We will soon collect morel mushrooms. Soak them overnight in saltwater to get the dirt and bugs out, and then sauté them in butter or olive oil. A pinch of salt. If you’re really in need of comfort food, bread them with flour or corn meal first, turn up the heat on the skillet and toss them in. They taste heavenly.

Before she died, my aunt Juanita told me and assorted kin at a reunion a story of the winter in what she called the Apple House during the Depression, when she was a little girl, and all they had to eat was apples, and the occasional game that could be shot or trapped. Grandpa Leonard was a hired hand on a farm. The Apple House was where the farmer dried and stored apples.

Hand on my arm, at a table, Aunt Juanita looked back those 80 years or so, and said: “When Dad or one of the boys got a squirrel, Mom always used to say: ‘Give me that squirrel head, honey. That’s all I want to eat, is the squirrel head. It’s the best piece of meat.’” She added, “It wasn’t until years later that we figured out there isn’t any meat on the squirrel head, and she treated it like it was a delicacy, just so us kids could get more to eat and we wouldn’t worry about her.”

In our pandemic, we are yet some distance from Apple House time, but it’s going to be strong institutions and smart public policy that will stop us from getting there. Grandpa Leonard was a Democrat. He went to his grave knowing that Franklin Roosevelt saved my grandma and their 11 children from starving to death during the Great Depression. It was a son of Iowa, the Republican Herbert Hoover, whose failed economic policies got us into that mess.

President Trump’s supporters are as strong and vocal as they ever have been. They’ve pivoted as crisply as a drill team from complaining that the virus is a Democratic hoax to bring the president down to barking that Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer are undermining the president as he seeks to protect us from the scourge of a terrible disease. It may not be logically possible, but some hold both positions at the same time.

Mr. Trump, along with his enablers in his administration and many Republican members of Congress, have done their best to undermine those institutions that we need so badly now.

But undermining our public institutions didn’t begin with Mr. Trump; it’s the lasting legacy of Ronald Reagan, whose words in his 1981 Inaugural Address — “government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem” — have undermined our public institutions for 40 years.