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Sunday, January 26, 2025

Opinion | Why McKinley is an unsettling choice as Trump’s presidential role model - The Washington Post

Why McKinley makes an alarming Trump presidential role model

(No wonder Trump's grades were so bad in high school. His father had to bribe his way to pass. Unlike Trump, I won my school's history in high school and was asked to teach a week in a Russian, honors history class, at Hunter College CUNY. Of course, Trump was too dumb for either of those honors. He was just a rich, orange-faced, DEI student taking his place among the rich which has always been the American way.)

"William McKinley was at best a mediocre president, but he had attributes that appeal to Trump.

Chief Justice Melville W. Fuller swears-in William McKinley as president as President Grover Cleveland watches on March 4, 1897. (Library of Congress via AP) (AP)

When most presidents cite illustrious predecessors, they usually turn to all-time greats such as George Washington, Abraham Lincoln or Franklin D. Roosevelt or to more recent favorites such as John F. Kennedy or Ronald Reagan. But in yet another reminder of what an outlier he is, President Donald Trump keeps extolling William McKinley, who held the office from 1897 to 1901 and is generally considered to be average at best: In one recent survey of scholars, he was ranked No. 24 out of 45 presidents.

Yet Trump spent months talking up McKinley’s supposed virtues on the campaign trail, largely because he was (like most Republicans of the 1890s) an advocate of high tariffs. “In the 1890s, our country was probably the wealthiest it ever was because it was a system of tariffs,” Trump told one audience. In his second inaugural address, Trump even gave McKinley credit for the Panama Canal, which was not begun until nearly three years after his assassination.

Trump claimed that the deceased McKinley “gave Teddy Roosevelt the money for many of the great things he did, including the Panama Canal,” before going on to complain that President Jimmy Carter “foolishly” gave the canal to Panama. Trump claimed the United States “lost 38,000 lives in the building of the Panama Canal.” (In reality, around 5,600laborers died, about 350 of them Americans.) And “We have been treated very badly.” (We haven’t.) And “China is operating the Panama Canal.” (It isn’t.)” Trump promised, “We’re taking it back,” without specifying how. (Earlier, he promised to measure his success by “the wars we never get into.”) This was part of a more sweeping pledge to turn America into a “growing nation” that once again “expands our territory.”

Trump has been talking in recent months about buying Greenland and even making Canada the 51st state, although, mercifully, neither warranted a mention in his inaugural address. The latter suggestion appears to be a joke, but the former seems earnest. He is even trying to rewrite maps by renaming the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America and changing Denali’s name back to Mount McKinley.

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Thus, Trump’s affinity for McKinley would appear to run deeper than mere tariffs. McKinley is remembered, after all, primarily for his promotion of U.S. imperialism: He fought a “splendid little war” against Spain and subsequently turned the Philippines into a U.S. colony, took possession of Guam and Puerto Rico, annexed Hawaii, and made Cuba into a protectorate. Trump seems eager to inaugurate a new era of territorial expansion and high tariffs, à la McKinley. A glance back at the 1890s suggests why these are both really bad ideas to resurrect.

McKinley did not make America incomparably rich: In 1900, at the height of protectionism, U.S. GDP per capita was, in inflation adjusted terms, $11,519 — less than Kazakhstan’stoday. By contrast, after decades of free trade policies, U.S. per capita GDP in 2023 was $82,769. The McKinley Tariff Act of 1890 — sponsored by McKinley when he was a House member — proved so unpopular that it led to the Democratic landslide of 1892, and it certainly did not set America on the path to limitless prosperity: The economic downturn from 1893 to 1898 was one of the worst in the nation’s history. Unemployment in 1894 spiked to 18.4 percent, the highest level until the Great Depression.

Overall, the U.S. economy was rapidly expanding during this period (the United States became the biggest economy in the world around 1890), but, as economist Douglas A. Irwin makes clear in “Clashing Over Commerce,” tariffs did not have much to do with it. Much of the explanation can be found, Irwin writes, in the fact that “the United States was an enormous continental market with an abundance of resources waiting to be filled with people.”

As Irwin points out, the U.S. population more than doubled between 1870 and 1913, growing from less than 40 million to more than 97 million, and “nearly one third of the population increase from 1870 to 1900 was due to immigration from abroad.” It was all these immigrants — particularly unskilled laborers working for low wages in factories — who made the American economy great. (Something Trump might keep in mind as he is closing the border.) “It is difficult to make the case that high import tariffs were an important factor driving late nineteenth-century US economic growth,” Irwin concludes.

Even McKinley came to see the limits of tariffs: As president, he embraced the benefits of “reciprocity” (lowering U.S. tariffs in return for tariff reductions in other countries), and, in the  last speech he gave, in 1901, he warned that economic “isolation is no longer possible or desirable.” In later years, U.S. policymakers would abandon his high-tariff policies and promote free trade.

So, too, McKinley’s embrace of American imperialism proved fleeting, for very good reason. The Spanish-American War — a conflict triggered by hysteria over the (likely accidental) explosion of a U.S. battleship in Havana harbor in 1898 (“Remember the Maine!”) — cost the lives of more than 2,000 U.S. service members. Then, by foolishly annexing the Philippines in 1899, McKinley embroiled America in another conflict that cost the lives of more than 4,200 U.S. soldiers and 20,000 Filipino combatants. More than 200,000 Filipino civilians also died from violence, famine and disease, and U.S. soldiers committed war crimes that shamed the nation. The United States eventually won the conflict but secured no real strategic or economic advantage; the U.S. bases in the Philippines were easily overrun by the Japanese in 1942.

The United States did not annex Cuba but did dominate it in cooperation with corrupt local elites. The last U.S.-backed dictator, Fulgencio Batista, was overthrown by Fidel Castro in 1959, and the island has been a thorn in America’s side ever since.

Little wonder that, in future years, U.S. leaders eschewed colonialism and embraced Woodrow Wilson’s policy of national self-determination. By the same token, U.S. leaders focused on lowering, not raising, trade barriers. Now Trump seems determined to turn back the clock in ways that can only encourage other countries to erect their own tariffs and to undertake their own territorial expansions — as China would like to do in Taiwan and as Russia is already doing in Ukraine. (Russian hard-liners are citing Trump’s bellicose rhetoric as justification for their own war of aggression.)

The McKinley presidency, properly understood, offers important lessons in why Trump’s preferred policies could be self-destructive. The last thing that America needs is to be embroiled in trade wars — much less in confrontations with other nations over Trump’s dreams of acquiring more real estate for the United States."

Opinion | Why McKinley is an unsettling choice as Trump’s presidential role model - The Washington Post

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