President Trump’s startling win in 2016 ushered in a new era of economic populism. Ever since, both parties have been vying to offer a new economic deal to blue-collar Americans, whose earning power had been declining for decades.

They could use a new deal. According to the Federal Reserve, real median earnings for non-college workers fell 14 percent over the past 40 years, while those for workers with a bachelor’s degree or higher have grown by 14 percent.

Opportunity in America looks very different to people on opposite sides of the diploma divide. Whereas non-college workers contend with downward mobility, the highly educated rise into tonier precincts of upper-middle-class affluence.

This disparity disfigures our society, and populists across the political spectrum are right to want to redress it. Unfortunately, they have proved better at posturing as working-class tribunes than at tangibly improving their lives.

President Biden presided over a nearly $5 trillion public spending binge aimed at rebuilding a pandemic-stricken U.S. economy “from the bottom up and middle out.” But Bidenomics ultimately struck out with working families, who identified it with rising living costs and eroding purchasing power.

Although he owes his reelection mainly to inflation, it didn’t take Trump long to break his promise to focus on batting it down. Instead, he’s launched a global trade war that’s driving prices back up for consumers and businesses, choking economic growth and provoking retaliatory tariffs on U.S. exports.

An angry Trump lashed out at Walmart last week........

© The Hill