Peggy Noonan's Take

(WSJ graphic)

Former Reagan and GHW Bush speechwriter Peggy Noonan could not bring herself to support Donald Trump. However, her personal feelings about the President-elect do not prevent her from performing an insightful analysis of Tuesday's results:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lest her readers think she has changed her mind about the man, she adds:

As for me, I don’t like the SOB, I think him a bad man who’ll cause and bungle crises almost from day one, but he’ll be the American president, and we all deserve grace. I will pray for him, support what I think constructive and oppose what I think destructive, call it straight as I can and take whatever follows.

Such language, Peggy, what would the Gipper say?