Donald Trump has spent considerable time on the campaign trail this year invoking a president who has been dead for more than 123 years: William McKinley.
The reason: McKinley and Trump’s shared affinity for tariffs.
McKinley, who served as president from 1896 to 1901, was an ultra-protectionist politician who arrived at the White House having already pushed through a key piece of legislation that boosted tariffs on many American products. The “McKinley Tariff of 1890” was even named after him.
Now, Trump wants to return America to McKinley’s era, with tariffs at the center of government policy and the US budget.
“In the 1890s, our country was probably the wealthiest it ever was because it was a system of tariffs,” Trump told a Michigan crowd recently.
The 45th president added just this Friday in a Fox Business interview that McKinley, the 25th president, “was a big tariff guy.”
But the story that Trump has repeatedly told is one that, according to historians, overlooks key details of that era.
They note that the shortcomings of tariffs became evident in McKinley’s time and began to forge a free-trade consensus that eventually pushed tariffs out of vogue for nearly a century — basically until Trump arrived on the scene.
The story Trump tells also overlooks McKinley’s own journey on the issue.
“Ultimately, Trump is missing the McKinley point,” said McKinley biographer Robert Merry in a recent interview.
Merry notes that McKinley indeed built his reputation on protectionist policies but began to see the limits of tariffs near the end of his presidency. He concluded that for US success to continue, it would need a freer flow of goods and reciprocity with global trading partners.
“And he was absolutely right about that,” Merry added.
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McKinley died in 1901 at the hands of an assassin. And he was in Buffalo, N.Y., that September in part to give a speech prodding the nation in a more free-trade direction.
“It was the high-water mark because once you start to get to the 20th century, many Americans have now said enough is enough,” added tariff historian William Bolt in an interview.
High duties made more reappearances after McKinley, to be sure — notably when President Herbert Hoover signed into law the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930.
Hoover is another president who comes up frequently in 2024, with the Kamala Harris campaign often noting that both Trump and Hoover ended their terms with fewer jobs in the US economy than when they began.
But a lasting legacy of McKinley is that protectionism was increasingly seen by the public as raising prices, leading to monopolies, and making depressions worse.
“Really ever since then, from the mid-1930s up until 2016 with President Trump, we had been on an unaltered path of lower tariffs and basically free trade in this country,” Bolt added.
Yet the era remains one of focus and lionization for both Trump and his top aides.
Robert Lighthizer, the former trade representative who could be up for another run in power if Trump wins, wrote in his own book that McKinley “achieved national fame through his strong and successful support of high tariffs.”
The 1890s: An era where tariffs indeed ruled
Part of Trump’s fascination with McKinley also stems from the fact that his era was the last one where tariffs were a significant source of revenue for US coffers.
“He made this country so rich,” Trump said of McKinley this summer in an interview with Bloomberg. “All he did was tariffs; we didn’t have an income tax.”
Indeed, in the 1890s, according to White House calculations, the revenue from tariffs constituted about half of federal revenue.
That figure is now below 2%.
Trump has floated scrapping the entire US income tax system in favor of higher tariffs. He has also suggested tariffs could pay for a wide array of programs, from cutting taxes to childcare.
But experts say the math simply doesn’t add up in the modern economy and with the vastly more expansive federal government of the present.
Such a move conservatively would require across-the-board tariffs of at least 70%, according to the White House. Other estimates peg the figure much higher — if not out of reach completely — if such historically high duties ground global trade to a near or complete halt.
The Peterson Institute for International Economics estimates that Trump’s highly ambitious plans for a 10% tariff on all imports plus 60% on imports from China would raise $225 billion a year, before taking into account retaliatory steps taken by other countries.
That’s far less than Trump’s promises on the campaign trail, which have been pegged at costing around $5.2 trillion and $6.9 trillion over the next decade.
The McKinley era as a ‘cautionary tale’
There are other reasons some say it may not make sense to return to the 1890s, an era that also came before the Federal Reserve and other economic tools at the government’s disposal to smooth out boom and bust cycles.
“There was a US depression from 1893-1897 and another national recession from 1899-1900,” Washington Post columnist Catherine Rampell noted online in response to one recent example of Trump lionizing the 1890s. “Other than that, pretty great.”
Details like that are ones Trump never mentions in his retellings of the McKinley era.
“In the words of a great but highly underrated president, William McKinley,” Trump said at a recent stop at the Economic Club of New York, “The protective tariff policy of the Republicans has been made and made the lives of our countrymen sweeter and brighter.
“History tells us that there are times when tariffs work,” said Merry. But he added that McKinley began to recognize the era was over, positing that America needed to begin focusing on lowering tariffs as long as other nations reciprocated.
“And that’s what that speech [in Buffalo] is all about.”
McKinley did deliver that speech on Sept. 5, 1901, but it turned out to be his last. He was shot in the abdomen the next morning by an anarchist named Leon Czolgosz, and he succumbed to his wounds 12 days later.
In the years that followed, McKinley’s message was haltingly heeded, with his immediate successor Theodore Roosevelt largely content to keep protectionist policies in place and Republicans maintaining a protectionist streak.
But critics of tariffs grew and reached a crescendo with the historic failure of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930. It was signed into law by Hoover in the early stages of the Great Depression and then blamed for making the downturn worse.
Trump aides like Lighthizer acknowledge that the 1930 law was unpopular but contend “as a matter of economic policy, it seems clear that the new tariff law had little if any impact on the economic crisis of the early 1930s.”
Perhaps one thing the current Trump fascination with McKinley proves is that protectionist impulses run strong in America, especially in manufacturing-dependent states like Pennsylvania, where the politics of tariffs were almost as complex in the 1890s as they are today.
“Trump, whether you like it or not, has tapped into that,” said Bolt, adding that Trump has succeeded in putting forth “a brand-new issue we haven’t really talked about probably in close to a hundred years.”
But at the end of the day, Bolts warned, the McKinley era “is a cautionary tale.”
Ben Werschkul is Washington correspondent for Yahoo Finance.
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