It's all about Making McKinley Great Again. Jim Vondruska/Getty Images


January 24, 2025   5 mins

If America’s 45th presidency was founded on the promise of Making America Great Again, Donald Trump’s priorities appear to have shifted for its 47th. Now, in part, it’s about Making McKinley Great Again.

It’s been more than 120 years since William McKinley played a starring role in American politics — but this week, that all changed. There he was, making a surprise appearance in Trump’s inauguration speech: the ghost of McKinley, still in mourning after seeing his name removed from the highest peak in North America by Obama. “We’re taking it back,” Trump declared in response.

Until Monday, McKinley, the Ohio Republican congressman who became the nation’s 25th President before being assassinated by an anarchist in 1901, had become a footnote in American history. Today’s Democrats hope that each president will be the next Franklin Delano Roosevelt, while small government conservatives have made a cult of tax-cutting Calvin Coolidge and Ronald Reagan. McKinley, meanwhile, is rarely remembered, seemingly overshadowed by his flamboyant and media-savvy successor, Theodore Roosevelt.

And then came Trump, the unlikeliest of historians, with his ode to the man who made “our country very rich through tariffs and through talent”. To many of his critics, Trump’s remarks were a surprise; to students of history, they were not. After all, McKinley and Trump are unsurprising bedfellows. They both became president in eras characterised by increasing great-power rivalries and trade wars — and both offered tough remedies in response.

During the 1890s and 1900s, Britain, the world’s first industrial superpower, was being eclipsed by the rise of the United States, Germany, Russia and Japan. All these nations used protectionism and state capitalism to catch up with British industry — and the US was no exception. Inspired by their heroes, Alexander Hamilton and Henry Clay, Republicans from Lincoln to McKinley styled themselves as economic nationalists committed to using tariffs to protect America’s “infant industries” from foreign competition, while inviting British and other foreign investment in American factories. Nicknamed “the Napoleon of protection,” McKinley declared: “I am a tariff man, standing on a tariff platform.”

Nor do the parallels stop there. Just as with the rise of industrialised China today, Germany’s ascendency at the turn of the century scrambled global political alliances. Until the late 19th century, the US had viewed Britain as its greatest strategic threat — so much so that, in 1867, the US purchased Alaska from Russia to keep it free from British influence or control. But the unification of Germany four years later changed all that. Faced with an Imperial Germany that made no secret of its ambitions in the Caribbean and Pacific, the US and Britain agreed to a strategic rapprochement.

Crucially for America, it was the senior partner in this relationship. Over the next half century, the US nudged the British fleet out of the Western hemisphere, forced Britain to terminate its treaty with Japan, and, after the Second World War, pressured Britain into dissolving its empire to the benefit of American investors and exporters. If much of this was achieved by McKinley’s successors, it was only because he was the man who decided their direction. In 1923, Calvin Coolidge, his successor as a Republican president, gave McKinley credit for the transformation of American grand strategy: “His vision now beheld his country first, but it reached beyond our own shores. He sought in trade and commerce a world relationship. His last public utterance, made at Buffalo, advocated reciprocal trade relations, which he knew had no basis without protection. At the same time he urged an Isthmian canal to unite our own coasts with the Latin-American Republics.”

Today, China has assumed the role of Imperial Germany a century ago, with its economic rise inspiring defensive protectionism and calls for soft containment among its great-power neighbours, Japan and India. So too with America: at his inauguration, Trump warned that “China is operating the Panama Canal” and threatened to impose a 10% tariff on Chinese-made goods. And nor was it empty rhetoric. Chinese companies now operate ports at both ends of the Panama Canal, while other state-backed Chinese investors have been involved with negotiations with Nicaragua’s anti-American regime to build a Nicaraguan Canal.

And yet, some in America still refuse to recognise this reality — and deride Trump’s calls for tariffs as inflammatory. After all, for American thinkers in the idealistic tradition of Wilsonian liberal internationalism, such as John Ikenberry and Robert Kagan, realpolitik is inherently immoral. Instead of playing by the traditional rules of power politics, they insist an “enlightened” US should transcend power politics altogether. Great-power rivalries should be replaced either by collective security, under the auspices of the League of Nations or the United Nations, or — in the neo-conservative version of Wilsonianism — by the US, acting alone as a benevolent, all-powerful Globocop that polices the world.

But neo-Wilsonian globalism failed disastrously when it was attempted by both Democrats and Republicans between 1992 and 2016. America’s European and East Asian protectorates became free riders on its security guarantee, while American soldiers fought and died in Middle Eastern “forever wars” under the banners of “the global democratic revolution” and “the rule-based international order”. One reason that Trump is President is that the American public is tired of paying the bills for foreign adventurism.

Nor did a globalised free-market economy materialise under America’s “benevolent” leadership, as those within the Clinton and Bush administrations once promised. Instead, the US and Europe opened their domestic markets, only to be deindustrialised by the predatory trade practices of China, Japan and South Korea — often with the aid of American capitalists willing to sacrifice their nation’s security and prosperity for quick profits and lower wage bills.

“One reason that Trump is president is that the American public is tired of paying the bills for foreign adventurism.”

Faced with this challenge, Obama — with the help of his Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) — sought to bind America’s European and East Asian trading partners in a single trade bloc that excluded China. In his first term, Trump adopted a far more unilateral approach, threatening the use of tariffs against America’s Canadian, European and Asian allies as well as China — and Biden followed suit. In short, the bipartisan consensus in favour of post-Cold War globalism was waning even before Trump. While the ghost of McKinley was awoken on Monday, it had been stirring for decades.

The challenge for Trump is that McKinley’s ghost will have to contend with other ghosts in American politics. Many members of his own Republican party are guided by the spirit of Ronald Reagan and his optimistic vision of free-market globalism. In their own seances, most Democrats still take guidance in foreign policy from the liberal internationalism of Woodrow Wilson, even if he has been officially cancelled because of his regressive views on race. It remains to be seen whether Trump’s neo-McKinleyism can defeat zombie Reaganism and zombie Wilsonianism.

Whether Trump succeeds or fails, we would do well to remember that the ghost of McKinley was stalking America long before this week. Restoring his name to a mountain in Alaska may be a nice touch. But more fitting would be an epitaph similar to that laid down by Sir Christopher Wren. You can still read it on the floor of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London: Si monumentum requiris, circumspice.

“If you seek his memorial, look around you.”


Michael Lind is the economics editor of Commonplace, a fellow at New America, and the author of The American Way of Strategy, among many other books.