Peggy Noonan on How to Save America

When I interview guests on Honestly, I have a job to do. And that job requires me to have a little bit of distance from the person I’m sitting across so that I can maintain my journalistic integrity.

But last week, for our November edition of The Free Press Book Club, I had the distinct pleasure of sitting across from none other than Peggy Noonan. And just for a moment, I had to bow down before the queen.

Peggy is quite simply the master. She does what we try to do every day at The Free Press: tell the truth, make sense of things plainly and without pretension, frame the news in a way that helps the reader make sense of things and, ideally, put things in a historical context that gives the day-to-day depth and meaning. 

And the very annoying thing about the former Ronald Reagan speechwriter is that she makes this thing that we know is so very hard look so very easy. And Peggy does it week after week after week. Over the past 25 years, she’s written more than 400 columns in The Wall Street Journal. (Four hundred columns is like eight million tweets, which is my preferred medium.) 

In her new book, A Certain Idea of America, Peggy collects 80 of those columns published over the last eight years. Now, the idea that old newspaper columns might be good fodder for a book seems weird, given that newspapers are famous for being the next day’s fish wrapper. But somehow this book feels timeless and urgent. In other words: Peggy Noonan’s old columns are better than most people’s brand-new ones.

Before this one, she has written ten books on American politics, history, and culture. She was a speechwriter for President Ronald Reagan. Peggy helped President George H.W. Bush get elected, and she consulted for the TV show The West Wing. Suffice it to say, she knows a thing or two about rhetoric and American politics.

In today’s conversation—one of my favorites of all time—we talk about how she understands Trump’s win and the political revolution that we’re living through. I ask what it feels like to lose in a values war and what it feels like to defend things like civility and decency in 2024. I also ask about Trump’s appointments, including Pete Hegseth and Matt Gaetz. (Right after this conversation, Gaetz withdrew himself from consideration.)

We talk about how, despite our troubles, America remains a good and great country—and why it’s so important for young people to know that—and Peggy also shares the story of meeting Trump just a few weeks ago. . . for the very first time. 

You can listen to our conversation on Honestly here:

Watch the video here:

Or read an edited version below:

Bari Weiss: When I think of the word civilized, I think about you. You don’t curse, at least not in public. You are from a generation of public figures who value things like grace, good manners, and discretion, and everything that we don’t have now in our public life. When did all of the things that you stand for fall so out of fashion? 

Peggy Noonan: What’s the wonderful cliché we’re all using now? “Slowly and then suddenly.” 

BW: “How we went bankrupt”?

PN: Yes, that’s Hemingway. I think it’s from The Sun Also Rises. I think things have a way of deteriorating slowly, and then there are moments when you can see the deterioration. I think our political life more or less started to become a rougher and less elevated thing around 2015, when maybe everybody’s frustrations rose so much that it was inevitable that they’d throw off what they experienced as shackles, and which we experience as standards and expectations.

I’m worried about the falling of standards in two areas. Only one is politics. The other is journalism, where the old standards have been replaced by something less impressive. I am not sure how mainstream journalism fully reclaims the best of its old standards while still traveling into the modern. 

Politically, I think sometimes, What will it take? There are plenty of people in politics still who uphold the presentation of adulthood. They tend to be, I think, governors. State by state, the governors and state legislators are very often presenting themselves in public in a more adult way. It’s funny that the states are better at this than the feds. Maybe on the federal level, somebody at some future point will come forward and radiate the old dignity in a way that he or she will help bring the old dignity back. Maybe. 

On working in the Reagan White House and Trump’s appointees:

BW: I want to talk about your book that’s had the biggest impact on me, What I Saw at the Revolution, which is a memoir about your time in the Reagan administration as a speechwriter. Forty years later, we are here living through a different kind of revolution, with a different kind of outsider in the figure of Donald Trump, who just pulled together an extraordinarily unlikely coalition of voters, who is ushering in a tidal change of the culture. And I wonder if you could spend a minute thinking about the revolution that you witnessed and the one that we are living through right now. 

PN: The revolution that I was part of—1980, 1988—was a revolution in the old world. America looked absolutely the same, and people looked absolutely the same in the days after that revolution. It was a revolution within a party. The conservatives of America had laboriously, over 20 years, taken over the Republican Party, and suddenly they had this rather dashing, shining new president.

Reagan was sworn in just [before] turning 70, which was so incredibly old then. But Reagan’s White House was full of young people. We apparently were the youngest presidential staff ever. We had significant positions, and we were in our 20s and early 30s. There’s a very good thing about that. It’s good to have the young there believing and fighting and bringing their energy and freshness. 

How does that compare to now? This revolution feels like a more cultural revolution, as if America is changing the way it looks and how it experiences itself and who it is. Trump and those around him sometimes confuse me. He got the popular vote, the first Republican in 20 years, but it was still a close victory (by 1.5 percent of the vote). This is not FDR in 1932, and it’s not Reagan in 1980. So even though I would think Trump and the people around him right now would feel personally triumphant, if they were cannier, they would be quickly rolling out appointees who everyone has to lean back and think, Whoa, that’s an impressive person. 

I was giving a speech, and right before the speech, I saw that Pete Hegseth is going to be secretary of defense. That makes no sense. So I say in the speech, “Pete Hegseth of Fox News. Nice man, two tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. Culture warrior. Fine. The world needs culture warriors. But that is not the bio of the guy who runs the 3 million man and woman, highly bureaucratized bureaucracy that is the Department of Defense, which runs all of the branches of the service, which is so complex. The office was held by George C. Marshall. Frank Carlucci. Bob Gates. These were substantial and serious men who understood the thing that they were running. They were also serious diplomats. Pete Hegseth? That’s crazy.”

And after the speech, I was talking with an audience member who came up to me and he said, “Matt Gaetz is going to be the new attorney general.” And I said, “Stop teasing me.” Because I knew I’d been tough on Hegseth in my speech. And he said, “No, I’m serious.” And showed me the headline, which happened while I was speaking. And I thought, Why are Trump and his people doing the opposite of what they should be doing, which is impressing us?

If you want to rub the win in somebody’s face, be much better than they expected. That’s what they ought to be doing. Instead, they’re going lower than most people had anticipated. 

BW: Are there any appointees that you feel excited about? 

PN: Excited? No. But a feeling of. . . good. Susie Wiles as chief of staff. She is a very serious, stable, orderly, grown-up, mature human, who knows something about executive responsibilities and functions. Marco Rubio as secretary of state. Just fine. There are a few others. I can’t remember their names. But that’s a good sign. Cabinet appointees should be normally impressive people whose names you can’t really remember. Matt Gaetz, you can remember.