At first glance, Donald Trump and William McKinley of Ohio would seem to be the odd couple of American presidential history. Trump is bold, brash, self-absorbed, sometimes given to crude expression, and known for flights of visionary excess. McKinley, the 25th president, was mild-mannered, affable, cautious in thought and action, always willing to let others take credit for good outcomes so long as he got what he wanted.
Now, 123 years after McKinley was killed by an assassin just five months into his second term, Trump is seeking to rescue the Ohioan from relative historical obscurity and emulate him as a man of vision and American greatness. In his inaugural address on Monday, Trump described McKinley as a “great president” who “made our country very rich through tariffs and through talent.” Further, on Monday Trump signed an executive order restoring McKinley’s name to that Alaska mountain known for more than a century as Mount McKinley until it was changed to Denali by President Obama in 2015 following persistent entreaties from Alaskans of native heritage.
Even a cursory review of the McKinley presidency suggests that Trump is not off base in suggesting that the Ohioan merits a higher stature in history than he generally gets. And there are other elements of truth in his rendition of the McKinley legacy. But there are some discrepancies also, and sorting them all out might provide some insight into Trump’s view of his times—and of himself.
McKinley languishes at a middling level in the periodic academic polls on presidential standing that are viewed collectively as history’s judgment on presidential performance. In seven of the most prominent of these polls since Arthur Schlesinger Sr. pioneered the concept in 1948, the Ohioan ranked variously at 14th, 15th, and 16th, below even undistinguished or failed presidents such as Chester Arthur, Martin Van Buren, Rutherford Hayes, and Grover Cleveland. (Though McKinley did receive a ranking of No. 11 in a 1982 Chicago Tribune poll, which is probably closer to what he deserves.)
After all, it can’t be denied that momentous events occurred during the McKinley presidency or that America moved into a bold new era of economic growth and global force. Indeed, few chief executives have presided over so many pivotal developments in so many areas: the embrace of the gold standard as a vehicle for currency stability, annexation of Hawaii, destruction of the Spanish empire and consolidation of America’s unchallenged Caribbean sphere of influence, liberation of Cuba from Spanish rule, the push into Asia through acquisition of the Philippines and Guam, the emergence of America as the world’s greatest industrial nation, and more.
Most significantly, America became an empire on McKinley’s watch. As he scribbled in a note to himself as the war with Spain progressed, “While we are conducting the war… we must keep all we get; when the war is over we must keep what we want.” In the end, he wanted all that he had gotten, except for Cuba, which had been promised independence by the Americans at the war’s inception.
It isn’t difficult to see how Trump, once he became familiar with the McKinley story, would embrace it as a model for his own White House leadership, and as a rhetorical stanchion to bolster up his own quixotic resolve to acquire Greenland through bullying tactics or the Panama Canal Zone through military action if necessary. Indeed, Trump often seems to hark back to precisely the McKinley era when he speaks, as he did in his inaugural address, of “new heights of victory and success” for a nation that “increases our wealth, expands our territory, builds our cities…and carries our flag into new and beautiful horizons.”
But 2025 is not 1898, and Greenland today is not Cuba of McKinley’s day, when a bloody insurrection against Spanish rule there was destabilizing the entire U.S. neighborhood. Eschewing bombast or public threat (though there was plenty of that coming from Congress), McKinley moved quietly and behind the scenes. He warned Spanish officials that they must end that insurrection, either by winning it or negotiating a settlement. When they whined and caviled, declaring Cuba to be none of our business, McKinley held firm on the conviction that the ongoing bloodshed was untenable so close to U.S. shores. The resulting war destroyed the Spanish empire and established the American one.
No such regional imperatives for America are wrapped up in Greenland’s status as a Danish protectorate, and Trump’s tendencies toward bombast and threat have probably already undercut what would have been a more modest and realistic aim of gaining guaranteed U.S. access to valuable strategic minerals in Greenland. The McKinley way of quiet diplomacy would have been far more effective for Trump in today’s world, as it was for McKinley in his day.
Or consider Trump’s invocation of McKinley’s protectionist convictions in conjunction with his own call for high tariffs to plenish federal coffers and help reverse the country’s decline as a major industrial nation. True, McKinley was a high-tariff man throughout most of his career. Journalist Ida Tarbell dismissed him as having “an advantage…which few of his colleagues enjoyed—that of believing with childlike faith all that he claimed for protection was true.” Two points are worth noting here.
First, protectionism had been an integral part of the Republican economic philosophy throughout the party’s 19th century growth years, as it had been for the Whigs before that and the Federalists even earlier. Protectionism is part of the country’s political heritage. Abraham Lincoln began his political career as a candidate for the Illinois legislature by declaring that his politics were “short and sweet, like the old woman’s dance”—he favored a national bank, internal infrastructure improvements, “and high protective tariffs.”
The second point is that, by 1901, McKinley had concluded that those high protective tariffs were not the right economic recipe for the new century, when America’s productive capacity in both the agricultural and industrial realms was outstripping the domestic market’s ability to absorb all those goods being produced. At a major address at Buffalo, New York, in September 1901, he outlined his remarkable turnaround in thinking on the tariff issue. Echoing a fundamental free-trade tenet, he said that if America wished to sell its products abroad, it must also buy from abroad.
“The period of exclusiveness is past,” declared the president. He then outlined a new concept of international trade called “reciprocity”: mutual trade pacts designed to reduce tariffs and enhance trade. “Reciprocity agreements,” declared McKinley, “are in harmony with the spirit of the times; measures of retaliation are not.”
The next day he was shot, and within eight days he was dead.
It isn’t clear if Trump’s bombast and threats regarding tariff rates are designed to bolster a policy more along the lines of McKinley’s reciprocity concept than of his earlier protectionist dogma. But, if McKinley is his guide on trade policy, Trump should heed the economic realities that induced the Ohioan to revise his outlook on trade and bring to the subject a new level of sophistication more in keeping with changing times. Tough protection may still be in order but should be reserved to foster robust trade, not to squelch it.
While he’s at it Trump might wish to consider the virtues of McKinley’s mode of operation–methodical, measured, steady, bold when necessary but devoid of bluster and pomposity, and always ready to face challenges with decisive decision-making. That might even be more important than what we call that mountain up in Alaska.
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