The president-elect promises to rule with robber baron tactics and imperial belligerence — just like his role model William McKinley.
President William McKinley and Vice President Theodore Roosevelt.
(Bettman/Getty)
For at least two decades, social critics and commentators have declared that America has entered the second gilded age. I like it similar discussion about fascisminvoking the height of free capitalism in the late 19th century to describe our own era of rampant inequality is not only obscuring but also illuminating. Yet here, on the cusp of Donald Trump’s second administration, at least one counterpart to the “Golden Age” is justified: the presidency of William McKinley, which neatly framed the views of the American ruling class in its confident heyday.
Trump invited some superficial comparisons to McKinley’s predecessor, the conservative Democrat Grover Cleveland, mainly because he is the only other president to serve non-consecutively. But in virtually every aspect of his governing agenda, Trump is a proud supporter of McKinley — and especially in his vision of an executive branch that functions as an aide to private business interests.
Trump’s most vocal affinity with McKinley is his aggressive tariff plan. “In the 1890s, our country was probably the richest it’s ever been because it was a tariff system,” Trump said. from the 2024 campaign stump. “We had a president, you know McKinley? Do you remember Mount McKinley?’ The president-elect’s hurt longing for the former name of Alaska’s Mount Denali, the highest point in North America — a place with little to no historical connection to McKinley, who never even visited it— runs deep. Over the past month, he has included renaming Denali after McKinley— an idea he first floated during his 2016 campaign — in his bid to entrench old American imperial prerogatives around the world. More importantly, Trump’s nostalgia for McKinley centers around a completely garbled historical reference — the 1890s brought unprecedented wealth to just the 1 percent and widespread destitution for the country’s working majority; indeed, in 1897, 4,000 families, who accounted for 1 percent of wealth and property, controlled most of the economy than the 11.6 million families who remained in the country.
Trump’s heavy leaning into imperial fantasy—with plans to annex Canada and Greenland along with a demand to restore US sovereignty over the Panama Canal and, heck, a ruse to rename the Gulf of Mexico the American Gulf—is another tribute to McKinley, who transformed the United States from a territorial empire to a world-spanning empire through the Spanish-American war. McKinley was initially ambivalent about entering a conflict that would have placed Cuba, the Philippines, and the Hawaiian Islands under far from benevolent American rule. But he eventually came around, saying that Filipino citizens demand American control of the island nation as a means of exercising basic civil liberties — a claim about as believable as Trump’s recent claim that Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was forced to resign in the face of a mass movement demanding to accept the country into the American republic as the 51st state.
Imperial hubris, of course, is never limited to mere considerations of fact, so almost all subsequent American interventions abroad, from Vietnam and Grenada to Iraq, have been based on slight variations of McKinley’s cherished dream that Filipinos—as well as Cubans and Hawaiians— were bound to meet their American occupiers as liberators.
If anything, Trump is showing himself to be a much more brutal imperialist than his predecessor. He has already signaled that he is does not exclude military force to gain new territory that would seem to fit his imperial profile more with the crazy chauvinist worldview of Vice President and McKinley’s successor, Theodore Roosevelt. The first president, Roosevelt, greatly overcompensated for a pampered and sickly childhood with a sharp commitment to what he called a “fighting spirit” – organizing an attack on San Juan Hill in Puerto Rico, going on extensive safari tours in Africa and asserting claims to sovereignty USA over the Panama Canal during its construction. So it’s only fitting that more than a century later, Trump is trying the same imperial gambit to rally expansionist sentiment behind him.
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On the other hand, McKinley, once assured that his business supporters supported the new American empire, returned to standard political appeals while campaigning for re-election in 1900. under the slogan “a full bucket of lunch “His past support for protectionism has given way to an imperial project to open global markets to American businesses. In 1897, in an address to the Commercial Club of Cincinnati, he declared that “our firm aim must be to open commerce wherever we can, making our ships and our commerce messengers of peace and amity.”
Trump, for his part, has also made a vague promise to restore mass prosperity, but he is preparing to turn his second administration into both a personal and a national vanity project, leaving basic safeguards for economic security an afterthought at best. He has already made it clear that he is unlikely to lower prices basic staples—a central collateral of its 2024 campaign. And his aggressive tariff policies along with the trade wars they are likely to trigger create new inflationary spirals.
Trump was also auctioned off regulatory gifts oil industry leaders in exchange for donations to the company, and promised parallel free ride through the permitting process for large foreign investors. None of these measures are expected to improve the lot of ordinary Americans struggling to survive; rather, they are designed to promote the government and for the rich. It’s also a clear message to the incoming Trump administration, which boasts 13 billionaire nominees.
McKinley was elevated to the presidency primarily because he was the consensus candidate of America’s robber baron caste. His de facto campaign manager, Mark Hanna, chaired the Republican National Committee, but far more importantly, Hanna was a wealthy, well-connected industrialist who received large donations for McKinley from the estate of John D. Rockefeller, JP Morgan, and other financial titans were terrified of the 1896 takeover of the Democratic nominee. by populist lawmaker William Jennings Bryan. “There are two things that are important in politics,” Anna observed. “The first is money, and I don’t remember what the second is.”
Hannah’s role was reprized in Trumpworld inflammatory racist Elon Muskwhose $277 billion subsidy to Trump’s 2024 campaign represents the largest single-source donation in American history. Musk has already seen a significant return on his investment, outperforming Trump and the Republican Party abolition of enhanced supervision of U.S. investment in China, where Musk’s auto factories generate about one-quarter of all revenue for his Tesla electric car empire, during a shutdown battle in Congress last month. But Musk’s role as czar of the White House plutocracy has yet to begin in earnest: his position as co-chairman (with fellow billionaire Vivek Ramaswamy) of the new Department for Government Efficiency is likely to normalize corruption profits on government operations on a scale Mark Hanna could only dream of.
Mainstream political coverage largely ignores the profound similarities between McKinley’s and Trump’s governing models, thanks in no small part to the American press’s inattention to the basics of political economy, not to mention its endemic historical illiteracy. More than that, however, Trump’s cult-like regard for McKinley belies the corporate media’s central narrative about Trump and the MAGA movement — that it populist uprising aimed at eliminating sinister networks of elite influence.
Trump’s specter, extolling the legacy of an American president recruited by the ruling class to crush a genuine populist rebellion from below, exposes the hollowness of history that has disfigured the basic coordinates of political causality over the past decade. That’s why we should be prepared not only for a Trump term that doubles as plutocratic madness, but also for a dark continuation of J.D. Vance taking up the mantle of Teddy Roosevelt on the wreckage. Only here, too, is Trump’s variation on the theme sure to be a serious step down: Vance shares TR’s imperial-racist worldview, but is a neo-reactionary a traitor to his working-class rootswhile FDR abandoned his birthright in favor of a confidence-busting progressivism. In short, history will not repeat itself; it will only get worse.
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