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With another tirade about tariffs, Trump is thwarting American history

Donald Trump's bleak economic vision for the United States is straight out of the '90s. And not the 1990s, but the 1890s.

After an event on Friday in Warren, Michigan, Trump faced widespread backlash for making deferential remarks about William McKinley's tariff plan while touting his own proposal to impose massive tariffs on imported goods. A wave of economists have warned that Trump's plan would likely lead to a rise in the cost of goods for ordinary Americans.

But Trump continues to tout it as his most important economic proposal. I suspect the potential for these tariffs to make some of his already wealthy major donors even richer may have something to do with it.

Still, Trump raved about McKinley during Friday's town hall meeting in Michigan:

We will use tariffs very, very wisely. You know, our country in the 1890s was…probably the richest country ever because they had a tariff system. And we had a president – ​​you know McKinley, right? Remember Mount McKinley? And then they changed the name. But one of those things. He was really a very good businessman and he took in billions of dollars back then, now it's always trillions, but back then it was billions and probably hundreds of millions. But we were a very wealthy country, and that's what we're going to do now.

As is usual with most Trump claims, this one requires fact-checking. McKinley was a member of the House of Representatives — not president — when his proposal for massive tariffs was signed into law by President Benjamin Harrison in 1890. And far from the economic recovery Trump envisioned, the tariffs were largely unpopular and contributed to major Republican election defeats in 1890 and 1892, followed by a depression known as the Panic of 1893. The 1890s also coincided with the end of the Gilded Age, a period known for extreme wealth inequality.

President William McKinley
President William McKinley.Library of Congress/Corbis/VCG via Getty Images

When Trump praised McKinley's tariffs earlier this year, Princeton University historian Sean Wilintz explained the stupidity of those comments to The New Republic:

[The tariffs] The average tariff on all imports was increased from 38 percent to 49.5 percent – a big jump. It was intended to protect American industry from foreign competition and thereby bind an alliance between labor and capital. But while it was beneficial to wool and tinplate manufacturers, it became extremely unpopular in the country, which suffered from the profiteering of American manufacturers, leading to a dramatic increase in consumer prices. This was partly responsible for Republican defeat in the 1890 midterm elections and helped derail Benjamin Harrison's re-election in 1892.

Back in 2019, Matthew Yglesias wrote for Vox that Trump's interest in the McKinkley era was “a stark reminder of his unusual ability to become completely obsessed with trade policy without actually knowing anything about it – or wanting to care about it.”

In fact, this McKinley obsession reflects two of Trump's truisms: He is hopelessly ignorant of politics, and the policies he pursues favor the rich at the expense of everyone else.

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