The week before Christmas, President Donald Trump delivered a televised address from the White House. The president can stretch things out when he speechifies, but this time he got right to the point and landed the message in under 20 minutes. “Eleven months ago,” he said, “I inherited a mess, and I’m fixing it.” Details of that mess began with “the worst [inflation] in 48 years, and some would say in the history of our country.” The word “affordability” is now all the rage, he reckoned, because life has become “unaffordable for millions and millions of Americans.” The president covered many other subjects from the White House. These included immigration, crime, government promotion of transgender athletes (“We had men playing in women's sports”), blowing up drug boats (“Drugs brought in by ocean and by sea are now down 94%”), education (“We have broken the grip of sinister woke radicals in our schools”), and his foreign policy moves (“bringing for the first time in 3,000 years, peace to the Middle East”), but it’s telling that he began with inflation and dwelled on it at length. The overall message that Trump emphasized was dramatic, rapid improvements under his second administration, with more to come. For instance, “We inherited the worst border anywhere in the world,” he said, “and we quickly turned it into the strongest border in the history of our country. In other words, in a...