Aroop Mukharji
President William McKinley is having his biggest moment since 1928, when his face was printed on the $500 bill. For the last few decades, only a smattering of quirky historians and cult devotees have paid much attention to him. But in repeated comments over the last several years, including in his second inaugural address, President Donald Trump has brought McKinley back into the spotlight. McKinley was “a natural businessman,” Trump remarked, who “made our country very rich through tariffs and through talent.”
Tariffs are at the core of Trump’s veneration of McKinley. This economic policy defined McKinley’s political career. His final act as a congressman was spearheading the McKinley Tariff Act of 1890, which set the average tariff on dutiable imports at around 50 percent. For most of his professional life, McKinley conceptualized American power and security as functions of the country’s domestic economic well-being, not the size of its military. This was not unusual. Two protective oceans, new industrial wealth, legal limits on the military, and few foreign threats led even the U.S. Navy in the Gilded Age to often see its primary peacetime role as protecting commerce.
Today, across the U.S. national security establishment, economics is once again a central concern. For Trump, U.S. alliances and relationships, Washington’s reputation, and even foreign threats often boil down to a single—if misleading—statistic, such as a trade deficit. McKinley’s tariff policy thus offers Trump an elegantly simple solution to the United States’ many, varied challenges. One policy to solve them all.
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