The president is setting the theme for the November congressional elections: Return control of the House and Senate to Republicans and let the good times roll. It’s a message that sells itself. And the good times probably will roll, barring a negative effect on the so-called real economy of three developments: the end of what seemed an inexorable rise in share prices, a wave of protectionism, and political turmoil caused by the possible impeachment of the president.

To those who knew him well, Jeffrey L. Bell was a real-life George Bailey: an accomplished and decent man who shaped important events by helping others achieve their own greatness, mostly without recognition himself.

I knew Jeff exactly 40 years, almost half his life and (so far) two-thirds of mine. The fictional George Bailey in the movie It’s a Wonderful Life saved the life of his kid brother, who went on to be a war hero, meanwhile George fought the Battle of Bedford Falls, keeping it from becoming a sleazy Pottersville. Like him, Jeff had the gift of making it possible for great men, notably Ronald Reagan and Jack Kemp, to achieve their own greatness, while helping many lesser lights to shine brighter than they ever

When I first encountered Jeff Bell, he was debating Bill Bradley, the Democratic candidate for Senate from New Jersey. Bell was the Republican candidate and the underdog to Bradley, a famous basketball star at Princeton and later for the New York Knicks. It was 1978.

Bell was talking about tolls on a bridge, a tedious subject he managed to make interesting. If the toll was $5, not many cars would pay to cross the bridge, he said. A $1 toll, however, would attract so many cars it would earn more money than a toll five times larger.

The toll analogy was Bell’s way of justifying tax cuts. They incentivize. They give people and companies more money to spend and invest, produce and create jobs.

One night over dinner, Mark Twain and his neighbor Charles Dudley Warner decided to write a satire skewering the postbellum culture of excess. They took their novel’s title from a line in Shakespeare’s King John: “To gild refined gold, to paint the lily . . . is wasteful and ridiculous excess.” The Gilded Age emerged as a delicious mockery of the over-the-top extravagance of America’s new-rich industrialists, whose ethics anticipated Mae West’s belief that “too much of a good thing can be wonderful.

In October 1797, 42-year-old John Marshall arrived in Paris with Charles Pinckney and Elbridge Gerry, the three of them constituting an official American commission charged with defusing tensions arising from the larger war between England and France. Both belligerents were seizing American ships thought to be trading with the enemy, and relations between the Jeffersonian Republicans, who favored the French, and the Federalists and President John Adams, who tilted British, were growing more acrimonious. The commission was to meet Talleyrand, the French foreign minister, who embodied both the ancien régime and the new revolutionary fervor (though his greatest cause was himself). He was well educated, rich, and powerful.

The Good Place is the most unexpectedly profound show on television. NBC’s afterlife sitcom, which just concluded its second season, stars Kristen Bell as an impostor in paradise and Ted Danson as her supernatural overseer. It begins by skewering shallowly sentimental ideas of heaven and then transitions to asking (sincerely!) how a bad person can become good. You know the show is something special when the Kierkegaard jokes start and don’t let up.

Bell plays a selfish woman named Eleanor Shellstrop who’s let into “The Good Place” by mistake and realizes she has to learn ethics to blend in.

Say what you will about Donald Trump’s intellectual acumen, but he does have a certain flair for drawing attention in directions he desires—or better yet, prompting his detractors to say things he wants them to say. This may not be “genius” in the usual sense of a much-abused term, but it’s a political talent of a very high order—especially impressive in a president whose political wounds tend to be self-inflicted.

The latest case in point: his suggestion that the annual Bastille Day parade in Paris—featuring troops on the march and mechanized hardware—has inspired him to sponsor a similar event here in Washington.

The reaction to this bright idea was instantaneous and