Reagan Insider Peggy Noonan on Trump, COVID-19 and Masculinity

WALTER ISAACSON: Thank you, Bianna. And Peggy Noonan, welcome to the show.

 

PEGGY NOONAN: Thank you, Walter. It’s wonderful to be here.

 

WALTER ISAACSON: This collection of columns reminds me how when you’re writing your columns, you’re almost thinking out loud. Talking to yourself, talking to us, and then processing information. You take us step by step through it. So let me understand. How are you processing the current moment in the current election?

 

PEGGY NOONAN: I am processing the current moment as: In Mar-a-Lago, the new incoming president is surrounded by people who are afraid to leave his line of sight <laugh>. And so they are staying all around him and giving some sort of physical sense of the new administration. And it’s an interesting picture. In a different way, I think it’s very funny, but sometimes white houses or incoming white houses are not quite conscious of the fact that they can do something that is disturbing to people. Here’s what it is. It’s like they’ve got a chef’s kitchen and a chef’s stove and they’ve got eight burners, and they decide to put eight pots on each burner and put them up to full boil and steam the windows and give a sense of, holy mackerel, what the heck is happening here? If I were to give them advice or they asked for advice, I’d say, gosh, with these cabinet appointments and these pronouncements, lower the heat, America’s just been through a dramatic election. What it would love to do, love to feel, and what would be very good for Mr. Trump is to make them feel reassured that mature nondramatic people are in charge.

 

WALTER ISAACSON: Wait, wait. Reassure that mature nondramatic people are in charge. I mean, Trump is based on drama. That’s his entire persona. Are you asking him to be something totally different?

 

PEGGY NOONAN: Well, I am asking them to be shrewdly self-disciplined for once, and that’s not too much to ask.

 

WALTER ISAACSON: You know, you were with Reagan, you did all of his great speeches. Compare and contrast Ronald Reagan and his rhetoric –  a lot of which you helped him write – to Donald Trump’s rhetoric.

 

PEGGY NOONAN: Well, Ronald Reagan was a man who loved words and their concrete meaning and their ability to suggest. So both sides of what a word is, what a sentence is. He had been – something that Reagan had that Trump does not have is that Reagan, since the 1960s, actually meaning 20 years before he was president, was seriously emerging as the conservative voice of the brand new conservative movement in America. So he knew his stuff, he knew what he wanted to say. He knew what quote from the founders he wanted to use, you well know. 

Donald Trump, of course, has been none of that and has done none of that. He is a man with a completely different background who now and then showed an interest in politics and now and then would go make a speech. But he was not the voice of a real philosophical thing. And mostly his sound – I mean, you have to give credit where it’s due – his sound is utterly genuine to him. He doesn’t try to hide much in a way. You know, he tells you, this is what I’m gonna do, this is why. We’ll figure out the details later, but this is what we’re doing. He has more the blunt and perhaps uncontexted sound of modern America.

 

WALTER ISAACSON: The book is called “A Certain Idea of America.” Great title and sort of derived from Charles de Gaulle. Explain why.

 

PEGGY NOONAN: Decades ago, I read Charles de Gaulle’s “War Memoirs,” and I found it a little masterpiece, actually. Not quite in the league of U.S. Grant’s war memoirs, but an impressive book from a deeply impressive man who had an almost mystical, I think a mystical attachment, with his nation, with his country, and its meaning and history. And what struck me when I read the famous first sentence of his memoir is, “All of my life I’ve had a certain idea of France.” It was so simple. And he explained that it was in one part emotional and in one part based on rational thought. And I will never forget seeing that sentence and thinking, do you know, that’s – not to compare myself to De Gaulle, of course, which I don’t. But that was true of me also.

All of my life, I’ve had a certain idea of America, of it’s –  for all its problems, all its flaws, all its failures it was a good nation, a unique force in the world, a new thing in the history of man based on a new thought. All people are equal here under the law. And wherever you start does not dictate where you will wind up. And to me, this is not a benign, a gauzy feeling about America. This is a truthful, factual feeling about America. And I do think, not to go too long here, I think the balance of our national conversation about our country has in the past 10 years skewed more towards the painfully shamed. And I just think, whoa, guys, we gotta reorder this a little bit. We gotta rebalance here. I feel very protective about America.

 

WALTER ISAACSON: And the America that you’ve talked about, the America that Ronald Reagan spoke about, was fundamentally optimistic, the morning in America feel. And it, you’ve just said that America now kind of feels shamed. It’s almost a dystopian vision that everything is going wrong. Explain, yeah, unpack that.

 

PEGGY NOONAN: Well, I’ll tell you what one of my great worries is. There are a lot of families in America that don’t work and are not so successfully bringing up kids with order and love. This has always been true in America. We’re an America of displaced people always pushing off somewhere else. And we’ve had interesting parenting styles. But when I was a kid in America in the fifties and sixties coming from a somewhat turbulent family, I always was allowed to have the feeling, Walter, that what is in the family is this, but when I open the front door, I go into America and it’s a good place. And it won’t be unkind to you based on your sex or your race. It will be accepting of you and good to you. What I fear is that in the past, I don’t know how long, 10 or 20 years, we have left kids from turbulent homes thinking, I am not safe here.

And guess what? I just opened the front door to go out. And I’m not safe there either. It’s a rather wicked place. This is actually something that has been on my mind as a working writer for decades. And I feel we’re selling those poor kids short, and we’ve got to give them a different vision so that they understand they can have a chance here and they can rise here and they can be accepted here, and they can be part of this big project that we have. So that has been very much on my mind.

 

WALTER ISAACSON: You’ve written often about the need specifically to teach as a culture. We need to learn how to teach again, how young boys should fit in and young boys should live. Why are you particularly worried about young boys, other than the fact that you have a son and now a new grandson?

 

PEGGY NOONAN: Because boys need masculine models. In some special way, boys need to be taught through the modeling of others how to be a boy, and how to be a man, and what the masculine virtues are, and how to be a gentleman, and how to be kindly and strong at the same time. This too has been a matter of real concern to me, and I feel like we’re getting it wrong a bit. And I don’t like it that we make sometimes these days boys feel like they’re nothing. They have no special place. They’ve lost their place. And it disturbs me.

 

WALTER ISAACSON: We’ve done that for wom – to women for centuries. Isn’t this just about a rebalancing?

 

PEGGY NOONAN: Yes. It is about a sensitivity. Can’t you help everybody at the same time? Do you have to really help the girls at the expense of the boys or the women at the expense of the men? We can do it all. We shouldn’t ever be categorizing and defining and limiting people by what they were born as. It’s not good.

 

WALTER ISAACSON: One of the other things you say in the book is you talk to some traditional Republicans, even during the tumultuous first term of Donald Trump. And they were looking to sort of the post-Trump era, we get back to real conservative. And I think you said that Reagan’s old conservatism was philosophically right, but it’s not fully in line with the crises of our times. Why is that?

 

PEGGY NOONAN: Yeah. You know, I’m a little impatient with the, What would Reagan do? What would Reagan say? These policies are, policies are not Reagan-esc. Look, if it’s 1962 and John F. Kennedy is president, people around him should not be running around and saying, he’s doing things different from FDR. FDRs age, and the immediate political demands of his age were different from John F. Kennedy’s. Donald Trump’s age and issues are different from Ronald Reagan’s. I am not really, I’m not a fan of – Okay. Philosophically, we’ve worked out where we stand on this issue, and we will stand there un-varying forever no matter what the reality outside. Ronald Reagan – to give you one example of a difference is that Ronald Reagan in 1980 was dealing with an essentially, and addressing an essentially healthy country. Healthy in its ways and ways of living, I guess. Donald Trump’s America is a very different America in which people are very disturbed and tormented by a lack of particular kinds of jobs, by drugs, by families that seem to cohere less. So, you know, as, what did Lincoln say? As our times are new, we must think anew. I have no problem with thinking anew. But certainly keep your kind of whatever kind of conservative you are, Burkian or whatever, keep that present and applicable because philosophies matter, they’re grounding for everything.

 

WALTER ISAACSON: One of the things that echoes through your book is Covid, because you’ve written about it from the very beginning, early on in Covid you were writing about it.Q14. I have a theory about Covid, which is that it turned into a class divide. There were certain class of people, usually the working class people who had to go to work and were appalled by all the lockdowns and the restrictions. And then there was sort of an over class, a meritocratic class who said, follow the science. And that divide became a political divide as well that was reflected in this election.

 

PEGGY NOONAN: Yeah. I think it became a political divide, but also reflected and underlined a political divide that had already been happening. I wrote about this somewhat in some very controversial columns. You know, and one I said, and I actually just think this working class folk who have tough lives and have to stock the ShopRite and drive the truck, they can be pretty tough about life, you know? In part because they probably came from a certain amount of toughness. So they see this terrible germ coming and they know it’s trouble and they’re wearing the mask, but they’re also seeing the laptop class, that’s me and you, staying home and what? Being detached from their real lives and detached from their need to simply live their lives. And I think maybe detached from a certain common sense and attached too much to this sort of, we know the science, where the superior folk stuff. And I thought it was painful and I didn’t like it. And yes, we’re still working it out. I think part of the story of the 2024 election – I’ve never seen it reflected in a poll. It’s only my hunch – is that the American people, a lot of them wanted to say, to look at the years 2020, 2024, and say goodbye to all that. Goodbye. We’re gonna reorder things.

 

WALTER ISAACSON: One of the toughest columns in your book is right after the January 6th attack on Capitol Hill. And you called it a sin against history, and you said that Trump was the chief instigator of it, and you said he should be removed from office.

 

PEGGY NOONAN: Yeah, whichever comes first. Yeah.

 

WALTER ISAACSON: After all this, how are we supposed to now make of January 6th and the fact that it rebounded?

 

PEGGY NOONAN: Look, I know what I think of January 6th. It was a terrible sin against history. And an American president ginned up these angry young guys and said to them, oh, I’ll meet you at the Capitol. Oh, we’ll catch up with the bad guys there. It was deliberate and mischievous to the point of malice. And then as the story played out on our airwaves, on the internet and on cable TV live, he sat and watched it. It was grossly irresponsible, just grossly so. Now, if I were a Trump supporter, I’d say, can you guys relax about this? It was a thousand guys in a nation of 335 million. They weren’t all armed with guns and looking to shoot somebody. They were acting out and acting up. And the law came down on them. Man, the book was thrown at them. They all went to jail. Relax. There are bigger problems. So that is the answer I often get.

 

WALTER ISAACSON: And which do you believe

 

PEGGY NOONAN: Mine? I’m sorry. You cannot do January 6th. You just can’t.

 

WALTER ISAACSON: You’re fundamentally optimistic in this book, in the speeches you wrote, other things. What is making you, if anything, optimistic these days?

 

PEGGY NOONAN: Oh, optimistic. I have faith. I think always prepare for a bad time, but live through each day in a happy way. You’re lucky to be here. Just lucky to be here. Lucky to be alive. So enjoy this thing that we have. Have faith in other people. I meet Americans throughout America on my travels. They are such a good people. So I worry about us a lot. But I love us a lot. And there you are.

 

WALTER ISAACSON: Peggy Noonan, thank you for joining us.

PEGGY NOONAN: Thank you, Walter, very much. It was an honor.