I was thinking recently about that moment on 9/11 when President George W. Bush was reading a storybook to a group of schoolchildren in Florida. You’ve probably seen the clip. An aide leans in, whispers in his ear that the country is under attack, and the entire world watches to see what he’ll do. And what does he do?
He keeps reading.
People debated that moment endlessly at the time, but when Bush was asked about it later, his explanation was simple and, frankly, correct: the children were watching, the country was watching, and his first responsibility was to project calm. When the world is on fire, the leader’s job is not to add gasoline. It’s to provide steadiness. Reassurance. A sense that someone is in control.
Contrast that with today. There is no major terrorist attack. No national catastrophe unfolding in real time. Yet people walk around with this low-grade anxiety about the state of the country. And the truth is, a lot of that comes from the tone set at the top. Love Donald Trump or hate him — that’s irrelevant to this point — he does not project calm. He does not create a sense of national steadiness. His instinct is always to escalate, to agitate, to turn every moment into a conflict that must be won, rather than a situation to stabilize. He even destabilizes deliberately because he thinks that is necessary to create change. And because the presidency is a symbolic office as much as a political one, the entire country ends up absorbing that energy.
Leadership isn’t just about policies or speeches. It’s emotional. A president becomes, in a sense, the country’s central nervous system. When he steadies himself, the country steadies itself. When he broadcasts agitation, grievance, and constant alarm, and when his policies are designed to maximize tumult, the public ends up living inside that emotional weather system. Even ordinary days start to feel like crises. The nation becomes tense, reactive, and uncertain, not because of what’s happening in the world, but because of how it feels to have a leader who seems perpetually on edge.
President Trump needs to learn this: calm is not weakness. Calm is strength. Calm is what allows a nation to breathe. And it’s remarkable that in a moment with no comparable threat to 9/11, Americans often feel more rattled than they did then. That’s not because the world is objectively more dangerous, it’s because the steadying presence at the top is missing.
A president doesn’t just manage policy. He manages the national mood. When leadership stops radiating calm, the people have to carry the burden of uncertainty themselves. And that wears a country down. You can see that in the polls and in the recent election, which reflect not just the typical dislike of an opposition president, but the anxiety and exhaustion of a country worn down.
History offers its own commentary on this. When the country has faced its darkest hours, the presidents who truly steadied the nation did so not by stirring its anxieties, but by calming its spirit.
Franklin Roosevelt understood this instinctively. The Great Depression was not merely an economic crisis; it was a crisis of nerve. Banks were failing, families were desperate, and the future seemed to collapse upon the present. Yet his fireside chats did not attempt to match the noise of the moment. They softened it. He spoke as a man who had already made peace with the gravity of the situation and therefore could guide others through it. His confidence was not theatrical but quiet, the sort of assurance that comes from someone who believes the ship can still be righted. And because he spoke that way, the public found the courage to believe it too — even with the worst war in history looming ahead.
Eisenhower, in a different era, offered the same kind of stability. Here was a general who had commanded armies across continents, yet in office he governed with a deliberate calm that feels almost foreign to our age. He did not seek to agitate or dramatize. He seemed to understand that a nation emerging from global conflict needed, above all, a steady hand. His restraint was not passivity; it was the discipline of a man who knew the difference between exerting power and broadcasting turbulence.
Reagan, likewise, came to office at a time when America felt spiritually threadbare. The assassinations of the 1960s, the traumas of Vietnam, the disillusionment of Watergate, and the bleak arithmetic of hyperinflation had left the country inwardly diminished. Reagan did not pretend these wounds were trivial. But neither did he let them dictate the national mood. His optimism was not naïveté; it was a deliberate act of leadership, a choice to remind the nation of its better self. In doing so, he helped the country rediscover the steadiness it had misplaced.
Theodore Roosevelt, so often caricatured as pure dynamism, led with a kind of firmness that should not be confused with agitation. His energy was ordered energy. His resolve was purposeful, not impulsive. He expanded America’s horizons without making the nation feel unmoored. Strength, for him, was the opposite of tumult.
Consider also Winston Churchill, who understood better than almost any leader that calmness in the face of genuine danger is the boldest posture a leader can take. London was being bombed nightly. Invasion was not a distant possibility but a looming expectation. Britain stood alone against a regime that had already swallowed half of Europe. And yet Churchill did not shout his way through the crisis. His most famous speeches were delivered in a steady, almost unadorned monotone; no theatrics, no bombast, no attempt to mirror the chaos of the moment. The power of his words came not from volume, but from their quiet resolve. He spoke as a man who refused to panic, and his refusal gave his people the strength to resist. His boldness was inseparable from his calm.
And this is the deeper truth running through all these examples: genuine leadership does not compete with chaos; it counteracts it. It meets turbulence not with theatrics, but with steadiness. It gives a frightened people the gift of a composed mind. It allows a nation to stand firm because its leader stands firm.
That is why conservatism places such emphasis on foundations. A society cannot build, cannot grow, cannot preserve what is worth preserving, if its emotional ground is constantly trembling. Foundations require stillness. They require the kind of ordered strength that men like Roosevelt, Eisenhower, Reagan, Theodore Roosevelt, and Churchill instinctively understood. Calmness is not the absence of boldness; it is its precondition.
When the person at the top radiates steadiness, the people beneath him can live, think, work, and hope without carrying the full weight of national anxiety on their own shoulders. But when agitation becomes the ambient sound of leadership, the public is left to bear the tremor themselves. And that is a burden a nation cannot, and will not, endure indefinitely.
