If the worst comes to pass, if the next four years are as bad as Biden warned, if the country—teetering before the abyss—stumbles toward that last precipice, it will have been American democracy’s self-styled savior who helped push it, tumbling end over end, into the dark.

Democrats did their best in their pivot from Biden, but it was too little too late. In their 2020 quest to beat Trump at all costs, they boxed themselves into a corner by propping up a mentally unfit octogenarian purely for the sake of winning that election, then didn’t realize it was time to change candidates early if they wanted to win this one.

As for Kamala Harris, she won’t be that occasional losing presidential candidate who nevertheless is accorded a status as her party’s leader going forward. She can expect to be jettisoned as an uber Dukakis, not only because of perceived inadequacy (she lost) but because of the sense of illegitimacy that attended her rise.

In her closing rally on the Ellipse last week, Kamala Harris scorned Donald J. Trump as an outlier who did not represent America. “That is not who we are,” she declared.

In fact, it turns out, that may be exactly who we are. At least most of us.

I hope the Democrats and their media enablers do plenty of soul searching. America needs a strong Democratic party and media they can trust. In recent years, the party has allowed its hatred of Trump to make them forget the common sense that moves most Americans.

Well, now Trump has made history as the first president since 1892 to lose the White House and then win it back four years later. The American people have spoken, so I’m here to say: Donald Trump is my president — and he’s your president, too.

Two ideological movements are competing for Trump’s mind. Evangelicals and isolationists. Evangelicals are pro-Israel and anti-Iran. Isolationists don’t want America to be pulled into what they see as Israel’s war with Iran. We don’t know which way Trump will go.

The last time Donald J. Trump was in office, the consequences for the Islamic Republic of Iran were disastrous.

As president, Mr. Trump pulled out of a nuclear deal that had begun to reduce sanctions in exchange for Tehran limiting its nuclear capacity. He added 1,500 sanctions, including on Iran’s oil sales and banking sectors…

As the Middle East teeters on the brink of a wider war, with Iran threatening to respond to an Israeli attack on its territory this month, there are concerns that Trump’s election may empower Netanyahu to strike Iran’s nuclear facilities, something the Biden administration warned against.

They are going mad over his integrity, his no-nonsense approach, his almost wooden laconicism. Over his statesman-like conduct, and his close relations with the Biden administration… Gallant is now everything Netanyahu is not, and will never be. The antithesis.

Gallant “is perceived to be very trustworthy, if not as cuddly as Gantz,” the source said of the hostage families’ reactions to the defense minister. “The way he speaks, and as a persona—he’s less lovable. But when he speaks his messages are respected. People don’t start shouting at him. He’s not polarizing…”

Gallant has long argued that the ultra-Orthodox should not be able to dodge the country’s mandatory draft and, with Israel locked in the longest war in its history, he has doubled down, putting the prime minister’s coalition in jeopardy.

Parents who watched in alarm as gender theory swept through schools will recognize the sudden, almost religious conversion to this newest ideology. And very few educators are standing against it. Much of the anti-Israel vituperation slides into classrooms through a subject called ethnic studies.

The MTA Rank and File for Palestine made up of members of the state’s teachers association, advertised the “Books not Bombs” event on their Instagram page. These same teachers believe Israel is “committing a Palestinian holocaust.”

Today there’s a palpable sense of things going backward. Backward in the Ivy League, where Jewish enrollment has plummeted and Jewish students feel unwelcome and at times threatened. Backward in cities like Oakland, Calif., where Jewish families pulled their kids out of public schools in protest of an antisemitic curriculum.

For many American Jews, that moment of reckoning arrived on Oct. 7 and in its aftermath, as they came face to face with just how politically powerless, demographically irrelevant, and devoid of meaning or spiritual sustenance nearly all of their institutions, affiliations, and leaders had become. The entire postwar framework, according to which Jews understood, organized, and portrayed themselves for at least six decades, is over.

History and the Jewish legal tradition has declared Hillel the winner in their halakhic battles, and Hillel’s victory has been promoted by painting a particularly harsh and unyielding picture of Shammai and his followers. But close scrutiny of Shammai’s rulings on women reveal an unexpected openness to the reality of the lives of the women of his time and an effort to see them as autonomous human beings who warranted respectful treatment by the law.

What if we redefine prayer entirely? What if, when you are home, you simply sit in a chair and breathe, imagining you are worthy of what you pray for? Maybe that’s peace in your heart, or the strength to act with courage even when you are terrified. Maybe you are asking for the clarity of mind to know which path to take next.