The image above depicts Holman W. Jenkins, Jr., a member of the editorial board of The Wall Street Journal. Below, I am providing you with a copy of his column dated January 28, 2026, so you can read it in its entirety. I think it's worth reading.
The column is particularly worth reading if you know something about the editorial positions that have typically been taken by The Wall Street Journal. The Journal is (or has been, perhaps) extremely supportive of our current president - at least, that's the way I read it. The column below, though, is different. It claims, for instance, that "Fight, fight, fight isn't a presidential coalition built to achieve anything." The title of the column implicitly calls our current president "mean," and the column states that our current president is repeating a [failed] pattern with respect to his "deportation binge," but that he has done so "with more tragedy and stupidity."
Now, do you think that there is any chance that Republican Members of Congress might start doing a little "truth telling" of their own?
We can only hope that they'll start doing that - and/or we can replace them this coming November. Let's not forget that option!
oooOOOooo
Trump’s Regression to the Mean
By Holman W. Jenkins, Jr., January. 27, 2026
Only with more tragedy and stupidity, Donald Trump repeats a pattern. Like every other president’s deportation binge, his is ending in a backlash while producing no meaningful effect on the large U.S. illegal immigrant population.
Take the headline on this column as a double entendre but today’s subject is the conventional meaning of regression to the mean, the statistical phenomenon whereby extreme outcomes are followed by more typical or average outcomes.
To give the most obvious indicator, the betting markets have signaled for months that Republicans in the fall are likely to lose the House and perhaps the Senate.
Lacking in last week’s Davos hysteria was any sense of politics. Mr. Trump’s address was a stump speech for channel flickers at home, on the way to dropping the Greenland threat that he so typically parlayed into global attention.
Guess who else is a politician? Every national leader in the room in Davos, who all have voters back home. Mark Carney could have not bothered getting back on his plane unless he found a suitably viral way to express what Canadian voters were feeling about Mr. Trump in that moment.
And yet NATO will survive. Quite obviously it will become only a more attractive U.S. partner as Europeans shoulder more of the cost and responsibility.
Say what you will about the Davosites, they are worldly types who understand regression to the mean. The next U.S. president won’t be anything like Mr. Trump, most importantly lacking the license he gave himself to behave the way he does by being Donald Trump in public for 40 years before becoming president.
Nor will the next president’s way be paved by the political gold that Mr. Trump got from the idiocies of Adam Schiff, Rachel Maddow, James Comey and the Bidens Joe and Hunter, who might as well have been on the Trump payroll.
Nor will he or she benefit from the nakedly commercial, ratings-based codependency of Mr. Trump and his cable TV detractors, also a product of his unique career path.
At every opportunity, headline writers define Mr. Trump as an outlier, a norm breaker, an offender against all that is holy. That is, until he opens his mouth at Davos. Then he becomes, alarmingly, synonymous with “the U.S.”
Davosites aren’t fooled. They know Mr. Trump is not a country of 340 million. They may even know a bit of electoral history. Nationalist, Midwestern, isolationist, culturally conservative America gets its hands on one party or the other’s nomination every 60 years or so: William Jennings Bryan, Barry Goldwater, Mr. Trump.
I would add another reversion to the mean. An OECD study finds a measurable increase in the stupidity of U.S. and other Western publics in the social-media age. Politicians speak frankly of a post-literate electorate. A practicing psychotherapist pointed out on these pages that Trump derangement syndrome is actually a bipartisan affliction. You suffer from it when your self-esteem is threatened by somebody saying something positive about Mr. Trump. You’re no less afflicted if you’re a supporter who feels threatened when somebody says something negative about him.
There’s only one way for the pendulum to swing: back toward adulthood, or what our therapist contributor calls proper psychological distance.
How will you know? When one of those serious, lauded Democratic governors, the kind always being cited as a future president, decides it’s safe to give an adult speech about Ukraine. Or when there is a sudden abatement in the panting ambition of Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut to be this cycle’s Adam Schiff.
As for Mr. Trump, he has three years to change the story line, but the provisional epitaph has been written. He is failing to expand his coalition. He shrinks it with reckless gestures aimed at keeping his name in the news. He had the AI wind at his back, the post-Covid recovery, a business and investment community united in revulsion at the fake moderation of his predecessor Mr. Biden. Mr. Trump could be building a pro-growth legacy like Ronald Reagan’s, leaving his mark on both parties by reviving Americans’ faith in themselves as a free and enterprising people.
What is Reagan not remembered for? Deportations. He put his effort into legalizing people already here—nearly three million, the largest such legalization in U.S. history. He made a point of promoting and signing a law with increased enforcement powers but barely used them. He deported in eight years fewer people than President Obama did in six months. Reagan understood the purpose of prosecutorial discretion. America had failed so long and so consistently to enforce its own immigration laws or make them sensible. It owed better to those now here than to treat every undocumented grandmother and restaurant worker as the equivalent of a Tren de Aragua gangster.
This even Mr. Trump has repeatedly given an impression of understanding.
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