President Trump’s speech today at the Economic Club of New York underscores how much better, in comparison with Vice President Harris, a steward of the economy he would be if he returns to the White House. It was a clarion call for a strong dollar, a strategic attack on our epic overspending, and justification of the constitutional powers of protection. It’s hard to imagine Vice President Harris speaking on the economy with such ease and savvy.

We mention that because the economic challenges our country is facing are the top issue with voters. This has been marked by one sounding after another. In some ways Trump’s speech was all over the map, with at least one doubtful idea  thrown in. What struck us, though, was the priority Trump placed on a strategy of maintaining the dollar as the world’s reserve currency — and reckoning that failing to do so would be worse than losing a war.

Advocates of sound money, like the Sun, are less concerned about the reserve status of the dollar than its definition in terms of specie. Yet the two issues are not disconnected. Nor detached from another headline point in the speech, the efficiency commission Trump talked of creating. He laid the idea to Elon Musk and said that one of the world’s richest men had agreed to head the commission aimed at a bottom up review of government spending.

The idea is being put out there after four years of Biden economics in which gargantuan spending — way beyond what might have helped an economy rebounding from Covid — led to the outbreak of inflation. That drove up prices an average of some 20 percent since Trump left office. Even as the pace of inflation ebbs, the cumulative impact of the price increases is dismaying Americans: Eggs and sugar are up 40 percent; Bread up 46 percent, and so on.

This was all well marked by Trump in a speech that our columnist Lawrence Kudlow, who played a major role in Trump’s term in office, calls an “optimistic, pro-growth, aspirational speech on the success that could happen” in a second Trump term. “We delivered an economic miracle,” Trump said, “which Kamala and Joe turned into an economic disaster, just like they turned the border and indeed the whole world into a catastrophic surrender.”

Trump spoke plenty harshly of the Biden-Harris economy, particularly their attack on energy, the “nation-wrecking” immigration spree they countenanced, and crippling regulations. His emphasis, though, was on the low taxes, curb on inflationary spending, and deregulation that would mark a second term designed to liberate the economy using supply-side incentives — along with measures to achieve domestic “energy abundance.”

Even as Trump zeroed in on the “economic disaster on our hands” as a “threat to every American and America itself,” though, some of his proposed solutions fell wide of the mark. His call for a sovereign wealth fund for America, Ira Stoll observed, would be “terrible policy” — if “catnip” for New York money managers. Mr. Stoll derided the idea as “a retread of a decade-old John Kerry proposal for a federal infrastructure bank.”

Then again, too, it was refreshing to hear Trump quote President McKinley, who helped steer America toward honest money. The 25th president was hailed for his stiff tariffs. Yet tariffs can be a blunt instrument, one that can redound to the tariff-issuers detriment. Trump, though, quoted McKinley in reminding that, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, tariffs had “made the lives of our countrymen sweeter, and brighter.” 

Whatever faults might be found in Trump’s economic proposals, they are night-and-day better than the moves eyed by Ms. Harris. She’s doubling down on her call for price controls and for taxing capital gains and even wealth. She’s for the high-tax, high-spending, high-regulation course that has triggered a wave of inflation and set America on the road to what Trump calls “serious decline.” Trump’s speech today offers the far better path to national renewal.