We will never forget the moment we realized that Donald Trump could win the 2016 election. It was in April of that year, shortly before New York’s Republican primary, when the billionaire’s plane taxied up to a hangar at the airport at Rome, New York, in the upstate Rust Belt — part of and proxy for America’s manufacturing heartland — that used to be full of humming factories and thriving cities like Utica, Syracuse, and Buffalo.

The candidate proceeded to deliver a devastating speech. It turned out to be a template for his successful primary campaign and then his general election strategy. And we can’t help wondering whether Mr. Trump would be in the predicament he’s in today — preparing for an arraignment on federal espionage charges — had he simply accepted his defeat in 2020 and started barnstorming on the issues the way he did at Rome, New York.

We call that the Rome Strategy — or, in the past two years, the road not taken. It was a rally that had just been announced a day before, yet the venue was filled with some 5,000 voters, hungry for hope. Mr. Trump alighted, strode to a platform, and then zeroed in on his signature campaign issue — how the Clinton-era trade pacts had led to the hollowing out of America’s manufacturing sector, enriching rivals like Communist China. 

“Your county has lost 60 percent of its manufacturing jobs since 1980,” he said. “According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Utica-Rome region has lost more than half of its manufacturing jobs since 1990. Now more than half, folks.” He pointed to China’s “currency manipulation” — it’s called “devaluation” — declaring that China’s entrance into the World Trade Organization has been a “total disaster for you and for this region.” 

That monetary manipulation was, Mr. Trump boomed, in part why the “Utica-Rome region lost nearly 40 percent of its manufacturing jobs since 2001.” He took aim, too, at the debasement of the dollar and the manipulations of the Fed. “If you think about it, the economy is rigged, the banking system is rigged,” he noted, “and that’s why a lot of you haven’t had an effective wage increase in 20 years, folks.”

Mr. Trump would later riff on Secretary Clinton’s campaign slogan — “I’m with her.” His response, he quipped, was “I’m with you, the American people.” He was greeted ecstatically at Rome, and, at the end of the rally, he got back on his jetliner and flew into history. It’s hard not to imagine that President Trump would be in a better position today if he had stuck to the issues on which he’d won his first term instead of complaining about 2020.

In other words, if during the Biden presidency Mr. Trump had kept the focus on the core economic issues, he might have widened his support within the GOP and cut into the Democrats and gained with minority voters as we hurtle toward 2024. Meaning, if he’d stopped complaining about his defeat — or about being outmaneuvered — in 2020 and launched, say, a broader version of his Mount Rushmore speech, where he evoked our better angels.  

Instead Mr. Trump has spent the last two years insisting that the election was stolen, revisiting his grievances, and fighting with the National Archives over his presidential papers. By contrast, as we noted on Saturday, when Richard Nixon lost to JFK in 1960, an election that also raised questions of voting irregularities, the California Republican accepted the outcome and bided his time, laying the groundwork for a historic comeback.

Can Mr. Trump regain the road he failed to take these past two years? His remarks on Saturday at Georgia — where he cited “the forgotten man” and the “silent majority” — started to echo the Rome strategy. It’s hard to judge now that federal charges have been laid against him, and prosecutors haven’t even gotten to his conduct on January 6. Then again, too, the Democrats — and the press — failed to appreciate the power of the Rome strategy until it was too late.