It's Not Over Yet for Donald Trump

In the late fall of 1995, the columnist Ben Wattenberg—on tour to promote a new book—received a phone call from an admiring reader. The reader was President Bill Clinton. Over the next hour, Clinton praised Wattenberg’s work as the most accurate criticism of his administration to date.

In his syndicated column to be published Thursday, Mr. Wattenberg quotes Mr. Clinton as saying that he was initially too interested in the "legislative scorecard, rather than in philosophy," focusing like a prime minister on shepherding his party's legislation, instead of using the bully pulpit like a chief executive. The column says Mr. Clinton said he was "so anxious to fix the economy" that he "changed philosophically and missed the boat."

With those mistakes, Clinton had