How to Respond to Trump, Trumpism, and anti-Trumpism

In her Wall Street Journal column Peggy Noonan, no particular fan of Donald Trump, muses on how we should be reacting:

What is required of us at this point in history? What is required of those of us who aren’t making history but observing it, watching with concern or alarm? There’s a sense now of not getting the news but listening for what shoe just dropped.

Thursday morning there was the president’s latest unhingement, in a phone interview on “Fox & Friends.” He was agitated; he spoke of witch hunts, monsters, fakes, phonies and killers. They are “trying to destroy” his doctor, who withdrew his nomination as secretary of veterans affairs. James Comey is “a leaker and he is a liar.” “There is no collusion with me and the Russians.” “Fake news CNN actually gave the questions to the debate.” “They have a witch hunt against the president of the United States.” “It is a horrible thing that is going on, a horrible thing. Yet I have accomplished, with all of this going on, more than any president in the first year in our history. And everybody—even the enemies and haters admit that.” He’s disappointed in his Justice Department. The “corruption at the top of the FBI, it’s a disgrace.” Michael Cohen represented him “with this crazy Stormy Daniels deal.” “But I’m not involved, and I’m not involved—I’ve been told I’m not involved.” He gets along with Kanye West. “I get along with a lot of people frankly.” “CBS and NBC, ABC—they’re all fake news.” They tried to suppress the Trump vote, so that his supporters on Election Day would say, “So let’s go to a movie, darling, and we’ll come home and watch Donald lose.” “Let me tell you the nuclear war would have happened if you had weak people.” “I don’t watch NBC anymore; they’re as bad as CNN. I don’t—by the way I made them a fortune with ‘The Apprentice.’ ”

You could call the interview far-ranging or scattered, you could call it typically colorful or really nuts, but you couldn’t hear it without feeling more disquiet and unease. And that was just Thursday’s installment of “As the Trump Turns.”

So what is required of us at this roiling time? What are some behavioral rules for the road? The political turbulence we’re experiencing isn’t going to go away, and what’s important at such a time is to absorb the daily shocks, think long-term, speak your mind, share your heart, and do your best.

Beyond that, I think the great requirement of this moment, in the second year of the Trump era, is: Don’t lose your composure. Don’t let it rob you of your peace. Maintain your poise. Don’t let the history around you destabilize you. Don’t become sour. Keep on your game, maintain your own standards. There are people on television who level the gravest charges against the administration. But they don’t look sad, they have a look of cackling glee. History isn’t unfolding for your amusement. If it’s such a tragedy, you could now and then look stricken.

It would be good for people to dig deep. Everything in our national political life is in flux. Don’t just oppose. Take time to look at why you stand where you stand. Why are you a Democrat? What truths, goals, realities of that party deserve your loyalty? Republicans, the same.

That is very much what I have tried to do here. Present reasoned, logical, and substantiated arguments against those things with which you disagree; provide substantial arguments for the things you believe in; maintain an even disposition.

That’s how we preserve the republic.