Jason Riley writes for the Wall Street Journal about a presidential campaign full of bad economic ideas.

“The Trump administration imposed nearly $80 billion worth of new taxes on Americans by levying tariffs on thousands of products valued at approximately $380 billion in 2018 and 2019, amounting to one of the largest tax increases in decades,” according to the Tax Foundation. Moreover, the former president insisted that slapping tariffs on goods from China and other countries would reduce the trade deficit. Instead, countries retaliated with tariffs of their own, the export competitiveness of U.S. firms suffered, and the trade deficit increased.

Kamala Harris can’t really critique these proposals, because she largely agrees with them—the Biden administration has kept most of Mr. Trump’s tariffs in place—and her own economic policies might be even worse. Ms. Harris wants to increase levies on corporations, income and capital gains, which historically has discouraged investment and retarded economic growth. She has also proposed increasing the minimum wage, notwithstanding that teenage unemployment and prices at fast-food restaurants shot up after her home state of California raised its wage floor in 2020.

Whatever her proposals, Ms. Harris’s overriding problem is that she can’t run away from the Biden administration’s record. Her campaign’s closing message is that Mr. Trump is a fascist threat to the republic, which is something you come up with when you can’t defend what your administration has been doing for the past four years about inflation, the economy, border security and other issues that voters care most about. Ms. Harris has spent a lot of time ducking serious interviews and deflecting tough questions so that she could focus on telling people what they already know about Donald Trump. Will it work? Not if Mr. Trump’s own closing message resonates.

“I’d like to begin by asking a very simple question,” Mr. Trump said at the top of his speech in New York City on Sunday. “Are you better off now than you were four years ago?” Unlike his opponent, Mr. Trump can run on his economic record, which surveys show is fondly remembered by a growing number of Americans.