is a ball and is round. What is round? He stares at it in his hands. But he’s so patient in how he allows you to fuss, as all around him do.

There are studies that say you get happier as you get older, and from what I observe and experience, especially this year, it’s true. The great decisions, which are all on some level great gambles—the profession, the partner, the people and places you seek—have been made, the results are in. No one gets it wholly right, but you survey the field of your life and cock your head. And you confide more because you know your fellow travelers—the friend who had to struggle with professional disappointments she now understands are final, or with personal ones that cannot be changed. But all the compensations, all the progress anyway.

All the grownups know what John F. Kennedy said, in words that are famous because they’re what everyone has always said and been right: “Life is unfair.” And still it is beautiful, magnificent. You want to take its face in your hands.