In the blink of an eye, all of our current concerns and distractions, up to and including our presidential election, disappeared this month beneath a wave. That wave, the coronavirus, washed over so many great countries, and it left so little behind it intact.

President Trump has perhaps changed more than anyone. He went from being the one man in the world who was his own biggest problem to being one of a number of national leaders staring down a great threat. No longer the problem, he was one of the group who were trying to fix it. With that shift in perspective, his place in the whole scheme of things altered. The emphasis now was much less upon who and what he was as a person than on what he was trying to do.