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Democratic gospel. The Democrats appeared to believe that it didn’t matter how out of touch and radical they’d become, so long as they were running against a Donald Trump who could be ruled out of bounds. But if the public concluded that Trump made more sense than his adversaries, a campaign to render him ipso facto unacceptable was going to fail.

This is not to say that Trump is an anodyne centrist. His zeal for tariffs and apparent determination to retake the Panama Canal are hardly consensus positions, and he didn’t mention his imminent Jan. 6 pardons in his address. No matter how much momentum Trump has now, controversies will pile up and events will take a hand. The current goodwill could prove quite transitory.

Still, it was Trump who was the focus of all the attention on Monday, Trump who is setting the agenda and Trump who can plausibly define himself as closer to the middle than his opponents — and they brought it on themselves.

Rich Lowry is editor of the National Review.

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