‘Every single day I will be fighting for you, and with every breath in my body, I will not rest until we have delivered the strong, safe and prosperous America that our children deserve and that you deserve. This will truly be the golden age of America — that’s what we have to know.’

So promised President-elect Trump in victory remarks delivered in the small hours of Wednesday morning at Florida, and we were glad to hear it. The phrase that sticks in our mind is the “golden age.” We’d like to see it be taken in its literal sense via an end to the age of fiat money — currency with no backing in any specie nor a definition in law — and a restoration of honest money. That would fit perfectly as an aspirational policy and a legacy of Trump’s presidencies.

Trump invoked a “golden age” when, in 2022, he announced his 2024 run. He returned to the theme in his acceptance speech for his third nomination. “America’s on the cusp,” he said at Milwaukee, “of a new golden age.” The nominee did not define the golden age. Yet we would, he said, “have the courage to seize it.” Added he: “We’re going to take it, we’re going to make it a current — I mean, we’re going to bring this into a golden age like never seen before.”

We don’t mean to suggest that in using the phrase “golden age” Trump was promising to reform the American monetary system. We are suggesting that if he really wants a golden age of stability and prosperity he would have to make reform a priority in his agenda. Let him bring back the portrait of Andrew Jackson that he’d hung in the Oval Office during his first term. And read Old Hickory’s farewell address.

“In reviewing the conflicts which have taken place between different interests in the United States and the policy pursued since the adoption of our present form of Government,” Jackson had said, “we find nothing that has produced such deep-seated evil as the course of legislation in relation to the currency. The Constitution of the United States unquestionably intended to secure to the people a circulating medium of gold and silver.”

The victor in what was known as the Bank War, with the Second Bank of the United States, warned that the “the establishment of a national bank by Congress, with the privilege of issuing paper money receivable in the payment of the public dues, and the unfortunate course of legislation in the several States upon the same subject, drove from general circulation the constitutional currency and substituted one of paper in its place.”

There has been a lot of paper under the bridge since Jackson’s prophetic farewell. The greenback was brought in during the Civil War, the constitutional battle over paper money was played out in a series of Supreme Court rulings known as the Legal Tender Cases. Gold convertibility was restored in 1879 and the discipline of the gold standard was tested in the election of 1896, when William Jennings Bryan vowed not to be crucified on a cross of gold.

Gold won, though, and by 1900 McKinley signed the Gold Standard Act. Yet in 1933, FDR devalued the resulting dollar by 60 percent. After World War II the Bretton Woods agreement ushered in the age of a gold exchange standard, in which America undertook to redeem at 35 dollars an ounce dollars presented to it by foreign governments. That ushered in a period of growth and full employment that lasted until the mid-1970s.

In the leadup to the 2024 election, which largely hinged on voters’ frustration with the economy, these columns traced the long-simmering aggravation of Americans over the inflationary spiral that was triggered by Biden-Harris administration and its federal overspending. The Biden-Harris inflation raised prices at a pace not seen since the Stagflation of the 1970s, as prices soared by an average of 20 percent. 

It’s no accident that as these prices surged, America’s dollar plunged. Measured in terms of gold, the real basis of value, our fiat dollars reached a record low of less than a 2,700th of an ounce. Trump now has the opportunity to tackle head-on the inflation crisis by returning to the honest money that fueled America’s rise to prosperity. In doing so, he would go down in history as the president who forged not only a figurative but a literal Golden Age.