We can layer these efforts according to whether they are made by politicians, policymakers or academic economists. For the first category, consider the split personality of Kamala Harris’s 2024 presidential campaign, which exemplified the lack of direction among would-be opponents on Trumpism. Hers was a campaign in two halves: it started out with an economic populism focused on the cost of living and a promise to address price gouging, then panicked about scaring the horses, backed away from economic radicalism and shifted to rescuing American democracy from Trump. The inconsistency of the campaign means that people can blame her defeat on whatever campaign message they didn’t like, leaving the “economic populism or moderate centrism?” question unsettled.