Why Donald Trump talks so much about William McKinley

This year, Donald Trump spent a lot of time on the campaign trail 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 came to the White House having already passed key legislation increasing tariffs on many American goods. The “McKinley Tariff of 1890” even bears his name.

Today, Trump wants to return America to the McKinley era, with tariffs at the center of government policy and the US budget.

“In the 1890s, our country was probably the richest it had ever been because there was a tariff system,” Trump recently told a crowd in Michigan.

The 45th president added this Friday in an interview with Fox Business that McKinley, the 25th president, “was a big defender of tariffs.”

William McKinley and Donald Trump (McKinley Photo: History/Universal Images Group via Getty Images; Trump: Scott Olson/Getty Images)

But the story Trump has repeatedly told is one that historians say overlooks key details of that era.

They note that the flaws of tariffs became evident during McKinley's era and began to forge a consensus on free trade that ultimately made tariffs obsolete for nearly a century, until 'when Trump arrived.

The story Trump tells also ignores McKinley's own background on the issue.

“Ultimately, Trump doesn't understand the McKinley point,” McKinley biographer Robert Merry said in a recent interview.

Merry notes that McKinley did indeed build his reputation on protectionist policies, but that he began to see the limits of tariffs toward the end of his presidency. He concluded that for the United States to continue its success, it would need freer movement of goods and reciprocity with its global trading partners.

“And he was absolutely right about that,” Merry added.

Read more: What the 2024 campaign means for your wallet: The Yahoo Finance guide to the presidential election

McKinley died in 1901 at the hands of an assassin. And he was in Buffalo, New York, in September, in part to give a speech urging the nation to move more toward free trade.

“That was the high point because starting in the 20th century, many Americans say enough is enough,” tariff historian William Bolt added in an interview.

High tariffs reappeared more often after McKinley, notably when President Herbert Hoover signed the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930 into law.

Hoover is another president who frequently comes up in 2024, with Kamala Harris' campaign often pointing out that Trump and Hoover finished their terms with fewer jobs in the U.S. economy than when they started.

The story continues

But a lasting legacy of McKinley is that protectionism was increasingly seen by the public as raising prices, leading to monopolies and worsening depressions.

President William McKinley delivered his inaugural address in 1897. (Photo12/Universal Images Group via Getty Images) (Photo 12 via Getty Images)

“From the mid-1930s until 2016 with President Trump, we followed the unchanged path of lower tariffs and free trade in this country,” Bolt added.

Yet the era remains one of attention and recognition, both for Trump and his top aides.

Robert Lighthizer, the former trade representative who could run for another term if Trump wins, wrote in his own book that McKinley gained national prominence through his strong and successful support of high tariffs.

The 1890s: a time when tariffs actually ruled

Part of Trump's fascination with McKinley also comes from the fact that his era was the last when tariffs were a significant source of revenue for U.S. coffers.

“He made this country so rich,” Trump said of McKinley this summer in an interview with Bloomberg. “All he did was tariffs; we had no income tax.”

Indeed, in the 1890s, according to White House calculations, revenue from tariffs accounted for about half of federal revenue.

This figure is now less than 2%.

Former president and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump answers questions during a town hall on September 27 in Warren, Michigan (Emily Elconin/Getty Images) (Emily Elconin via Getty Images)

Trump has proposed eliminating the entire U.S. income tax system in favor of higher tariffs. He also suggested the tariffs could fund a wide range of programs, from tax cuts to child care.

But experts say the math simply doesn't hold up in the modern economy and with today's much more expansive federal government.

Such a move, conservatively, would require across-the-board tariffs of at least 70 percent, according to the White House. Other estimates put this figure much higher, or even completely out of reach, if such historically high tariffs resulted in a near or complete shutdown of global trade.

The Peterson Institute for International Economics estimates that Trump's highly ambitious plans to impose 10% tariffs on all imports, plus 60% on imports from China, would raise $225 billion a year, before take into account retaliatory measures taken by other countries.

That's far less than Trump's campaign promises, which are expected to cost between $5.2 trillion and $6.9 trillion over the next decade.

The McKinley era as a “cautionary note”

There are other reasons why, some say, it may not make sense to return to the 1890s, an era that also predated the Federal Reserve and other economic tools available to government to smooth out economic cycles. expansion and recession.

“There was a depression in the United States from 1893 to 1897 and another national recession from 1899 to 1900,” Washington Post columnist Catherine Rampell noted online in response to a recent example of Trump touting the years 1890. “Other than that, pretty good.”

Details like these are ones that Trump never mentions in his accounts of the McKinley era.

“In the words of a great but greatly underrated president, William McKinley,” Trump said during a recent stop at the Economic Club of New York, “the Republicans' protective tariff policy was crafted and has made the lives of our compatriots sweeter and sweeter.” brighter.

A 1900 campaign poster for William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt, his running mate, touted the return of prosperity thanks to their high protective tariffs and sound monetary policy. (Bettmann via Getty Images)

“History tells us there are times when tariffs work,” Merry said. But he said McKinley was beginning to recognize that those days were over, believing that America needed to start focusing on reducing tariffs as long as other countries reciprocated.

“And that's what this speech [in Buffalo] That’s all.”

McKinley gave this speech on September 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 succumbed to his injuries 12 days later.

In the years that followed, McKinley's message was hesitantly followed, with his immediate successor, Theodore Roosevelt, largely content to keep protectionist policies in place and the Republicans retaining a protectionist bent.

But criticism 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 at the start of the Great Depression, then accused of worsened the recession.

McKinley faced heavy criticism from many quarters for his pricing policy, including claims that it only helped monopolies. (World History Archives/Universal Images Group via Getty Images) (World History Archives via Getty Images)

Trump aides like Lighthizer acknowledge that the 1930 law was unpopular, but say that, from an economic policy perspective, it seems clear that the new tariff law had little or no impact on the economic crisis. from the early 1930s.

Trump's current fascination with McKinley may prove that protectionist impulses are strong in America, particularly in manufacturing-dependent states like Pennsylvania, where tariff policy was almost as complex in the 1890s as it is today.

“Trump, whether you like it or not, exploited this,” Bolt said, adding that Trump managed to bring to the forefront “a whole new issue that we haven’t really talked about in probably close to a hundred years.”

But ultimately, Bolts cautioned, the McKinley era “is a cautionary tale.”

Ben Werschkul is Yahoo Finance's Washington correspondent.

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