Thus, Trump said in his speech that President William McKinley, whose name he has ordered to be restored to Mount Denali, “was a natural businessman” who “made our country very rich through tariffs and through talent.” He credited that wealth in the eventual building of the Panama Canal, which he said cost 38,000 American lives. He added that “above all, China is operating the Panama Canal.”
Rewriting history is a trademark of modern despots. Twentieth-century fascists “loved slogans that resonated like a new religion, and preferred creative myths to history or journalism,” Yale historian Tom Snyder notes in On Tyranny. “They used new media, which at the time was radio, to create a drumbeat of propaganda that aroused feelings before people had time to ascertain facts.”
Every autocrat has essentially done the same. Lenin oversaw a rewriting of history that demonized opponents of the Russian Revolution and made indoctrination campaigns a key part of Russian education. Trump will bring his particular ideology into the classroom as well: He said Monday that “we have an education system that teaches our children to be ashamed of themselves [and] hate our country,” promising, “All of this will change starting today and will change very quickly.”
In truth, there is no decline: Bidenomics produced low unemployment and tremendous growth and Biden brought dignity, compassion, and competence back to the Oval Office. And the only liberation Trump is providing is for the coup mob that attacked the Capitol on January, nearly all of whom he quickly pardoned.
In a way, Trump’s limited understanding of history allows him to easily contort it. In his first term, he made Andrew Jackson into the president he most sought to emulate, despite Jackson being a slaveowner and perhaps the greatest genocidaire of Native Americans in U.S. history. Jackson, a strong believer in tariffs, practically single-handedly brought on the Panic of 1837 through the credit crisis he caused by refusing to recharter the Second Bank of the United States and requiring that federal land purchases only be done with gold or silver, greatly restricting the money supply.
Trump’s new icon is another tariff advocate, William McKinley, the Civil War hero and Gilded Age president who led us through the Spanish-American War and a period of imperialism that saw us occupy Cuba, officially annex Hawaii, and take Guam, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines. Trump, too, has been expressing expansionist desires of late, openly coveting Greenland, stating his desire to retake the Panama Canal, and refusing to rule out military force for either. He’s even mockingly suggested making Canada the “51st state.”
Nonetheless, Trump has brought McKinley back into the limelight, pointing to the Gilded Age as the apparent time of greatness that MAGA wants to return us to, a time when women and most minorities could not vote, there was staggering wealth inequality (well, that one we still have), LGBTQ+ people all had to remain in the closet forever, there were no income taxes, and the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act was still in effect.
Unsurprisingly, Trump has much of this history wrong. We could dismiss his misstatements as mere errors if it wasn’t for the fact that they seem to suit his causes so well.
Nicaragua was considered the most plausible location, despite the previous French efforts in Panama, and McKinley went to his death presuming it would be there if anywhere. But Roosevelt seized upon the Panamanian revolt from Colombia that made the Panamanian canal possible. Hay, who had stayed on, negotiated a new treaty with the Panamanians: the Hay-Bunau-Varilla treaty, which allowed us to build the canal. We began operating the canal when it opened in 1914. Over 60 years later, the Carter administration negotiated new treaties with Panama that guaranteed the neutrality of the canal, permitted the U.S. to defend that neutrality, and gave the canal to Panama as of December 31, 1999.
Equally false is Trump’s claim that McKinley’s tariffs created mountains of wealth. As Douglas A. Irwin explained for the Peterson Institute, McKinley was behind the Tariff Act of 1890 when he was a congressman, which sent prices soaring. As president, Irwin says, “McKinley was more forward-looking … [and] embraced trade reciprocity,” believing it was “time to move away from protective tariffs through trade agreements.” Tariffs remained high on a number of products, and it was the American consumer who was forced to pay. But the boon industrial times allowed us to succeed despite this, Merry says, not because of it. And had McKinley not eased his position, it’s likely the tariffs would’ve done considerably more damage.
Trump likes the idea of a Second Gilded Age, perhaps because he himself is gilded: showy on the outside, empty on the inside. Yet his rhetoric and his actions are much more in line with the Futurists, the movement that preceded fascism in Italy, which promoted the idea that speed and technology would be our salvation and asserted that we should burn down the libraries, museums, and institutions of the past. Or, you might say, “Move fast and break things,” as our new oligarchy promises to do.
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