The cathedral effect

It's falling away

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Here’s my letter-to-the-editor of The Wall Street Journal that wasn’t printed concerning last Saturday’s Peggy Noonan column. But it’s almost like she read it, leading up to today’s Noonan column headlined “In Gut We Trust?”

I wrote:
“Like Peggy Noonan, world leaders no doubt pore over President Trump’s The Art of the Deal to decode what drives his decision-making. Being ‘unreadable and sneaky’ may be a strategic advantage in real estate negotiations or on a reality TV show, but it’s perilous when those traits define the leader of the free world. A president whose mood swings lead to reckless improvisation, bullying and confusion among allies leaves the world off-balance and in a dangerous place.

“America’s past may include other presidents who were moody shape-shifters lacking self-restraint. But none of them had a social media account to sow overnight chaos.”

Then came Trump’s Easter Sunday post (“Open the fucking Strait, you crazy bastards…”) on Truth Social.

Today Noonan writes that Trump’s post “left his friends and foes slackjawed,” hitting “a new and infernal, face-lit-by-flames bottom, in world communications.” She reminds readers how other wartime presidents carried themselves, lest “we forget what they were, and the current fecal matter will be all we know and can continue.”

“You unconsciously stand up straight in a cathedral,” she writes. “You crouch down low to enter a darkened shack. The sound of our leadership now makes us all crouch too low.”

Noonan’s right about that cathedral effect. The tragedy is that we’ve started mistaking the shack for home, and the crouch for posture.