With Donald Trumps use over Labor Day of the phrase the false economy we finally have a candidate who is getting to the bottom of the so-called Obama recovery. On the one hand the Presidents approval ratings are above 50%. On the other hand, vast majorities think the country is moving in the wrong direction. Official unemployment is below 5%, but because the job participation rate is at its lowest point in decades. The government has racked up more debt than all previous administrations combined. Yet it has eked out growth of less than 2%.

To millions of Americans this is just unreal  and Mr. Trump, in the most important and even radical feature of his demarche, lays the blame at the clay feet of the Federal Reserve. The GOP nominee, speaking to newspapermen on his campaign plane, accused the Fed, as Reuters paraphrased him, of keeping interest rates low to help President Barack Obama. Hed been asked about interest rates. Said The Donald: Theyre keeping the rates down so that everything else doesnt go down. We have a very false economy, he said.

We dont think weve heard a presidential candidate talk about the economy in quite this way  at least not since Congressman Ron Paul, whom James Grant likes to call the party of one, sought the GOP nomination. Not that Mr. Trumps ideas are so heretical. At some point the rates are going to have to change, Reuters quoted him as saying. Both the Wall Street Journal and economist David Malpass have been making that point for months (or years). The only thing that is strong, Reuters quoted Mr. Trump as saying, is the artificial stock market.

This strikes us as a positive development in Mr. Trumps campaign. It puts him in front on the economy and leaves Mrs. Clinton with few options than to put a falsely rosy tint on an economy that has stranded tens of millions of Americans. She has abandoned, in the Trans Pacific Partnership, the very trade agreement that she once praised as ideal and that is a lynchpin to the pivot to Asia for which the administration forsook victory in the Middle East. And she offers little but tax increases, spending, borrowing, and regulation as a forward strategy.

Mr. Trump, by contrast, can take the next step and address the monetary question. If the Fed has failed  and it is not the only central bank that has had and that has found itself without further monetary ammunition  can monetary reform be far behind? The most significant monetary move in the past month, in our view, was the endorsement by the Wall Street Journal of a proper monetary commission, which is now before the Senate. That would put the GOP candidate on the same page with the Speaker, Paul Ryan, and Congressman Kevin Brady.

Chairman Brady has been plumping for a centennial monetary commission for several years now, starting when he was chairman of the Joint Economic Committee and continuing into his chairmanship of Ways and Means. What an alignment of leadership he and Messrs. Ryan and Trump and a Vice President Pence could provide. The commission would open up the whole question of monetary policy, including whether to return America to a system of a dollar defined in gold. In using the phrase false economy Mr. Trump has signaled that he comprehends that we need to reconnect the economy to some measure of value that is real.